Acknowledgement In writing this monograph and preparing it for publication, I received invaluable help from many people. First I would like to thank Professors John Finley, Albert Lord, and Calvert Watkins. I owe them a debt as teachers, benefactors, and constructive critics which is deeply felt, and which my work, I fear, […]
Bibliography Abbreviations AJP = American Journal of Philology HSCP = Harvard Studies in Classical Philology PMLA = Publications of the Modern Language Association Prilozi = Prilozi za književnost, jesik, istoriju i folklor TAPA = Transactions of the American […]
13. Central Asiatic and Balkan Epic* A musical instrument, a story, a hero and his horse, horse culture, these and other items of narrative and social context unite the epics of the Balkans with some of those of Central Asia. It is possible that certain particulars actually came into Balkan epic from […]
12. Narrative Themes in Bulgarian Oral-Traditional Epic and Their Medieval Roots* The core of this paper consists of the examination of several narrative themes in Bulgarian oral-traditional epic, particularly in the songs about the hero Krali Marko, with the hope of discovering possible medieval roots for them. It is necessary to stress […]
11. Notes on Digenis Akritas and Serbo-Croatian Epic* This paper was inspired by an article by the eminent Byzantinist Henri Grégoire. [1] Published in 1949, the article, entitled “Le Digénis russe,” established the priority of the Russian versions of the Digenis Akritas poem over the Greek versions. Grégoire demonstrated that the two […]
10. The Influence of a Fixed Text* In The Singer of Tales I attempted primarily to describe the workings of a pure oral tradition of narrative song, one in which written texts had no influence, or were nonexistent. [1] A knowledge of the processes of oral composition and transmission in their pure […]
9. The Formulaic Structure of Introductions to Direct Discourse in Beowulf and Elene* This paper is an attempt, after a long silence, to continue work along lines suggested by my distinguished colleague Larry Benson, in an article published in 1966. [1] In it he indicated that a number of the Anglo-Saxon poems […]
8. Interlocking Mythic Patterns in Beowulf* There are two discrete narrative patterns that are found fairly widely disseminated in epic or story tradition, the possible presence of which I should like to explore in Beowulf. The first of these involves three stages, (1) A powerful figure is not present or, for various […]
7. Beowulf and Odysseus* Oral tradition leaves its mark not only in the formulaic style of verse making and in the presence of repeated themes but also in the persistence of certain basic narrative patterns, in spite of sea-changes and reinterpretations. There seems to be evidence that one of the patterns found […]
6. The Kalevala, the South Slavic Epics, and Homer* The differences among the three epic traditions represented in this chapter are great. The Kalevala is the last of a series of compilations made by Elias Lönnrot of shorter songs collected by himself and others from epic singers in various parts of Finland. […]