The Gesar epic belongs to a tradition of oral performance associated with bards who are, within the culture that produces them, often described as receiving their material through dreams or spontaneous inspiration rather than formal memorization alone, a claim that marks the epic's transmission as understood locally to be different in kind from ordinary storytelling. Performances can run for many hours or across multiple sessions, combining spoken narration with passages sung to melodies specific to particular characters or moods.
Written versions, compiled from dictated or recorded performances, run to many volumes and still represent only a portion of the material various bards carry, which means any single manuscript or printed edition captures one performer's repertoire rather than a complete or authoritative Gesar. Since the mid twentieth century the epic has drawn sustained academic attention as one of the longest continuously performed oral epic traditions still active, and its recitation continues in Tibetan and Mongolian communities today, including among diaspora populations outside the epic's original geographic range.
Chinese, Russian and later international scholarship began systematically recording Gesar performances from the nineteenth century onward, and archives built from these recordings, alongside more recent audio and video documentation, now form the primary basis for comparative study of how the epic varies between individual bards and across the Tibetan and Mongolian traditions that both claim it.