South Slavic Epic and the Philology of the Border

Abstract

Abstract Epic singing among the south Slavs is a “tradition of the border”: historically, its development was closely intertwined with the conditions pertaining in the Balkan frontier zone that separated the Ottoman Empire from its neighbors. After reviewing fundamental characteristics of this tradition, the present chapter argues that the tradition itself can be understood as a “borderland” through which a variety of boundaries have been traced. These boundaries have determined how the territory has been mapped in terms of genre (epic vs. ballad), gender (“women’s songs” vs. “heroic songs”), and the orality/literacy divide. The binaries that emerge from the tracing of such boundaries are readily appropriated by the ideological structures of nationalism. The application of a “philology of the border,” understood as the critical re-examination of philological acts of discrimination, reveals the underlying continuities often obscured by the boundaries imposed on the south Slavic epic tradition, as well as the ideological values those boundaries express.