Bringing Back Bakonja

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 37 (2025):139-74 This song would be good if it were not so unnecessarily long. Although about 200 verse lines have been excised, this is the longest of all songs known to date. I could forgive him all the repetition and all the stretching out with nice language and diction, but I cannot forgive […]

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Fragments of the Utopia of Contestation in South Slavic Oral Lyric Poetry

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 37 (2025):175–96 Introduction South Slavic oral lyric songs are characterized by subjectivity and emotionality. They follow human life from birth to death—from lullabies to laments. When they sing about love, longing, desire, departing to a distant land for work or to war; when they are sung during work, during rituals (most of all […]

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“A True Pioneer”

Noel Spencer Published: Categories: English

Oral Tradition, 37 (2025):197–220 This article1 looks at the relationship between Matija Murko (1861-1952)2 and the two well known Harvard scholars, Milman Parry (1902-35) and Albert Lord (1912-91). Much connects these researchers: they were interested in South Slavic oral tradition, recorded guslari, used similar fieldwork methods, and all three compared South Slavic epic poetry to […]

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