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For instance, the Iliad’s lists of Greek heroes camped on Priam’s shores end with derivations of “and forty black ships crossed the sea with him.” When the fighting begins in earnest, the phrases “he killed his man” and “darkness veiled his eyes” repeat themselves (almost distressingly often for the contemporary reader). Many of these utterances contain what appear to be mnemonic placeholders, oft-repeated phrases which exist to give the poet time to prepare his next burst of story. The poet delves into his toolkit of story fragments and descriptions, editing based on environment and audience reaction.
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This was because these singers had a very loose conception of what a “word” was, instead thinking in terms of what Lord calls “utterances.” So while one singer might relate “that the door creaked and a messenger entered,” another will describe how “Mustajbey looked out the window and saw a cloud of dust which emerged from a rider bearing a message on a branch.” Yet both utterances are held to be the same, since they serve the same function in the overall narrative. To Lord’s frustration, the singers would insist that their songs were identical, even though their versions of tales often differed greatly from one another. Instead, the poet composes “during oral performance” in such a way that “every performance is a separate song.” While both academic and academically quarrelsome, The Singer of Talesremains a stunning read, partially because of Lord’s insistence that the oral poet does not simply memorize his tales, either from some central text or from his forebears. As Lord wrote, the tradition was already dying.
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The singers Lord and Parry studied were mainly illiterate peasants who sung their epics “to the gusle,” a single-stringed instrument, often in coffeehouses or courtyards. The singers would insist that their songs were identical, even though their versions of tales often differed greatly from one another. This evidence was enough to convince Lord - and, after much pushback from those who could not “tolerate the unwashed illiterate” Homer, the scholarly community at large - that these Yugoslavian singers shared a common tradition of oral poetry with the foundational storyteller of Western culture. Drawing on more than thirty years of field work, Lord found tremendous similarities in content, form, and composition between the songs of bards in then-Yugoslavia and those of Homer. Lord published The Singer of Tales, based on research initiated by his mentor Milman Parry. In 1960, the Harvard classicist Albert B. While the epic doesn’t exactly seem like traffic-jam salve or workout accompaniment, it might seem appropriate to hear the story of Achilles’ wrath read aloud, since Homer was an oral poet - except his particular method of composition and recitation is all but extinct. “You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding…” - Socrates on writing in Plato’s PhaedrusĪs befits a story which has been translated so many different ways, in so many different eras, and into so many different languages, there are at least seventeen audiobooks of the Iliad currently for sale in English.