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 Homer. Parry’s and Lord’s research is well known to those interested in orality and oral literature and so is M. Murko’s proverbial influence on their work.3 Some research has even been done to explain how M. Murko’s work theoretically compares to and connects with the work of the two Harvard scholars,4 but no one has looked closely at the historical circumstances that enabled this exchange and its broader implications for the development of oral theory. In this article, I contextualize M. Murko’s influence on Parry, Lord, and early oral theory by investigating archival materials and M. Murko’s lesser known publications.5 I show that the narrative about M. Murko as “a true pioneer” was invented by Parry and Lord, whose work shaped subsequent attempts to understand the development of oral theory. Consequently, M. Murko’s influence on Parry is presently overstated at the expense of other, similar projects, while the significance of M. Murko’s later research, unavailable to Parry, is mostly overlooked. By examining personal correspondence between Lord and M. Murko’s son, Vladimir Murko, I show that Lord was more interested in and far better acquainted with M. Murko’s research. I conclude by suggesting that M. Murko’s contribution to oral theory can only be understood if we move away from the myth of a “true pioneer” and seriously consider what Lord and later scholars learned from him.
1 This work was supported by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (project J6-4620).
2 Also known as Matthias Murko. Throughout the paper I use the initials M. and V. to distinguish between Matija Murko and his son, Vladimir Murko.
3 For example, Lord 1953, 1960, and 1991; Lesky 1963:32; A. Parry 1971; Foley 1985:13; Merritt Sale 1996; Mitchell and Nagy 2000; Garbrah 2000; Nagy 2001 and 2003:61; de Vet 2005; Tate 2011; Hall 2008:20-21; Saussy 2016; Ready 2018; McMurray 2019; Kanigel 2021:129. While this list is not exhaustive, it reflects the continuity of the claim that M. Murko was Parry’s predecessor.
4 For example, A. Parry 1971; Foley 1985; Buturović 1992 and 1999; Garbrah 2000; Tate 2011; Fischerová 2014; Zabel 2020.
5 Bibliography of M. Murko is available in M. Murko 1951a.
197
Matija Murko’s Acquaintance with Homeric Scholarship
So, who was Matija Murko and why was his work important? M. Murko was a linguist, an anthropologist, and a literary scholar specializing in Slavic studies. Born in Styria in the village Drstelja, now part of Slovenia, he spent most of his life in Vienna (1897-1902), Graz (1902-17), Leipzig (1917-20), and Prague (1920-52), where he held prominent academic positions. His research encompassed various disciplines and topics, among which his work on the Slovenian language, the history of different Slavic literatures, and Slavic folklore was most influential.6 To classicists, he is known first and foremost for his work on South Slavic oral traditions and for occasionally comparing them to Homer.7 Since this comparative approach needs to be considered if one is to understand his influence on Parry and Lord, I shall first outline what M. Murko knew about Homer.
Classicists may be surprised to learn that M. Murko was not particularly fond of Homer and indeed wary of classical studies altogether. In his memoirs, he remembered how disappointed he was when first reading Homer as a high school student (M. Murko 1951a:29), which perhaps influenced his later conviction that classical philology was unjustifiably valued above other national philologies. As a student at the University of Vienna, he insisted that his doctoral exam (rigorosum) in “Germanistik” include Slavic philology instead of the then mandatory classical philology, which required the university to change its rules (M. Murko 1951a:49). In his later academic career, too, he objected to the prevalence of classics in departments of Linguistics (see Gantar 2020). At the University of Leipzig, for example, he opposed the suggested appointment of Paul Kretschmer8 to the chair of comparative philology, which resulted in a long lasting dispute with the rector of the university, Erich Bethe (M. Murko 1951a:165-66). All these episodes paint a picture of a man who wholeheartedly cherished Slavic philology and objected to the privileged position of classical studies in academia.
