Epic Singers and Oral Tradition.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - Contents: Foreword by Gregory Nagy -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Words Heard and Words Seen -- 2. Homer�s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts -- 3. Homeric Echoes in Biha -- 4. Avdo Mededovic, Guslar -- 5. Homer as an Oral-Traditional Poet -- 6. The Kalevala, the South Slavic Epics, and Homer -- 7. Beowulf and Odysseus -- 8. Interlocking Mythic Patterns in Beowulf -- 9. The Formulaic Structure of Introductions to Direct Discourse in Beowulf and Elene -- 10. The Influence of a Fixed Text -- 11. Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo-Croatian Epic -- 12. Narrative Themes in Bulgarian Oral-Traditional Epic and Their Medieval Roots -- 13. Central Asiatic and Balkan Epic -- Bibliography -- Index. - Albert Bates Lord (15 September 1912 � 29 July 1991) 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. Lord demonstrated the ways in which various great ancient epics from Europe and Asia were heirs to a tradition not only of oral performance, but of oral composition. He argued strongly for a complete divide between the non-literate authors of the Homeric epics and the scribes who later wrote them down, positing that the texts that have been preserved are a transcription by a listener of a single telling of the story. The story itself has no definitive text, but consists of innumerable variants, each improvised by the teller in the act of telling the tale from a mental stockpile of verbal formulas, thematic constructs, and narrative incidents. This improvisation is for the most part unconscious; epic tellers believe that they are faithfully recounting the story as it was handed down to them, even though the actual text of their tellings will differ substantially from day to day and from teller to teller. Lord studied not only field recordings of Serbian heroic epics sung to the gusle, and the Homeric epics, but also Beowulf, Gilgamesh, The Song of Roland, and the Anglo-Scottish Child Ballads. Across these many story traditions he found strong commonalities concerning the oral composition of traditional storytelling. (Wikipedia) ISBN 9780801424724