So i think while we often hear about how rich the somali culutral heritage is and specifically the poetry. I thought itd be good to be put some numbers to it so people can appreciate what we're working with.
In this article on somali folklore published in 1972 by John William Johnson. He mentions one of the somali scholars Ahmed Ali bokor who collected 576 poems by 34 different poets from the the golden age of somali poetry ( the golden age he's referring to is basically defined as poetry from the 1800s up to the 1920s at the latest) to put that into perspective somali poetry is genreally 30 -100 lines with it sometimes being much longer. So if we calculated each poem as being 50 lines thats basically 2,000 pages worth of poetry or 4 500 page volumes
and imagine thats how much material one scholar had been able to collect by 1972.
Even we were to be extremely generous I highly doubt this single scholar was able to collect even 1% of all the golden age period somali poetry known across the country. But let's say he did that means we'd be looking at 100,000s of pages worth of somali poetry from between the 1800s to the early 20th century being out there. Which i suspect has probably been mostly collected on audio tapes or in books in the last 50 years.
In this article on somali folklore published in 1972 by John William Johnson. He mentions one of the somali scholars Ahmed Ali bokor who collected 576 poems by 34 different poets from the the golden age of somali poetry ( the golden age he's referring to is basically defined as poetry from the 1800s up to the 1920s at the latest) to put that into perspective somali poetry is genreally 30 -100 lines with it sometimes being much longer. So if we calculated each poem as being 50 lines thats basically 2,000 pages worth of poetry or 4 500 page volumes
and imagine thats how much material one scholar had been able to collect by 1972.
Even we were to be extremely generous I highly doubt this single scholar was able to collect even 1% of all the golden age period somali poetry known across the country. But let's say he did that means we'd be looking at 100,000s of pages worth of somali poetry from between the 1800s to the early 20th century being out there. Which i suspect has probably been mostly collected on audio tapes or in books in the last 50 years.