Nevertheless, aversion does not equal ignorance. M. Murko knew ancient Greek and Latin well, read ancient literature, studied the Iliad and the Odyssey, and, as I show here, was relatively well acquainted with concurrent Homeric scholarship—at least for someone not working in the field (see Zabel 2023). This becomes clear upon inspecting M. Murko’s personal papers, containing around thirty folios of notes about Homeric epic and Homeric scholarship,
6 See for example, Čubelić 1961; Förster 1988; Gutschmidt 1988; Foley 1988:1-18; Kozak 2000; Bošnjak 2002; Žele 2003; Kunej et. al 2020.
7 John Miles Foley was one of the first scholars to look seriously into M. Murko’s writing on Homer (for example, Foley 1985) and translated some of his work (M. Murko 1990). Others followed in his path (see, for example, Garbrah 2000; Tate 2011; Fischerová 2014; Talam 2014 and 2015; Elmer 2025).
8 Paul Kretschmer (1866-1956) was at the time widely known for his work on pre-Greek elements in ancient Greek.
198
now archived in Ljubljana.9 The notes are hard to read, the hand rather cryptic, and the collection is clearly fragmentary,10 but it is clear that they are personal study notes on Homer and Homeric scholarship. Some folios also include transcriptions of specific verses from Homer, and two folios contain a comparison of the number of verses from the Iliad and the Odyssey (for each book separately) with what are presumably (no titles are given) numbers of verses from several South Slavic epic poems.11
The extant study notes concern several publications on Homer. The most extensive collection (ten folios in MS 1392, III.7) is about Erich Bethe’s Homer: Dichtung und Sage (1914-1927), one of the most influential contributions to the so-called “analysis school” of Homeric scholarship (Tsagalis 2020:130). In this three-volume work, Bethe advanced Gottfried Hermann’s argument that at the kernel of the Iliad lies an original poem about the wrath of Achilles by adding to it the idea that the poem must have been heavily expanded by a sixth-century redactor. He also argued that ancient Greek folksongs must have been incorporated into the Iliad in the process. The ten folios reveal that M. Murko devoted utmost attention to this book, outlining Bethe’s argument page by page.
Another batch of personal notes, probably from an earlier period (Ms 1392, III.4), contains notes on another representative of the analysis school, Georg Finsler, and his two-volume work, Homer. M. Murko clearly read at least the first part, subtitled “Der Dichter und Sein Welt” (1913). There, Finsler argued that Homer was the author of the Iliad only, and that the poem was later reworked. M. Murko also took study notes from Engelbert Drerup’s Homer (1915), a well-known contribution to the “unitarian school,” which criticized the analytic approach and argued for the unity of the two Homeric epics (see West 2012). The two scholars were evidently in academic dialogue: Drerup commented on M. Murko’s phonographic recordings12 of South Slavic epic (see Drerup 1920:265-70 and 1921:48-57), and M. Murko occasionally responded to Drerup’s research in his own publications (for example, M. Murko 1919:280, 283-84, 292, and 296). Finally, M. Murko took notes from Thaddaeus Zielinski’s substantial article, “Die Behandlung gleichzeitiger Ereignisse im antiken Epos” (1901), in which the author presented what has come to be known as “Zielinski’s law.” As is well known, the applicability of Zielinski’s law, which “states that Homeric narrative always moves forward and so cannot depict two simultaneous actions,” has been heatedly discussed in oral literature research (Scodel 2008:107; cf. de Jong 2007 and Danek 1998).
9 M. Murko, Personal Papers, MS 1392. The materials about Homer are located under III.4, “Concepts and Excerpts,” and III.7, “Materials about Homer” in the archival records. Throughout this article, abbreviated citations of unpublished manuscripts (labeled “MS”) are provided in the footnotes, followed by full citations in the bibliography.
10 Since most of the notes were numbered by M. Murko himself, it can be concluded that only a few folios were preserved.
11 M. Murko also compared the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey with particular guslar performances in his publications (see M. Murko 1929a:14-15).
