We are pleased to share the news that Epic Singers and Oral Tradition by Albert Bates Lord is now available in electronic form, for free, from the CHS website, here.
In the Introduction, he writes:
“It is of the nature of things that Homer and his poems should play some role, directly or indirectly, in all the articles in this volume. It is not surprising, either, that South Slavic oral-traditional epic should loom large in them as well. Since my graduate work was also seriously concerned with medieval English and Germanic epic, some of the writings included here represent that field. Because the methodology that I inherited from my teacher Milman Parry is, I believe, applicable to many other narrative poetries, references to them are not infrequent. “
Members of Hour 25 have recently been reading selections from The Singer of Tales for a Book Club discussion. We are always returning to Homeric epic, and will be reading Beowulf in February 2016, so Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will provide a useful and interesting comparative framework for thinking about these texts, and others, as part of an oral tradition.