Albert Lord

Albert Bates Lord (born in 1912 - died in 1991) was a American Philologue , professor of Littérature Slavic and Littérature compared with the Université of Harvard.

Between 1933 and 1935, Albert Lord made two voyages in Yugoslavia, in company of Milman Parry, which, former student of Antoine Meillet in the Sorbonne, was then Professor Associé with the Université with Harvard. Together, they traversed the area of Novi Pazar. It is in this area that in 1389 had been held the Bataille of Kosovo Polje opposing the Serb prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and the sultan Murad Ier. This battle had given rise to great epopees, recited by bards (guzlars) often illiterate, able to build poems of several thousands of worms thanks to a “style form”. In their recitation, these bards were accompanied by a kind of hurdy-gurdy, the Guzla (or gusle). According to the example of Matija Murko, Parry and Lord recorded a few hundreds of epopees, currently preserved at the Widener library in Harvard.

After the death of its Master Milman Parry in 1935, Albert Lord continued his work on the epic literature. And in 1960, it published The Singer off Bruise .

In this work, it tried to show that the great epopees of Europe and Asia were the heiresses not only of one oral tradition but also of an oral composition. Thus he argued in favor of a strict separation between the authors of the Homeric epopees and those which, later, entrusted them to the writing; according to him, the preserved texts were the transcription by a listener of a history recited. The history itself was not pressed on a final text, but made the object of multiple alternatives, each one improvised by the storyteller. The storyteller, at the time of the recitation, drew from a form of expressions, funds of constructions narrative sets of themes and incidents. According to Albert Lord, this improvisation was, essentially, unconscious; the storytellers thought of bringing back the facts accurately.

Albert Lord also studied the Beowulf, the epopee of Gilgamesh, the Chanson of Roland and the English and Scottish popular Ballades indexed by Francis James Child.

Beyond these multiple narrative traditions, it emphasized their common points in the fields of the oral composition and art to tell.

Source

John Foley Miles, " Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991): Year Obituary, " Newspaper off American Folklore 105, pp. 57-65, 1992

Random links: