This book focuses on the performance of oral epics and explores the significance of performance features for the interpretation of epic poetry. The leading question of the book is how the socio-cultural context of performance and the various performance elements contribute to the meaning of oral epics. This is a question which not only concerns epics collected from living oral tradition, but which is also of importance for the understanding of the epics of antiquity and the Middle Ages which originated and flourished in an oral milieu. The book is based on fieldwork in the still vibrant oral traditions of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia. The discussion combines fieldwork with theory; it is not limited to Turkic epics but branches out into other oral traditions.

Originally published in 1992, Turkic Oral Poetry provides an expert introduction to the oral epic traditions of the Turkic peoples of central Asia. The book seeks to remedy the problem of non-specialists’ lack of access to information on the Turkic traditions, and in the process, it provides scholars in various disciplines with material for comparative investigation. The book focuses on "central traditions" of this region, specifically those of the Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Karakalpak’s, and Kirghiz and looks at the historical and linguistic background to a survey of the earliest documents, portraits of the singers and of performance considerations of genre, story-patterns, and formulaic diction, and discussions of "composition in performance", memory, rhetoric and diffusion.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Twenty-three years of joint endeavors and extensive field collecting of the narratives referred to in the present volume have resulted in the availability of a multimedia archive of Philippine epics, ballads and rituals both at the Pardo de Tavera collection of the Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University, and online. The linguists, anthropologists, and ethno-musicologists who have contributed to this book have long been conscious of the close links between ‘Intangible Heritage’ and ‘Tangible Heritage’. In the Philippines, sung narratives have been recorded in situ (through both audio and audio-video media), transcribed, translated, digitized, and analyzed by scholars and knowledgeable persons from fifteen cultural communities in the islands of Luzon, Panay, Palawan, Mindanao, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi. Meanwhile, other scholars have dedicated their lifelong research to the Mergui Archipelago, central Sulawesi, southwest Maluku, and East Timor. Emerging from international collaboration, the scholarship provided here seeks not only to safeguard and comprehend the uniqueness and evolving beauty of ancient sung narratives that are currently performed in the islands of Southeast Asia, but also to defend their vitality in today’s changing world. This collection of twelve essays is the most recent achievement of ongoing studies of performances by singers of tales and ritualists in contemporary socio-cultural contexts by means of pioneering initiatives in the Digital Humanities, multiple analytical approaches and expert use of our growing technical capacity to safeguard and explore Intangible Heritage.

Francis James Child, compiler and editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, established the scholarly study of folk ballads in the English-speaking world. His successors at Harvard University, notably George Lyman Kittredge, Milman Parry, and Albert B. Lord, discovered new ways of relating ideas about sung narrative to the study of epic poetry and what has come to be called - oral literature. In this volume, 16 scholars from Europe and the United States offer original essays in the spirit of these pioneers. The topics of their studies include well-known Child ballads in their British and American forms; aspects of the oral literatures of France, Ireland, Scandinavia, medieval England, ancient Greece, and modern Egypt; and recent literary ballads and popular songs. Many of the essays evince a concern with the theoretical underpinnings of the study of folklore and literature, orality and literacy; and as a whole the volume re-establishes the European ballad in the wider context of oral literature. Among the contributors are Albert B. Lord, Bengt R. Jonsson, Gregory Nagy, David Buchan, Vesteinn Olason, and Karl Reichl.

A musical companion to "The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York) by Theodore Levin.

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in times past, the essays collected here span half a century of Lord's research on the oral tradition from Homer to the twentieth century. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in living oral traditions and on the theoretical writings of Milman Parry, Lord concentrates on the singers and their art as manifested in texts of performance. In thirteen essays, some previously unpublished and all of them revised for book publication, he explores questions of composition, transmittal, and interpretation and raises important comparative issues. Individual chapters discuss aspects of the Homeric poems, South Slavic oral-traditional epics, the songs of Avdo Metedovic, Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon poetry, the medieval Greek Digenis Akritas and other medieval epics, central Asiatic and Balkan epics, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Bulgarian oral epic. The work of one of the most respected scholars of his generation, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of myth and folklore, classicists, medievalists, Slavists, comparatists, literary theorists, and anthropologists.

Presenting a new take on what made the Homeric epics such successful examples of verbal artistry, this volume explores the construction of the Homeric simile and the performance of Homeric poetry from the neglected comparative perspectives offered by the study of modern-day oral traditions.