Our Book Club readings this month are from Albert Bates Lord: Epic Singers and Oral Tradition, which is available online for free at CHS. As usual we will start and continue the discussion in the forum, and we will meet via Google+ Hangout on Tuesday, October 31 at 11 a.m. EDT. Read more
The intellectual goal of the original editors is simple and at the same time most ambitious: of all existing commentaries on Homeric poetry, this project is the first and only such commentary that is based squarely on the cumulative research of Milman Parry and his student, Albert Lord, who created a new way of thinking about Homeric poetry. Read more
"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… Read more
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… Read more
We are pleased to announce that Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales is now available, for free, in electronic form on the CHS website. Albert Lord's book builds on the work begun by Milman Parry during his search for the oral traditions in the Yugoslavia of 1933–35, when he began recording and studying a living tradition of oral poetry to further understanding of how Homeric poetry had been composed.… Read more