12 M. Murko’s recordings from his early expeditions (1912-13) were published on compact discs. See M. Murko 2017.
199
These study notes were probably taken as part of M. Murko’s preparation for the research of South Slavic oral traditions, where he regularly compared South Slavic epic with Homer and even speculated about the oral social context of Homeric society. Such comparisons featured prominently in “Neues über südslavische Volksepik” (1919),in which he mentioned both Drerup and Bethe, La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle (1929),13 and Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike: putovanja u godinama 1930 do 1932 (1951), but appeared also in other publications, such as “Die serbokroatische Volkspoesie in der deutschen Literatur” (1906) and “Kod Meštrovića i njegovih: Ivan Meštrović kao pjevač epskih narodnih pjesama” (1933a).
Lastly, M. Murko’s familiarity with the work of Parry and Lord should be considered before I discuss their acquaintance with his work. M. Murko was present for Parry’s soutenance in 1928 (see below), but, as I will show, he learned of Parry’s and Lord’s research on South Slavic epic song only in 1951, a year before his death. He never cited either scholar in his own work, nor does he appear to have read any of their publications. This can be seen, for example, in Tragom, where he wrote that “it is a pity that no one has collected folk song in the Novi Pazar region,” even though Parry and Lord extensively recorded in the area (M. Murko 1951b:282; cf. Fischerová 2014:88).
Matija Murko and Milman Parry
Milman Parry’s relationship with scholarship on South Slavic oral epic, including the work of Matija Murko, is complicated. Before Parry decided to look closer at the tradition as part of his research on Homer, South Slavic epic had been studied for more than two centuries. As a thorough scholar, Parry of course read some of the existing work on the topic: he studied Vuk Karadžić’s collections; he became acquainted with the collection of songs by Matica Hrvatska; he studied Gerhard Gesemann’s work; and he read some of the work by Luka Marjanović on Mehmed Kolaković.14
Parry also read the work of Matija Murko, who made the biggest impression. Here is the often quoted passage in which Parry pays his respects (1971:439):
My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher M. Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate at the Sorbonne Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague delivered in Paris the series
13 A good half of La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle (1929) is in fact a revised translation of “Neues über südslavische Volksepik” (1919).
14 Parry mentions the Croatian ethnographer Luka Marjanović and the singer Mehmed Kolaković in Ćor Huso, a transcription of a dictation he recorded in Dubrovnik. See Milman Parry, Ćor Huso (MS), pp. 1.16-1.17. The part of the manuscript which mentions Kolaković was not published in Parry 1971.
200
of conferences which later appeared as his book La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle. I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to some remark of M. Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic poems of the South Slavs.
As a review of the literature reveals,15 this passage determined most later attempts at characterizing M. Murko’s role in the development of oral theory, constructing him as the first inventor of oral theory. Two decades later, Lord would repeat this claim by writing that M. Murko was “a true pioneer” (1960:208). Nevertheless, to understand how M. Murko really influenced Parry and Lord requires unpacking this narrative somewhat.
For that, one needs to do some historical digging. First of all, Parry and M. Murko undoubtedly met in 1928. At the time, M. Murko was visiting the Sorbonne on the invitation of the Society for Slavic Studies, presided over by Antoine Meillet (see Mazon 1936), which also explains why Meillet invited M. Murko to Parry’s defense. During his stay in Paris, M. Murko held a series of three lectures on South Slavic epic tradition,16 for which Parry later remembered seeing advertisements. These lectures were published a year later as La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle (1929). Parry undoubtedly read this work, for he often referred to it in his writings.17 It is also clear that several theses about South Slavic poetry which Parry did not observe himself were taken from this work (Tate 2011:330-34).
Despite Parry’s own narrative, I believe that he was more or less unaware of M. Murko’s research until his second expedition to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1934; I would even suggest that M. Murko was but a marginal motivation for his decision to undertake fieldwork. Before traveling to Dubrovnik, Parry knew only La poésie and “Neues über südslavische Volksepik” (see Parry 1971:335). This is evident from the fact that in all of his writings he referred only to these two publications, even though M. Murko wrote numerous other articles on South Slavic oral poetry, including some which mention Homer. Moreover, Parry also did not know of M. Murko’s fieldwork in the twenties and thirties. This is to be inferred from his application for funding for his second expedition, in which he wrote:
I was the first person of any sort who had ever come to Stolac for the poetry; the only person who had preceded me at Nevesinje and Gacko was Murko in the brief trip he made in 1913, in which he collected no texts.18
15 See footnote 3, above.
16 According to M. Murko’s own account in Murko 1929a:1. At least one lecture was part of the Society’s seminar series where Meillet was “president de séance” (Mazon 1928). For M. Murko’s relationship with the Parisian Society for Slavic studies, see Zelenka 2020.
