South Slavic Epic Research Articles

Compilation of South Slavic Epics by Milman Parry and Albert Lord and the Milman Parry Collection

Avrupa’da 19. yüzyıldan itibaren yükselen romantik milliyetçilik düşüncesi ile yeni uluslar yaratma sürecinde halk ve halka ait olan her türlü geleneksel bilgi Avrupalı araştırmacıların ilgi alanına girmeye başlamıştır. Süreci, bu ürünlerin kayıt altına alınıp yayımlanması yönündeki çalışmalar takip etmiştir. Ulusların tarihî kökenlerini ve ulusa mensup kahramanların mücadelelerini terennüm etmesi hasebiyle destanlar, bu araştırmaların merkezinde yer almıştır. Modern uluslar, kendi uluslarının yüceliklerini ve eskiliğini kanıtlama adına sözlü kahramanlık destanlarını ortaya çıkarma gayreti içerisinde olmuşlardır. Etnik çeşitliliği ile Balkanlar, sözlü kahramanlık destanlarının derlenip yayınlanması çalışmalarının en önemli merkezlerinden birisi olmuştur. Zira sözlü destan yaratım geleneği bölgede yaşayan başta Boşnaklar olmak üzere Güney Slav halklarının yaşantılarında önemli bir yere sahiptir. Bu çerçevede yerli ve yabancı birçok araştırmacı, Güney Slav destanlarını kayıt altına alma gayesi ile önemli bir Slav nüfusunu bünyesinde barındıran Batı ve Kuzeybatı Balkanlarda derleme faaliyetleri yürütmüşlerdir. Elbette ki yalnızca ulus ve ulusçu düşünce ile olan sıkı münasebetleri, bölgedeki sözlü destan anlatma geleneğine karşı artan ilginin temel sebebi olmamıştır. 20. yüzyıl Batı edebiyatı araştırmalarının en önemli tartışmalarından biri kabul edilen ve Homer Sorunu olarak bilinen; İlyada ve Odesa destanlarının ne şekilde teşekkül ettiği; bu destanların tek bir kişi yahut birden fazla kişi tarafından mı kaleme alındığı; Homeros’un kimliği, destanların sözlü gelenekten mi kayda geçirildiği yoksa telif mi olduğu gibi soruların yanıtını bulma gayretleri kapsamında, birçok araştırmacı dikkatini sözlü destan yaratma geleneğinin hâlâ canlı bir biçimde varlığını devam ettirdiği Güney Slav coğrafyasına çevirmiştir. Bu araştırmacıların öncüleri, aynı zamanda 20. yüzyıl Homeros araştırmalarına damgasını vuran iki isim olan Milman Parry ve asistanı Albert Lord olmuştur. 1920’li yıllarda Paris Sarbonne Üniversitesi’nde doktora öğrencisi iken Parry, Güney Slav destanları ve destancılık gelenekleri ile alakalı yapmış olduğu çalışmalar ile tanınan Sloven halkbilimci Matija Murko ile tanışmış, onun yönlendirmeleri ile bölgede saha çalışmaları yapmaya karar vermiştir. 1930’lu yıllarda Harvard Üniversitesi Klasikler bölümünde göreve başlayan Parry, 1933 yılında ilk kez bölgeye gelmiş ve aralıklarla toplam 2 yıl bölgeden ağırlıklı olarak destan olmak üzere önemli sayıda sözlü malzeme kayda geçirmiştir. Milman Parry’nin 1935 yılında ani ölümü üzerine asistanı Albert Lord onun çalışmalarını nihayete erdirmiştir. Kayıt altına alınan ve dünyanın en hacimli sözlü şiir koleksiyonu olarak kabul edilen külliyatın büyük bir kısmı destanları ihtiva etmektedir. Koleksiyon, Harvard Üniversitesi, Widener Kütüphanesi bünyesinde muhafaza edilmektedir. Koleksiyon, Parry ve Lord’un kayıt altına aldığı malzemenin yanı sıra Zagreb ve Belgrad’dan daha önce kayıt altına alınan Güney Slavlarına ait kahramanlık şiiri koleksiyonları eklenmek suretiyle bugünkü hâlini almıştır. Bu çalışmada Milman Parry ve Albert Lord’un Güney Slav destanlarını derleme çalışmaları, bu çalışmaların hedefleri ve neticeleri ve koleksiyonda mevcut olan malzemenin değerlendirmesi yapılacak, son tahlilde her ne kadar da Homer meselesinin çözümü adına yapılmış olsa dahi bu çalışmaların Güney Slav destan araştırmalarına olan katkısı üzerinde durulacaktır.

