The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated that the oral tradition of the Homeric epics is a system that is good and useful for composition-in-performance and that also creates meaning for the audience in a special way. While some oral traditions for which Parry and Lord’s work has… Read more
One of the main advantages of the line of inquiry opened by the path-breaking works of Milman Parry and Albert Lord is its comparative dimension. [1] Formula and theme became not only distinct matrices for analyzing a given epic text or a given tradition; these… Read more
Introduction In The Singer of Tales, A. B. Lord introduced the term ‘patterned narrative’ for texts composed by formulas and themes. In his introductory discussion of patterns, Lord identified patterning on the level of rhythm, word-boundaries, syntax, sound, and thought, and further on he also spoke of patterns of formulas,… Read more
In the The Singer of Tales, Albert Lord only briefly mentions the famous traditional ballad of “Marko and Musa,” the earliest printed version of which was collected by Vuk Karadžić from Tešan Podrugović of Gacko, Hercegovina in 1815. [1] (Versions were collected by Milman Parry… Read more
The Sámi writers Olaus Sirma and Johan Turi described Sámi song tradition for a non-Sámi audience through elaborate narratives of contextualization. The present article examines these narratives from the perspective of Sámi music, underscoring the insights they offer for the study of richly context-dependent genres. Understandably, perhaps necessarily, the earliest… Read more
Introduction The centerpiece of this essay is a brief narrative found in the classical Persian text of the Shāhnāma or ‘Book of Kings’, a monumental poem composed in the early eleventh century CE by a poet named Ferdowsi, literally, ‘the man of paradise’. In this narrative, the poet tells the… Read more
The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, housed in Harvard University’s Widener Library, offers a unique window into the past, and specifically into the world of Yugoslav oral epic as it existed in the 1930s among a non-literate population. Thanks to Milman Parry’s foresight, scholarly rigor, and perseverance, the materials… Read more
One paradox of the study of ancient Greek athletics is that the epinikian odes of Pindar remain a prime source for us, despite revealing so little about the specifics of the events they celebrate. Much of what the poet does tell us comes by way of a highly stylized art… Read more
The many identities of agonistic victors “The 120th Olympiad. Pythagoras the Magnesian, stadion. Wrestling, Keras the Argive (who tore the hooves of a cow).” [1] The Olympiad list copied by Eusebius identifies a long series of Olympic victors—in this case two victors from the year… Read more
S’inscrivant dans le prolongement de l’épopée homérique, Apollonios ne peut manquer d’avoir à l’esprit une tradition de héros qui se sont notamment illustrés dans les épisodes fameux des jeux funèbres en l’honneur de Patrocle ou des jeux de divertissement chez les Phéaciens. [1] Or il… Read more
