Albert Bates Lord

Discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic.

The Singer of Tales

Béla Bartók

Serbocroatian Heroic Songs

Beginning Bulgarian

Milman Parry

David E. Bynum

This limited edition contains the critical texts of eight long oral epics from four bards of northern Bosnia, the northern most predominantly Muslim district in Europe. Sung with the accompaniment of the picked tambura rather than the bowed gusle that is familiar elsewhere in the Yugoslav tradition, the epos in northern Bosnia was often strophic or stanzaic rather than stichic. This volume is the first publication in the more than century-old scholarship on South Slavic oral traditions to take note of that fact, and to document it with specific texts. The editor's Prolegomena include detailed discussions of the principles of rhythm in this epos, the sources of the tales in it, and extensive comparative commentaries linking the eight narratives with those found in other Yugoslav towns, especially with the tradition of Avdo Međedović at Bijelo Polje.

Epics from Bihać, Cazin, and Kulen Vakuf

Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, Volume 14: Bihaćka Krajina

A Symposium

Slavic Folklore

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic. The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.

Epic Singers and Oral Tradition

Beginning Serbocroatian

Albert Bates Lord

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