Avdo Međedović’s Post-Traditional Epics and Their Relevance to Homeric Studies

Abstract[Milman Parry established first that Homeric poetry was traditional, based on his studies of its formulae and language, and then that it was oral, based on his experience of recording south Slavic epic; he likened the unusually long epics of Avdo Međedović to those of Homer. Albert Lord put the two concepts together, holding that both south Slavic epic and Homeric poetry were oral-traditional and that all oral epic poetry, including that of Međedović, is traditional. However, the author’s investigations into the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and his personal experience of collecting epics in Montenegro in 1989 prove that this is incorrect. The poems of Avdo Međedović do not conform to traditional uses of language, theme and story-patterns, but offer something new, of which other traditional singers disapproved, as their recorded conversations demonstrate. Similarly, by analogy, the epics of Homer differed from the traditional poems of the Epic Cycle, exactly as Aristotle indicates in the Poetics. Hence neither Međedović nor, by analogy, Homer were fully traditional poets, although they were oral poets; instead, they deliberately adapted the tradition so that the old stories were mixed and matched into much lengthier and more complex epics, which should be called post-traditional.]

Specific initial (introductory) formulas in Albanian (decasyllabic) songs of the frontier warriors

This paper primarily seeks to demonstrate the position and importance of specific initial (introductory) formulas in the Albanian songs of the frontier warriors (Alb. k?ng? kreshnik?sh, k?ng? t? kreshnik?ve), proposing their classification into several categories. The analysis performed on the corpus consisting of 102 songs has resulted in a typology similar to the one in Detelic 1996. Such a classification serves as a starting point for further research and future mandatory study of structural and other concordances between the corresponding formulas in South Slavic epic, which could be useful in shedding light on the issue of originality of the Albanian songs.

