Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

Forty Bosnian traditional ballads are now available to the English reader in this bilingual edition offering a selection of never before translated or published materials from Harvard University’s Parry Collection. These songs were performed by Bosnian women and gathered in the Gacko region of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1930s.

This work explores the role of orality in shaping and evaluating medieval Icelandic literature. Applying field studies of oral cultures in modern times to this distinguished medieval literature, Gísli Sigurðsson asks how it would alter our reading of medieval Icelandic sagas if it were assumed they had grown out of a tradition of oral storytelling, similar to that observed in living cultures.

The existing manuscripts of Old Norse mythology were written mainly by Christians, obscuring the pre-Christian oral histories. This book assembles comparisons from a range of analytical perspectives—examining the similarities and differences of the Old Norse mythologies with the myths of other cultures and within the Old Norse corpus itself.

First published in 1960, The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry—from South Slavic epic songs to the Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf and beyond. This edition offers a corrected text and is supplemented by an open-access website with audio recordings.

Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord collected singularly important examples of Albanian epic song while conducting fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania. A complete catalogue of their collected materials, Wild Songs, Sweet Songs is an authoritative guide to one of the most significant collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.

Formulaic phraseology presents the epitome of words worn and weathered by trial and the tests of time. Weathered Words concentrates on verbal art, which makes Oral-Formulaic Theory (OFT) a major point of reference. Each of the eighteen essays gathered here brings particular aspects of formulaic language into focus.

Grounded in the legacies of two pioneering scholars of oral literature, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, Singers and Tales in the Twenty-First Century gathers essays on what the study of oral poetry means today across diverse traditions, especially in light of transformations that have dramatically reshaped and destabilized the notion of tradition.