ORAL LORE FROM PRECOLONIAL TIMES (-- 1564) singer, or storyteller as long as he knew the

I. Historical accounts language and had been attentive to the

A. 1521 - the beginning of our history? conventions of the form.
B. “Las islas Filipinas” C. Convention Oral Literature
C. “Tabon Man” – a 50, 000-year-old artifact discovered in
a cave in Palawan in 1962
II. Comments about Philippine History
a. William Henry Scott states that what has been written
about the Philippines’s history shows a lot of discrepancy to
what has been known about the pre-Hispanic Philippines
which is usually misleading and insufÏcient. Scott says:
“… Filipinos were wearing bark and woven cloth, and gold,
bronze, stone and shell hair ornaments, earrings, pectoral
discs, bracelets, finger rings and imported beads, and mined
and work gold for jewelry and iron tools and weapons; they
filed, stained, blackened or chipped their teeth and
decorated them with gold, and had been chewing betelnut
for 3,000 years; they owned tens of thousands of valuable
Chinese porcelain jars and plates but cooked in a type of
local pot with history going back to 1000 B.C., they deformed
skulls, removed them, preserve them, and buried their dead
supine, prone or flexed in caves, graves, jars or cofÏns, and
disinterred them, reburied and venerated their bones.”
III. Indigenous Culture
A. Referred to as “natives”, “ethnic minorities”, “tribal Filipinos”
etc.
IV. Precolonial literature
A. Setting
1. Created in the society where the resources for economic
subsistence-land, water, and forest- were communally
owned.
2. Its subject matter invariably includes the common
experience of the people constituting a village- food-
gatherer, creature and objects of nature, work in the
home, field, forest or se, caring for children, etc.
B. Language
1. The language of oral literature was the language of
daily life unless the piece was part of the cultural
heritage pf the community like the epic.
2. Any member of the community was a potential poet,
 1. Formulaic repetitions
2. Stereotyping of characters
3. Regular rhythmic and musical devices
D. Ownership of literary composition
1. It is described as communal authorship.
2. Originating individual is not emphasized in the process of oral
transmission.
3. It is conceivable that the receiving performer of a song or a poem
often feels that the work he is performing or delivering is
expressive of his own beliefs, attitudes and emotions.
E. Alphabet
1. The syllabary had three vowels (a, i-e, o-u) and 14 consonants
(b,d,g,h,k,l,m,n,ng,p,s,t,w, and y)
2. The introduction of Roman alphabet has affected Phil’ literature by
way of:
a. When syllabary fell into disuse Among Christian Filipinos, who
were later to constitute most of the population, much
valuable information about precolonial culture that could
have been handed down to us was lost.
b. Fewer and fewer Filipinos kept records of their oral lore
which resulted to fewer and fewer people who could
decipher what had been recorded in earlier times.
c. In time, the perishable materials on which the Filipinos wrote
were left to disintegrate and those remained were destroyed
by missionaries who believed the indigenous pagan culture
was the handicraft of the devil himself.
F. Colonialism
1. Two ways by which the uniqueness of indigenous
culture survived colonization:
a. By resistance to colonial rule.
i. The Maranaws, the Maguindanaws, and the Taosugs of
Mindanao and the Igorots,Ifugaos, Bontocs, and
Kalingas of Mountain Province were able to keep the
integrity of their ethnic heritage.
b. By Virtue of isolation from centers of colonial
power.
i. The Tagbanwas, Tagibilis, Mangyans, Bagobos,
Manuvus, Bilaan, Bukidnons, and Isnegs could cling
on the traditional lifeways because of the
inaccessibility of their settlements.
 i. to explain natural phenomena, past events,
and contemporary beliefs in order to make
the environment less fearsome by making it
G. Literary Forms more comprehensible and, in more
1. Riddles and Proverbs instances,
a. are the simplest forms of oral literature. ii. to make idle hours less tedious by filling them
b. In them, we get a sampling of primordial 4. Dra with humor and fantasy
indigenous ma
poem, at the heart was the talinhaga 3. Prose narratives and oral culture
(analogue, methaphor, or figure) a. These were consisted largely of origin myths, hero
c. The riddles and proverbs have been drawn from tales, fables, and legends.
a 1754 Tagalog-Spanish dictionary work. b. Their function in the community were:
d. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala- is one of the rare
Spanish sources that provides us with samples of
early oral lore obtained direct from the people.
2. Poetry
a. Monoriming heptasyllabic lines appear
frequently enough in samples and in oral poetry
from many tribal Filipinos to warrant saying that
much of the precolonial poetry probably employed
single rimes and seven syllables per line. (e.g.
Ambahan)
b. Ambahan: is often chanted without a
predetermined musical pitch or musical
accompaniment, a phenomenon that might explain
why vernacular Philippine poetry is invariably
performed in a sing-song rhythm, at a pitch above
the tone of conversation.
c. Tanaga: a stanza form with fixed number of lines
(four)
d. Lyric Poetry: An early Spanish chronicler noted
the social function of these songs are the political
and religious life of the people which was based on
tradition. He stated that “preserved in songs they
have memorized and which they learned as
children, hearing them sung when folks rowed,
worked and made merry and feasted, and mourned
their dead. In these barbaric songs were told the
fabled genealogies and vainglorious deeds of their
gods.”
 a. A literary form that had not yet begun to evolve
among the Filipinos the Spanish conquest took
place.
b. Evidence of anthropological and ethnological
studies shows that Philippine theater consisted
largely in its simplest form, of mimetic dances
imitating natural cycles and work activities.
c. The Ch’along of the Ifugaw is an example of how rite
when combines with plot could develop in time as full-
fledged drama.
5. Dances and Rituals
a. It suggests that indigenous drama had begun to
evolve from attempts to control environment.
b. Philippine drama would have taken the form
of the dance-drama found in other Asian
countries if the
missionaries had not intruded into what would have
been a normal process of its development.
6. Folk Epic
a. E. Arsenio Manuel has surveyed these
“ethnoepics,” and in his 1962 study he was
able to describe 13 epics found among pagan
Filipinos, 2 among Christian Filipinos and 4
among Muslim Filipinos.
b. Features of Folk Epic as described by
Manuel:
i. Narratives of sustained length
ii. Based on oral tradition
iii. Revolving around supernatural events or
heroic deeds
iv. In the form of verse which is either
chanted or sung
v. With a certain seriousness of purpose,
embodying or validating the beliefs, customs,
ideals, or life values of the people
c. Examples of Folk Epic
 i. Lam-ang (first recorded among Christian
Ilokos in 1889)
ii. Tuwaang (a pagan epic discovered by
Manuel in 1956 among the Manuvus of
Central Mindanao)
iii. Hinilawod (a pagan epic among the Solud
of Panay). It is considered as the longest
epic so far recorded in the Philippines.
iv. Bantugan (is a Maranaw epic)