Challenges in Comparative Oral Epic

Challenges in Comparative Oral Epic John Miles Foley (bio) and Chao Gejin (bio) Introduction (by Chao Gejin, November 2012) The present paper was composed by the late John Miles Foley and myself more than ten years ago, during the time I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Missouri granted by the Ford Foundation. We met frequently on campus, discussing issues covering a wide range of topics, especially oral epic traditions. During these conversations, we recognized the need to write something in response to significant challenges in epic studies that would illustrate the richness and diversity of epic traditions in particular. With these goals in mind, we started to work on this piece together two or three afternoons each week throughout the summer of 2001, sitting side by side, composing paragraph by paragraph, and incorporating examples and scholarship from our respective experiences and backgrounds. We moved forward steadily and eventually fulfilled our plan. A Chinese version of this article appeared in 2003 in a collection of papers focusing especially on Oriental Literature.1 At the time, it provoked reflections on basic dimensions of epic poetry and, furthermore, facilitated multiple ways of understanding epic, moving beyond a purely Homeric criterion of epic poetry. At a personal level as well as professional, I highly regard this paper because it reflects both our long-term friendship and our common interests. John made his first trip to China soon after I returned to Beijing. He delivered lectures in our institute, conducted field trips to Inner Mongolia, and visited a number of scholars working on related research. As a result of these early collaborations, his own compositions began to include additional Mongolian examples, such as the singers Choibang and Losor, among others. From then on, he visited China regularly. He was the first speaker to initiate the yearly “IEL International Seminar Series on Epic Studies and Oral Tradition Research,” and he held appointments within the Institute of Ethnic Literature, most notably as chief advisor of the “Center for Oral Tradition Research.” It was a great misfortune that our newly designed program on oral tradition and the Internet with partners in Missouri, Helsinki, and Beijing was interrupted by John’s unexpected absence. Still, the blueprint of this international program will be followed and fulfilled without a doubt. His cutting-edge thoughts will continue to shed light on our explorations. In Mongolian epic tradition a true Baatar (“hero”) would never truly pass away. John is, by any measure, just such a Baatar, and he, too, shall be with us forever. An Overview of the Study In this paper we propose to examine some fundamental issues in comparative oral epic. Our investigation will proceed across four epic traditions widely separated in space and time. Two of them, the Mongolian and South Slavic epic, are or were recently still living and therefore observable by fieldworkers. The other two, the ancient Greek and Old English epic traditions, are preserved only in manuscript form. Although no comparative treatment can ever claim to be exhaustive or universal, we feel that these four witnesses represent considerable diversity and collectively offer a chance to forge a suitably nuanced model for oral epic. We welcome responses from scholars in other fields, especially Africanists, as we all search for ways to understand the international phenomenon of oral epic.2 In order to provide a clear path through this complex subject, we propose a five-section structure, with each section keyed by a question that reflects an issue of contemporary importance. Thus the paper will begin by asking “What is a poem in oral epic tradition?” Scholars have argued from many different perspectives about the large-scale organization of oral epic; are the smaller tales integral parts of a single whole, facets of a single gemstone, or simply individual narratives that collectors have assembled into “anthologies” based on a literary model? On a slightly smaller scale, we will then consider the question of “What is a typical scene or theme in oral epic tradition?” The focus here will be on those recurrent passages, such as the arming of a hero or the boast before battle, that epic bards use as “large words” in their tale-telling...

Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to the Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform

Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to the Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform Michael D. C. Drout (bio) One1 of Albert Lord’s more surprising discoveries about living oral traditions was that no two oral performances of the South Slavic epic that he collected were precisely the same (1953).2 Scholars before Milman Parry and Lord seem to have assumed that any long performance must have been of a text that had been memorized verbatim. It took the Theory of Oral Composition as originally developed by Parry and Lord and elaborated and refined in the decades since3 to explain why in many traditions no two performances are the same at the level of the word and sentence even though the audiences and the performers state that the “same” story is being performed (cf. Foley 2002:12–20). Recent work has shown how the influence of the “performance arena” and the differing skill sets and tendencies of individual singers contribute to the significant variation in the exact words used in any given performance of a specific song (Foley 1995:8–11). But although individual performances vary, they do not vary infinitely, for if they did, there would be no tradition. Oral Theory has used the term “multiform” to describe verbal or textual entities that display this “variation within limits” (Foley 1991:6–8, 1998:149). Although use of “multiform” both as adjective and noun is widespread in scholarship, it remains difficult to find an agreed-upon definition. Lauri Honko’s description of multiforms as “repeatable and artistic expressions of variable length which are constitutive for narration and function as generic markers” (Honko 1998:100–05; cf. Foley 1995:102) is probably as close to a consensus as one can find, but the problem that Lord noted in The Singer of Tales remains: “unlike the oral poet, we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of fluidity. We find it difficult to grasp anything that is multiform. It seems to us necessary to construct an ideal text or seek an original, and we remain dissatisfied with an ever-changing phenomenon” (1960:100). Despite the efforts of many scholars to explain the phenomenon of multiformity (perhaps epitomized by Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem [2002]), it remains difficult to think and talk about the multiform without collapsing it to a single, textual entity.4 Scholars do not even agree completely on the size of multiforms: Parry and Lord’s original approach limited varying formulas to circumstances with identical metrical conditions (although Lord also discussed “themes” that were groupings of ideas [1960:68]), but more recent work has identified much larger multiforms that extend well beyond sentence length (Honko 1998:102–14), and the scholarship seems to be moving in the direction of identifying as multiforms even complete songs (Foley 1998).5 The work of Gregory Nagy in developing an “evolutionary” model has been influential in this area, in particular his view that the multiform should be understood in relative rather than absolute terms, so that any particular composition could be more or less multiform “along a graded continuum” (Nagy 1996Nagy 2001:109–10). That multiforms vary at different levels from the micro to the macro is borne out by studies such as Honko’s of Siri epic or Foley’s work with the variants collected by Parry and Lord (Foley 1998). Nevertheless, significant disagreements among researchers remain, both in theoretical terms and, more specifically, about the relative multiformity—and attendant orality—of particular works (for example, the Homeric Iliad versus the Cypria [Finkelberg 2000; Nagy 2001]). This state of difficulty is not confined to purely oral, or even primarily oral, traditions, either. In medieval studies Paul Zumthor’s discussion of mouvance—most succinctly expressed by Bernard Cerquiglini’s assertion that (1989:111) “l’écriture médiévale ne produit pas de variantes, elle est variance” (“medieval writing does not produce variants, it is variance”)—brought about significant changes in both theoretical approaches and editorial practices (Zumthor 1972Zumthor 1987).6 Although Cerquiglini’s position is seen as extreme in contemporary medieval studies, the variable nature of texts—even when they are not considered to be particularly close to an...