17 See Parry 1971:330, 335, 336, 347, 361, 439-40, 458, and 468.
18 Milman Parry, Project for a Study of Jugoslavian Popular Oral Poetry (MS), p. 4.
201
That Parry referred only to M. Murko’s research in 1912 and 1913—published in La poésie—and did not mention his several research trips through the Balkans between 1927 and 1932, seems to indicate that he was as yet unaware of M. Murko’s expeditions after 1927. This is because Parry’s statement is not consistent with the fact that during these later expeditions, M. Murko gathered several recordings, texts, and interviews from and around Stolac, Nevesinje, and Gacko.19
By the time Parry wrote the application, M. Murko had already published several reports on these later expeditions: for example, in the newspaper Prager Presse.20 More academic were the two longer articles in Československo-jihoslovanská revue (see M. Murko 1930-31a and 1930-31b; a German translation was published in Slavische Rundschau, M. Murko 1931a) and an article in Ročenka slovanského ústavu, which culminated in the better known “Nouvelles observations sur l’état actuals de la poésie épique en Yougoslavie” published in Revue des études slaves (M. Murko 1933b). Had Parry known about M. Murko’s post-1927 research, he probably would have read at least some of these publications.
So, to understand why Parry wrote that “it was the writings of Professor Murko” that impressed him most, one should consider the context in which these later words were written. First of all, the above quoted passage comes from Parry’s personal notes entitled Ćor Huso, which were probably meant to culminate in a book on the two expeditions. According to Lord, they were dictated while Parry was still in Dubrovnik “in the winter and spring of 1935” (1991:3). Considering that Parry conducted fieldwork in the same area as M. Murko had a few years earlier, and since they both interviewed and recorded some of the same singers, Parry might have learned about M. Murko’s expeditions between 1930 and 1932. For example, he could have heard about them from guslari that both scholars met. One such singer was Salih Ugljanin, with whom Parry recorded several songs and a long interview in 1934, and with whom M. Murko recorded three songs in 1930 (M. Murko 1951b:94). Other guslari that both researchers met, listened to, interviewed, or recorded were Ahmet Mušovič, Milutin Bakić, Drago Drljević, Osman Lizde, Vukale Marković, Simo Milić, Joko Radonjić, Nikola Ružić, and Antonije Ćetković.21 Field recording was at the time relatively rare, and since both scholars were well known in the area, it is hard to imagine that at least one of the many singers would not have mentioned M. Murko to Parry.
Moreover, Parry systematically collected works on South Slavic poetry during his time in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and he might have come across some of the other publications by M. Murko. Parry’s own estimate of the total amount spent on “books” (a “collection,” as he
19 For example, in Nikšići, he recorded the guslar Sava Zurovec from Nevesinje (M. Murko 1951b:136, 542); in Metkovići he listened to Mitar Puhalo from Stolac; and in Čaplina and in Domanocići, villages close to Stolac, he met several singers and listened to different songs (M. Murko 1951b:126).
20 For example, “Ein montenegrinischer Guslar” (January 1, 1928), “Im slavischen Süden” (October 19, 1930), “Modene jugoslavische Guslaren” (December 25, 1931), and “Ivan Meštrović als Rhapsode: Der ‘Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan-Aga’ in einer neuen Version” (April 17, 1932).
21 This provisional list can be deduced by comparing the recordings and transcripts kept in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature (Kay 1995) and the list of singers published in Tragom (M. Murko 1951b:926-37).
