The Center for Hellenic Studies

Albert Lord
Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Series

Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century

Grounded in the intellectual legacies of two pioneering scholars of oral literature, Milman Parry (1902–1935) and Albert Lord (1912–1991), Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century gathers reflections on what the study of oral poetry might mean today across diverse poetic traditions, especially in light of ongoing global transformations that have dramatically reshaped and destabilized the very notion of tradition. This collection of essays spans disciplinary perspectives from Classics and comparative literature… Read more

Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Series

Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord

In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time. Nicola Scaldaferri and his collaborators provide a complete catalogue of the Albanian texts and recordings collected by Parry and Lord; a selection… Read more

CHS Learning Module

A Homer commentary in progress: A forthcoming project from CHS!

~A guest post by Leonard Muellner~ The intellectual goal of A Homer commentary in progress is simple and at the same time most ambitious: of all existing commentaries on Homeric poetry, ours 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. Both Parry and Lord taught… Read more

News, Publications

Now Available Online – The Singer of Tales

The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce that The Singer of Tales by Albert B. Lord is now available online, for free, in an electronic form, on the newly redesigned CHS website. Albert Lord’s book builds on Milman Parry’s work in his search of the oral traditions in the Yugoslavia of 1933–35. Parry began recording and studying a live tradition of oral narrative poetry to further understand how… Read more

News, Publications

Albert Lord Centennial (1912-2012)

A MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF CHS As one of Albert Lord’s former students, it gives me great pleasure to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth on Sept. 15, 1912. As a pioneering scholar in the study of oral traditions, Lord had a profound impact on our understanding of oral epic traditions, including the tradition represented by the Iliad and Odyssey. His book The Singer of Tales introduced thousands of readers to the richness… Read more