Presentation Formulas in South Slavic Epic Song

Ever since the pathfinding fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, South Slavic oral epic song has supplied one of the principal points de repere for scholars interested in the study of oral, especially epic, traditions. 1 Parry traveled to the Balkans in the 1930s in search of a “living laboratory” in which to test his ideas about the oral and traditional nature of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. He found among the Slavic-speaking inhabitants of then-Yugoslavia a tradition that was remarkably similar to Homeric poetry in terms of both form and content. The Muslim communities concentrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Sandžak region of Serbia and Montenegro had developed a particularly rich repertoire of songs describing battles and raids along the Ottoman frontier of the recent or remote past. Parry, however, was interested less in the content of the songs than in their formal features and the techniques of their production. He embarked on an ambitious project of collecting audio recordings and written records intended to document as fully as possible these formal and technical aspects of the tradition. Lord, Parry’s student and assistant in the field from 1934-35, continued this project with subsequent fieldwork in the 1950s and ’60s. Their recordings and texts—which number in the thousands and are today conserved in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University—allowed these two scholars to identify and describe phenomena that have been recognized as characterizing numerous oral traditions worldwide, principally the phenomenon of “compositionin-performance,” by which is meant the technique of performing narrative through manipulation of traditional themes as expressed in traditional verbal formulas, without reference to a fixed text. The phenomenon I intend to examine in this essay is likewise common to very many oral traditions, and for that reason it may at first glance appear to be unremarkable. Like performers in diverse other traditions, the singers of South Slavic epic frequently have occasion to address their audiences directly in the course of performance. It is not readily apparent whether these appeals to the listener—which are accomplished, as we shall see, by means of very short, relatively inconspicuous expressions—have any function beyond simply inviting the audience to experience a sense of participation in the performance. I will argue, however, that patterns of

Music of Southslavic Epics from the Bihac Region of Bosnia

Music of Southslavic Epics from the Bihac Region of Bosnia

Music of Southslavic Epics from the Bihac Region of Bosnia

Music of Southslavic Epics from the Bihac Region of Bosnia

Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικού δημοτικού τραγουδιού (review)

