Introduction The epiphany of the goddess Aphrodite in Song 1 of Sappho may seem, from a modern perspective, paradoxical. On the one hand, if one considers epiphany to mean simply the appearance of a divinity, it is not difficult to identify the exact moment in which the song’s epiphany occurs;… Read more
University of California, Santa Barbara For researchers who conduct ethnographic fieldwork on oral traditions, one of the most exciting aspects of The Singer of Tales is Albert Lord’s accounts of experimentation in the field, the various ways in which he and Milman Parry interrogated living traditions by comparing performances, setting… Read more
When Albert Lord published his ground-breaking study of South Slavic oral epic poetry in 1960, he entitled his book The Singer of Tales: the singer of tales, not the narrator of tales. With this title Lord acknowledged the fact that the South Slavic pjevač is literally a singer, who accompanies… Read more
This essay aims primarily to point out some new directions in research on Albanian epic song. [1] Starting from archival materials and the issues they raise for further investigation in the field, it will focus in particular on certain structural elements of the songs related… Read more
1. Introduction Homeric poetry is an intensely visual art, as numerous studies have shown. [1] This intense visuality is a feature that Homeric poetry shares with many other oral narrative traditions. [2] The affinity of oral narrative for optically rich… Read more
A young groom-to-be, along with a celebratory band of Romani (Gypsy) musicians and a throng of wedding guests, arrives after a lengthy journey at the faraway residence of his soon-to-be bride, eager to take her home, where she will become his wife and join his family. The bride’s father, however,… Read more
The formulaic phrases referring to Troy in the Iliad have not received enough attention until now: Milman Parry emphasized the epithets for heroes, but was not as confident in regard to epithets for objects and places.* In his first dissertation, he actually considered some generic… Read more
In 1922 Houro Karppo, a refugee from Viena Karelia, performed a set of yoiks and laments for the Finnish ethnomusicologist Armas Väisänen. The performance was interrupted by a mistake. In her defense, the woman quoted a proverb: “The horse has four legs, but it stumbles. Man has only one tongue… Read more
Most who pause to commemorate the first half-century of The Singer of Tales will remember, vividly, how they first made its acquaintance. Fifty years since The Singer of Tales marks forty-four since I was introduced to Albert Lord, from the distance of the back row of a Harvard lecture hall… Read more
Richard Martin has observed that “what experimentation is to science, comparison should be to philology—a way to test hypotheses and produce new ones that account for more data, more economically.” [1] This paper is an attempt at such an experiment. [2]… Read more
