The Singer of Tales

by Alfred B. Lord


Lord originally wrote this work as his dissertation for Harvard in the 1950s. The book form was published in 1964, a few years later. Lord is writing about the development of epic poetry for oral tradition. To examine this phenomenon, he takes the quintessential epic writer, Homer, for his example. He is building off of the work of Milman Parry who attempted to prove the "oral character" of the poems. By building off of Parry, Lord attempts to set forth "with exactness the form of oral narrative poetry" (3). Oral, in Lord's and Parry's works, means a verbal, spoken construction prior to writing, "With oral poetry we are dealing with a particular and distinctive process in which oral learning, oral composition, and oral transmission almost merge" (5).

Lord is arguing that epic poetry was "composed," or constructed according to certain rules of the trade, "A poet composing a line in a certain way because of necessity or because of the demands of his traditional art" (11). Thus, Lord moves away from the various textual critical theories, and the controversies of authorship to posit another solution to the form of epic poetry.