This is a common assertion that both storytellers and folklorists made when attempting to convey the conservatism of oral tradition. While this sort of accurate repetition may have been the goal - and storytellers may have believed they achieved it, it is less likely that this was actually the case. Burke's claim is based on what was likely a deception - believed by storytellers and folklorists and passed on to the greater academic community (and then accepted by Burke).

In my forthcoming book The Folklore of Cornwall: The Oral Tradition of a Celtic Nation, I discuss the problem with this sort of assertion. Here are some excerpts (before the copyeditor makes me sound eloquent):

Many societies feature specialists who rise above most active bearers of tradition. These skilled narrators graduate to the next level by winning acclaim and sometimes becoming professional storytellers. In 1945, James Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga; 1899-1980), the founding director of the Irish Folklore Commission, presented a classic study of the seanchaithe, the storytellers of Ireland. His essay went a long way toward documenting the expert keepers of tradition who roamed the countryside, telling stories in exchange for room and board. Delargy was pathfinding; folklorists regard his eloquent work as the definitive early discussion about those who conveyed popular stories from one generation to the next.(1)

(I then proceed to point out how Delargy was enthralled by the idea that the Irish storytellers were , in fact, repeating stories word for word as they had heard them).

A subsequent encyclopaedic study by Georges Denis Zimmermann is a twenty-first-century benchmark analysis of the Irish storyteller. Zimmermann draws on evidence from early material as well as from the later period of classic folklore collection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With this information, he constructs an elaborate portrait of those who told the stories. The insights of Delargy stand, but Zimmermann adds a comprehensive review of sources.(2)

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Zimmermann includes a detailed discussion of the role and limits of memorization when it came to the transmission of longer stories. He points out that there is no good evidence that people could repeat, word for word, long stories they had heard. Instead, an experienced storyteller understood the structure of the genre and could adopt a story for his or her repertoire by breaking the story into its essential elements. By relying on the established rules that governed the nature of oral tradition, a storyteller faced a less daunting task when it came to ‘memorizing’ something recently heard. The degree to which someone could or would take pride in the alleged exact repetition of a folktale depended on individual ability and interest but also on cultural preferences. Many in Ireland wanted to believe their folktales preserved an ancient inheritance, and this affected the storyteller, the audience, and the collector’s perception. The degree to which a storyteller maintained a legacy from past generations can be questioned, but clearly pre-modern Ireland idealised conservatism when it came to the telling of stories.(3)

The conclusion that Zimmermann reaches is that Irish storytellers may not have been able to repeat a long story exactly, but they may have believed they did just that. As Zimmermann notes, ‘we may suppose that most of those who said they could learn such stories from hearing them only once, and repeat them “word for word” … were probably deceiving themselves.… Still, a gifted Irish storyteller was often said to repeat exactly what he had heard, and could sincerely believe that he did.’(4) The pivotal point here is that the assertion that Irish storytellers repeated stories exactly as they heard them is less important than the belief in that level of precision. It was the ambition of the purveyors of Irish folklore to carry the tradition to the next generation as accurately as possible.

(1) James H. Delargy (Séamus Ó Duilearga), ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller with some notes on Gaelic Folk-Tales’ (The Sir John Rhŷs Lecture, presented 28 November 1945; published 1946); and see his ‘The Gaelic Story-Teller – No Living Counterpart in Western Christendom’, Ireland of the Welcomes, 1:1 (1952) 2-4. Delargy was the long-standing director of the Irish Folklore Commission. Dundes reproduced the original Delargy article in his edited work, International Folkloristics, 153-76. References to the Delargy article employ page numbers from this edition. Dundes, 157, further recommends additional sources to be considered in the context of storytellers: Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island, translated by Bryan MacMahon (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1974; originally published in Gaelic in 1938) and her sequel, An Old Woman’s Reflections, translated by Séamus Ennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Henry Glassie, Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Gun Herranen provides an example of a Finnish-Swedish storyteller, Berndt Strömberg (1822-1910), discussing the creativity of the tradition bearer. Herranen’s article, ‘The Storyteller’s Repertoire’, appears in Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, editors, Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989) 63-69.

(2) George Denis Zimmermann, The Irish Storyteller (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001).

(3) Zimmermann, The Irish Storyteller, 440-4. Alan Dundes, in an essay introducing the work of Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957), points out that ‘van Gennep … understood that folklore was “living” rather than wrongly considered solely to be “dead” survivals from the past’: Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 100, from Dundes, International Folkloristics, 99-108.

(4) Zimmermann, The Irish Storyteller, 443.