Foley performed a computer analysis -- then a novelty in the humanities -- to write a paper on the metrics, the science of writing in meter, of Beowulf. "When he read to us," he recalls, "I kept hearing a recurring rhythm, not just the rhythms that were allowed in the system of meter but a further focusing." Foley figured he could analyze that pattern by writing software that coded the stresses and then looked for patterns.

"I discovered you could use computer analysis to try to understand what systems were at work," he says. "The naked eye flipping through pages, on the other hand, would allow you to select examples and, if you were patient enough, maybe to deduce a little bit of the system. Still, nobody could keep that all in their head at the same time to get the patterns."

Elder academics were impressed by the young scholar's analysis, especially a computer-assisted insight concerning the poem's specific rhythmic variations. Out of the blue, the grad student with several boxes of IBM punch cards and an ear for spoken language had become a force in the normally staid world of Beowulf studies. Speaking engagements at conferences in Europe and the United States soon followed.

Foley built on this success by analyzing additional oral patterns in the programming language Pascal, eventually programming a computer to determine patterns among various versions of an oral poem. The idea was to read "across the tradition," sizing up which parts were common to the whole and which were idiosyncratic. Foley dubbed his word processor "heuro," which in ancient Greek means "I found."

Foley followed his singular insight into computer analysis with equally unique fieldwork in what was then Yugoslavia. He has spent a total of three years there, much of it living in villages and observing oral culture firsthand. His motivation for making the trip stemmed in part from his admiration for Milman Parry and Albert Lord, early oral tradition scholars who had done seminal work there in the 1930s.

Parry and Lord recorded the performances of oral bards who sang book-length epic songs that descended from Homer's Odyssey and continued the traditional use of patterned language, even in the outline of the plot. It was no longer possible to do field work on Homer or Beowulf, but here was a living example of how bards recomposed these poems on the fly for audiences by using the patterned language to their advantage. Foley has collected such performances himself, but he also discovered a large repertoire of oral poems used in everyday life -- songs for unmarried women, songs for older women, songs for dinner, song-charms for healing, and so on.

"I came to see that these are highly functional forms of verbal art," says Foley. "They are tools for living, they are not only expatiations of the soul. Oral poems may sometimes be that, too, but that doesn't exhaust the possibilities for poetry in a society. It can be workaday stuff, such as putting recipes into poetry."

That sort of insight often escapes scholars who study only texts, Stanford's Richard Martin says. "What's the value of field work? It's like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film turns from black and white into Technicolor: You can spend your whole life studying what's on the page, but when you see real singers confronting an audience, it casts an entirely new light on things."

For nearly 20 years, part of the workaday stuff of Foley's academic life has included running the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition, which he founded in 1986. Foley has used the MU-based center to house a vital clearinghouse for the ideas of thousands of oral tradition scholars worldwide. Foley also edits the center's journal, Oral Tradition, which publishes scholarly work in disciplines ranging from anthropology to religious studies. Scholars associated with the center are now at work editing their 20th book on oral traditions.