oral tradition

Book Club | November 2015: Albert B. Lord: The Singer of Tales

Our next Book Club selection features two selections from Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: Chapter 2 ‘Singers: Performance and Training’, and Chapter 5 ‘Songs and the Song’. This book, originally published in 1960, is based on research carried out in the former Yugoslavia by Milman Parry in the 1930s, which focused on how singers who learn songs in an oral tradition compose in performance. This provides valuable evidence for… Read more

Connections: Sappho, Epic, and Women Singers in India and Beyond

Many community members have been reading Gregory Nagy’s recent commentary about Song 44 of Sappho and the role of women in the making of epic on the Classical Inquiries website. Below are some resources for additional study inspired by that post. Primary Texts Sappho (trans. Gregory Nagy), on the CHS website. Also, see Sappho 44 below. Epic Barbara Graziosi, “Homer and the definition of epic, Classics@Issue 3 Gregory Nagy, “Epic” Shubha Pathak, Divine yet Human Epics: Reflections… Read more