Collecting South Slavic Oral Epic in 1864: Luka Marjanović's Earliest Account

Abstract

What follows is a translation of Luka Marjanovic’s preface to a collection of oral epic and lyric songs that he transcribed by hand from singers in northwestern Bosnia and published as a songbook in 1864. Albert Lord described Marjanovic as “one of the finest of the Croatian collectors of oral-traditional epic at the end of the last century,” 1 though Lord and others have criticized Marjanovic’s editorial methods. Marjanovic is a significant figure in the history of oral epic studies for the reason that he collected an enormous amount of epic songs from singers in northwestern Bosnia during a decade of fieldwork in the 1880s. The collection comprises, in fact, the first major corpus of Bosnian oral-dictated epic manuscripts that we have, and predates Parry’s recordings by many decades. Today Marjanovic’s manuscript collection is kept in the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb, Croatia. 2 The manuscripts were used by editors at the end of the nineteenth century to furnish material for the anthology known as Hrvatske narodne pjesme (Croatian Folk Songs), the seminal Croatian folklore anthology published in Zagreb from the late nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century. 3 Volumes three and four of that anthology were devoted to Bosnian oral epic, known as “Mohammedan” epic at the time, and were based on the Marjanovic collection, though it cannot be said that the two volumes present even a fraction of the material contained within the manuscript corpus itself.