Cornell University Press
Epic Singers and Oral Tradition
About this book
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 In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues.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.
Author / Editor information
Albert Bates Lord is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor, Emeritus, of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Singer of Tales.
Reviews
A welcome publication.... The book contains eleven of his most important previously published articles and two studies which have not been published before.... There is something to be learned from every one of these studies.
Topics
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Frontmatter
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Contents
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Foreword
ix -
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Acknowledgments
xi -
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Introduction
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CHAPTER 1. Words Heard and Words Seen
15 -
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CHAPTER 2. Homer's Originality: Oral Dictated Texts
38 -
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CHAPTER 3. Homeric Echoes In Bihac
49 -
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CHAPTER 4. Avdo Mededovic, Guslar
57 -
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CHAPTER 5. Homer as an Oral-Traditional Poet
72 -
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CHAPTER 6. The Kalevala, the South Slavic Epics, and Homer
104 -
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CHAPTER 7. Beowulf and Odysseus
133 -
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CHAPTER 8. Interlocking Mythic Patterns in Beowulf
140 -
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CHAPTER 9. The Formulaic Structure of Introductions to Direct Discourse in Beowulf and Elene
147 -
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CHAPTER 10. The Influence of a Fixed Text
170 -
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CHAPTER 11. Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo-Croatian Epic
186 -
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CHAPTER 12. Narrative Themes in Bulgarian Oral-Traditional Epic and Their Medieval Roots
195 -
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CHAPTER 13. Central Asiatic and Balkan Epic
211 -
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Bibliography
245 -
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Index
259