202
called it) was $562.52, a hefty amount at the time,22 and he even spent “a week at Zagreb for the repairing of the sound apparatus and the purchase of the books.”23 With this money he “tried to obtain all the printed texts of the songs as well as those books of an historical nature which bear directly on the background of the poetry. . . . The collection, however, is already, I believe, a unique one for America, and when finished should be very valuable.”24 At the end of the expedition, he shipped the books back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he kept them in his private library; and after his death, his wife Marian donated most of them to Widener Library at Harvard University.25 As acquisition records reveal, the library received 202 books and 303 pamphlets on January 3, 1936.26 Some of these books are still to be found in the library, accompanied by the following dedicatory note: “Harvard College Library. From the Estate of Milman Parry, Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin. Received January 10, 1936.” Apparently, no list of the donated books exists—if it was ever made—but it is quite possible that during his stay in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Parry obtained some of M. Murko’s work.27
Parry’s words in Ćor Huso hence need to be read in this context, that is, as written after he travelled some of the same paths as M. Murko had a few years before. While he was probably not aware of M. Murko’s contemporary fieldwork before he left Cambridge, he must have soon realized that he talked to, collected songs from, and recorded the same singers. Whether he subsequently obtained more of M. Murko’s publications is as yet uncertain, but quite possible. Parry’s narrative, which consequently installed M. Murko as his predecessor and as a proponent of “proto-oral theory,” was mediated through a particular moment in time. This narrative further determined later reception of M. Murko’s research, generating an increased interest in his early expeditions (1909-13) and subsequent publications (for example, Murko 1913a, 1913b, 1915a, 1915b, and 1929a) that supposedly influenced Parry despite the lack of any explicit evidence.
At the same time, this narrative created a blind spot for considering other inspirations for Parry’s research. One such overlooked example is the fieldwork of John and Alan Lomax, whose project of collecting “American folk song” began a year before Parry started recording guslari, with preparations starting as early as 1931. In fact, their project resembled Parry’s much more than M. Murko’s fieldwork: it had an archival scope and ambition; the Lomaxes, like Parry, focused on processes of oral composition; and they used a similar recording technology that was powered by a car battery (see Bulger 2006:11). Parry also knew John and Alan Lomax much
22 Milman Parry, Project for a Study of Jugoslavian Popular Oral Poetry (MS), p. 6.
23 Milman Parry, Project for a Study of Jugoslavian Popular Oral Poetry (MS), p. 1.
24 Milman Parry, Project for a Study of Jugoslavian Popular Oral Poetry (MS), p. 10.
25 Some of the books, mostly valuable critical editions, Marian sent to Parry’s friends. Details are found in Milman Parry et al., Letters to Milman Parry and His Wife, Marian Thanhouser Parry, 1914-1936 (MS).
26 Harvard Donation Records, UAIII 50.15, January, 1936 (MS).
27 This was confirmed to me by the archival specialists of the Harvard University Archives. I personally looked over some of the books on South Slavic epic that are kept in the library, and while many come from Parry’s estate, the two publications by M. Murko cited by Parry come from older collections or donations. I have not, however, looked at all of M. Murko’s publications in the library. It is also possible that the library disposed of duplicates, which was at the time a standard practice.
203
better than M. Murko,28 and, in Ćor Huso, he mentioned discussing his findings with them.29 Here is hence an example of one thread which is still left unexplored due to Parry’s own narrative about M. Murko.
Matija Murko and Albert Lord
In the previous section I suggested that Parry met M. Murko only once and that he was, at least until 1933, acquainted with only two of his publications. When Parry died in 1935, all recordings and documents he gathered remained in Widener Library and, after the war, Albert Lord started studying the materials for his doctoral project.30 Since Lord was the person who, in the aftermath of Parry’s death, most intensively studied his work and promoted the research of South Slavic oral traditions, one can understand M. Murko’s role in the development of oral-formulaic theory only by considering his influence on Lord.