Reviews 305 Greek, and questionnaires (for which no information is given about the respondents and which in no way produce statistically significant results). Despite the author's elaborate justification, one could seriously object to the use of decontextualized constructions to study "language in its social context." For this reason, the book's strength lies not so much in any rigorous sociolinguistic approach as in the wealth of material it unearths and in its useful insights into a series of phenomena whose study in Greek is still in its infancy. In its descriptive analysis, Sifianou's Politeness PL·nomena in Engend and Greece covers the areas of pragmatics and everyday usage that are known to be most demanding and most useful to the foreign learner, the translator, and the linguist. In addition, it emphasizes the need for further research on social aspects of Greek on the basis of pragmatic principles and contextual information. The informed theoretical discussion and the range of evidence from Greek (especially in chapter 7) are an invaluable contribution not only to Modern Greek linguistics but also to research on politeness from a crosscultural perspective. This contribution is especially welcome as an attempt to improve cross-cultural understanding at a time when nationalistic sentiments are resurfacing so ominously. Dionysis Goutsos University of Birmingham G. M. Sifákis. Γ. M. Σηφάκης, Για μια ποιητική του ελληνικοϕ δημοτικοϕ τϕαγουδιοϕ. Iráklio: Panepistimiakés Ekdósis KrÃ-tis. 1988. Pp. 236. Gregory Sifákis makes substantial progress "towards a poetics of modern Greek folk song" by harnessing the potential of oral-compositional theory more fully than any previous effort, as well as by marshaling selected elements of semiotic and linguistic theory for his purpose. This progress is all the more commendable when viewed in the context of the slow response in Greece to the rampant growth of oral-composition theory over half a century—a slowness that is paradoxical because it was from work on ancient Greek epics in the late 1920s by Milman Parry that the study of the purportedly universal phenomenon of oral-formulaic composition spread to a host of other medieval and modern literatures and waxed to the point of claiming the status of a whole new discipline, and because Homer has remained the standard analogue for modern oral poetry ever since. It is not that the Homer/folk song nexus had escaped notice in Greece, but rather that folklorists were preoccupied with exploiting the Homeric qualities of modern texts for other purposes, as revealed, for example, in the sub-title of I. E. Tsouderos's slim volume Όμοια καιπαϕάλληλαφϕαστικάσυστήματασταομηϕικάÎ-πηκαιστονεοελληνικό δημοτικότϕαγοϕδι:τασωστάκϕιτήϕιατηςγνησιότηταςτωννεοελληνικών δημοτικών τϕαγουδιών (Athens, 1976). More sophisticated investigators of 306 Reviews this nexus mentioned by Sifákis (pp. 137, 203) also refrained from pursuing formula analysis, and one might speculate that perhaps the use of South Slavic epic by Parry and A. B. Lord as the modern point of comparison for Homer dampened enthusiasm for their method and findings among exponents of the traditionally nationalistic discipline of laografÃ-a in Greece, while the perception that Parry's emphasis on tradition detracted from The Poet's originality and artistry (which earned Parry the label of "the Darwin of Homeric studies" in the West) would not have endeared him to Greeks who might otherwise have been pleased to argue for continuity from ancient to modern poetic technique. On the other hand, throughout his book Sifákis takes up the challenge of refuting the facile assumption that tradition and creativity are mutually exclusive. Whatever the reasons, just ten years before the publication of Sifákis's book, Alki KyriakÃ-du-Néstoros could report that Milman Parry's oral-formulaic theory had made no impact to date on the θεωϕία της ελληνικής λαογϕαφίας, which formed the title of her book (Thessaloniki, 1978, p.174). It seems that the efforts of overseas scholars including Morgan, Trypanis, Jeffreys, Alexiou, A. B. Lord himself, and especially James Notopoulos, who had tried valiantly in the 1950s to replicate Parry's and Lord's "Yugoslav laboratory" in Greece, failed to arouse much local interest. But the momentum was not lost, and it was not much longer before Roderick Beaton's Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge, 1980) substantially inaugurated, among other innovations, the Parry-Lord approach to Modern Greek folk song. Not that his...

Oral and written transmission in Ethiopian Christian chant

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.

:Prince Marko: The Hero of South Slavic Epics

:<i>Prince Marko: The Hero of South Slavic Epics</i>

Prince Marko: the hero of South Slavic epics

Prince Marko: the hero of South Slavic epics