folk poetry

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

Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature Series

Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women

Bosnian traditional ballads have intrigued many by their beauty and eloquence, from Goethe’s poetic interest in them in the eighteenth century to the work of twentieth-century scholars such as Milman Parry and Albert Lord. These songs are now available to the English reader in a bilingual edition offering a selection of never before translated or published materials from Harvard University’s Parry Collection. The forty oral ballads, many appearing in multiple… Read more

Curated Books

The Singer Resumes the Tale

Edited by Mary Louise Lord after the author’s death, The Singer Resumes the Tale focuses on the performance of stories and poems within settings that range from ancient Greek palaces to Latvian villages. Lord expounds and develops his approach to oral literature in this book, responds systematically for the first time to criticisms of oral theory, and extends his methods to the analysis of lyric poems. He also considers the… Read more

Curated Books

The Singer of Tales

This 40th anniversary edition of Albert Lord’s classic work includes a unique enhancement: the original audio recordings of all the passages of heroic songs quoted in the book; a video publication of the kinescopic filming of the most valued of the singers; and selected photographs taken during Milman Parry’s collecting trips in the Balkans.  Parry began recording and studying a live tradition of oral narrative poetry in order to find… Read more