The Singer of Tales is a book by Albert Lord that discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medievalepic. Lord builds on the research of Milman Parry and their work together recording Balkan guslar poets.[1] It was published in 1960.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part concentrates on the theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition and its implications for bards who would recite epic poetry and the eventual literary figures who converted that oral material into written form. His development of the theory is firmly rooted in studies of contemporary Serbo-Croatian poets who primarily use oral formulas to remember long passages that make up songs and epic.
Chapter One, Introduction, gives the reader a brief outline of the history of the oral-formulaic theory and stresses the importance of the contributions of Milman Parry to the theory.
Chapter Two, Singers: Performance and Training, attempts to define the performer in question. It asks and attempts to answer the question of who were these traveling bards who would move from province to province to recite great epic. Moreover, the chapter discusses the level of control that Ancient performers had over these tales; it concludes that those who have to memorize such long tales never tell the same story twice with the same wording by examining the examples set by Serbo-Croatian poets. He describes three stages in the training of an oral poet. In the first, passive stage in which a young boy learns the themes and general structures of an epic. In the second stage, he first attempts to put the stories he knows in the context of the meter of poetic verse; finally, he attempts to recite-compose his first complete poem.[2]
Chapter Three, The Formula, discusses what Lord believes to be a classic oral formula. In doing so, he borrows Parry's definition that defines a formula as "a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea."[3] Parry's formulas are almost mathematical in nature; his discussion focuses on repetitions of meter and pitch more than textual content. However, he also notes that oral poets learn their epics like one would learn a living, evolving language.[4]
Chapter Four, The Theme, focuses on the repetitions in content that appear in ancient epic. Parry writes that the same theme can be expressed by many different formulas, and analyzes several examples from Serbo-Croatian poetry to demonstrate his points.
Chapter Five, Songs and the Song, follows the intrinsic distinctions between the bard's attitude towards his own work and the tendency of modern scholars to think of the oral-formulaic poem as "a given text that undergoes change from one singing to another."[5] In fact, he says, the ancient bard was more likely to think of himself as a "flexible plan of themes.".[6] As a result of this, epic tends to change over time as imperfect memories bend the traditions in new ways.
Chapter Six, Writing and Oral Tradition, describes the effect of the oral tradition on the writing of a given culture while also examining the transition of stories from an oral to a written (manuscript) tradition. However, he says, while the writing of a culture can affect its oral tradition, that is by no means a requirement. Since oral poems are so fluid in nature, any written records we have of them represent only one performance of them. As a result, as writing replaced oral tradition, the two could not live in symbiosis and the latter disappeared.[7]
The second part of the book shows the application of the theory discussed in the first half to the work of Homer in general before more carefully examining its application to the Iliad, Odyssey, and medieval epic.
Chapter Seven, Homer, attempts to prove, using the theory developed in the first half of the book, that the poet modern-day readers refer to as Homer was an oral-formulaic composer.
Chapters Eight and Nine, The Odyssey and The Iliad, examine both works in the context of composition by an oral poet.
Chapter Ten, Some Notes on Medieval Epic, does the same for medieval French and English poetic epic, with a focus on similarities between Beowulf and Homeric epic, as well as other medieval epics such as The Song of Roland and a medieval Greek poem called Digenis Akritas.
Related Research Articles
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.
Homer was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history.
Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system, or in parallel to a writing system. Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Jainism, for example, have used an oral tradition, in parallel to a writing system, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies from one generation to the next.
Milman Parry was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Darwin of Homeric studies". In addition, he was a pioneer in the discipline of oral tradition.
Albert Bates Lord was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who, after the death of his mentor Milman Parry, carried on Parry's research on epic poetry.
Narrative poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not need to rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with various characters. Narrative poems include all epic poetry, and the various types of "lay", most ballads, and some idylls, as well as many poems not falling into a distinct type.
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure and the members of the L'Année Sociologique. In 1890, he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language. After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva so he continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that the Swiss linguist had given.
A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of epithets, as in "rosy-fingered" Dawn or "swift-footed" Achilles. Epithets are used because of the constraints of the dactylic hexameter and because of the oral transmission of the poems; they are mnemonic aids to the singer and the audience alike.
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and their historicity. The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies. The subject is one of the oldest in education.
Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain.
The Greek word aoidos referred to a classical Greek singer. In modern Homeric scholarship aoidos is used by some as the technical term for a skilled oral epic poet in the tradition to which the Iliad and Odyssey are believed to belong.
Avdo Međedović was a guslar from Montenegro. He was the most versatile and skillful performer of all those encountered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord during their research on the oral epic tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro in the 1930s. At Parry's request, Avdo sang songs he already knew and some songs he heard in front of Parry, convincing him that someone Homer-like could produce a poem so long. Avdo dictated, over five days, a version of the well-known theme The Wedding of Meho Smailagić that was 12,323 lines long, saying on the fifth day to Nikola that he knew even longer songs. On another occasion, he sang over several days an epic of 13,331 lines. He said he had several others of similar length in his repertoire. In Parry's first tour, over 80,000 lines were transcribed.
Oral-formulaic composition is a theory that originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry and developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century. It seeks to explain two related issues:
the process by which oral poets improvise poetry
the reasons for orally improvised poetry having the characteristics that it does
Oral-formulaic theory in Anglo-Saxon poetry refers to the application of the hypotheses of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on the Homeric Question to verse written in Old English. That is, the theory proposes that certain features of at least some of the poetry may be explained by positing oral-formulaic composition. While Anglo-Saxon epic poetry may bear some resemblance to Ancient Greek epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey, the question of if and how Anglo-Saxon poetry was passed down through an oral tradition remains a subject of debate, and the question for any particular poem unlikely to be answered with perfect certainty.
John Miles Foley was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic. He was the founder of the academic journal Oral Tradition and the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri, where he was Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and W. H. Byler Endowed Chair in the Humanities.
The Kângë Kreshnikësh are the traditional songs of the heroic non-historical cycle of Albanian epic poetry. They are the product of Albanian culture and folklore orally transmitted down the generations by the Albanian rhapsodes (lahutarë) who perform them singing to the accompaniment of the lahutë. The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survival of its kind in modern Europe. The poems of the cycle belong to the heroic genre, reflecting the legends that portray and glorify the heroic deeds of the warriors of indefinable old times. The epic poetry about past warriors is an Indo-European tradition shared with South Slavs, but also with other heroic cultures such as those of early Greece, classical India, early medieval England and medieval Germany.
Albanian epic poetry is a form of epic poetry created by the Albanian people. It consists of a longstanding oral tradition still very much alive. A good number of Albanian epic singers can be found today in Kosovo and northern Albania, and some also in Montenegro. The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survival of its kind in modern Europe.
Dr. Zlatan Čolaković was a Bosnian Homerist, philologist and researcher.
Salih Uglla Peshteri was an Albanian performer of epic poetry from Ugao, in Pešter a sparsely populated region near Sjenica, modern day Sandžak.
↑ Foley, John M. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. p. 31
↑ Parry, Milman "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I: Homer and Homeric Style." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 41:80 (1930).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
