The Singer of Tales

I haven't looked at this book since a graduate seminar in Homer several decades ago. Parry made an important observation about Homer's use of formulae (amazing nobody saw it before him); Lord elaborated it with devotion and tunnel vision. There is much that is good in Singer of Tales; the chapters on formula and themes are strong. Lord builds a solid case for oral composition both in Serbian traditional poetry and Homer. But then he goes a bit overboard with the dogma. In discussing the transition from oral to written poetry, he really has nothing conclusive to say about Homer and mostly presents his personal opinions with some overconfidence. The chapters on the Odyssey and Iliad try to shoehorn everything into preconceived patterns show more based on Lord's theories. Not everything is a fertility myth or dying god! This is the problem of looking at things through a single lens: you can make some really great observations, but your larger conclusions are likely to be way off.

Lord has a very readable style for a relatively technical book. What might be called an academic conversational style. I have never seen so many exclamation points in an academic book! I don't know any Serbian, but with the translations it is not that difficult to pick out words and formulae (a lot of recognizable IE formations). show less

Fascinating book requiring careful reading. Shows how 'authorship' and composition before blank paper are recent and relative modes of creation whereas for thousands of years ( or more?) some humans have stirred a public much the way jazz musicians may do nowadays. And how the two oral poems we "possess" in written form, named 'Illiad' and 'Odyssee' , came to be put down — no full answer to that.

Edition: // Descr: xv, 309 p. 24 cm. // Series: Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature Volume 24 Call No. { } Contains Appendixes, Notes, and Index. // John E. Rexine Library Donation //

Orig. publ. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1960