Unlike Parry, Albert Lord never met M. Murko in person, but Lord was nevertheless far better acquainted with his work than his mentor. This can be ascertained on the grounds of his personal correspondence with M. Murko’s son, Vladimir Murko (1906-1986), who assisted his father with fieldwork in the thirties. V. Murko later became a professor of financial law at the University of Ljubljana, but he continued to promote his father’s heritage throughout his life.31 The two scholars’ correspondence is preserved in the University Archives at Harvard University,32 comprising eight letters sent by V. Murko to Lord and four transcripts of letters sent by Lord to V. Murko. The collection is clearly fragmentary, as not all of the correspondence was archived. Unfortunately, there are no letters from or to Lord in V. Murko’s personal archives in Ljubljana, but the archive does contain letters addressed to other people (mostly relatives), in which V. Murko mentions his correspondence with Lord.33 This confirms that V. Murko and Lord communicated quite regularly, at least throughout the fifties and sixties.34 To better understand Lord’s interest in M. Murko’s research on South Slavic oral poetry, I here present a short outline
28 Alan Lomax was a visiting student at Harvard in 1931, and John Lomax often visited Cambridge due to his friendship with George Lyman Kittredge (see Szwed 2010:22-30).
29 “. . . what the Lomax’s have told me about variations in the same song by the same singer among the southern Negroes would indicate that certain ballads in that poetry exist in a far more fluid state than is ever to be found in the case of the Southslavic” (Parry 1971:445).
30 Lord obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1949.
31 For V. Murko’s life and work see Kambič 1991b. V. Murko also wrote articles on his father’s work; see V. Murko 1953, 1958, 1963, and 1967. Cf. Kambič 1991a.
32 See the folder entitled “Murko, Vladimir” (MS), among the Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
33 The two archives that contain the surviving correspondence of Vladimir Murko are the Archive of the Republic of Slovenia (SI AS 1250) and the Manuscript Collection at the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia (Ms 1986).
34 See also Vladimir Murko’s short comments on their correspondence in V. Murko 1953:81, 1958:473, 1963:116, 119, and 1967:183.
204
of the preserved correspondence, focusing on those topics that help contextualize Lord’s reception of M. Murko’s work.
The oldest letter in the archive is dated June 9, 1951, and was sent by V. Murko to Lord.35 It is the only letter written by V. Murko in English (with numerous errors for which the author apologizes).36 V. Murko sent the letter to introduce himself and to inquire about the “important book on the history of epical poetry, based also on the study of the yugoslav epical poesy.” Moreover, he wrote that he is sending two publications by or about his father, hoping that they could help Lord in his preparation of the “important book.” Those were a newspaper article under the headline “Prof. Matijo Murko,” published in honor of M. Murko’s ninetieth birthday in Tovariš (February 1, 1951, p. 57), and M. Murko’s hefty essay “Velika zbirka slovenskih narodnih pesmi z melodijami” (“A Great Collection of Slovenian National Songs with Music”), published in 1929 in the Slovenian journal Etnolog (Murko 1929b). The newspaper item in Tovariš was aimed at the general public and included some excerpts from Matija Murko’s memoirs, not yet available in Slovenian, but the article “Velika zbirka”was still one of the most detailed overviews of the history of folkloristic research in Slovenia and the broader region.37
In the letter, V. Murko also announced that he was editing a Slovenian translation of his father’s Spomini (Memoirs), previously published in Czech as Pamětí (1949). He stressed that he would prepare M. Murko’s full bibliography, which was not included in the Czech original, and expressed his hopes that this would be of interest to Lord. He further mentioned that his sister Jelka Arneri (born Murko) recently translated Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike: putovanja u godinama 1930 do 1932 from the original Czech manuscript into Serbo-Croatian, and that the translation would be published in Zagreb. Lastly, V. Murko sent his father’s Prague address, but warned Lord that “because of his feebleness I cannot guarantee you will receive an answer from him.” As later correspondence reveals, all communication between Lord and M. Murko henceforth went through V. Murko as an intermediary, except for a package of goods that Lord sent to Prague.38
Because this letter started a years-long correspondence between the two scholars, the question arises as to why V. Murko first decided to contact Lord and inquire about an “important book.” V. Murko had probably heard about Lord from a local newspaper. Sylva Fischerová found a typescript of a newspaper article in M. Murko’s archive in Litoměřice entitled “Američki učenjak o Jugoslavenskim narodnim pjesmama” (“American Scholar about Yugoslavian Folk Poems”), which reported on Lord’s lecture for the Archaeological Institute of America in New
35 “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, June 9, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
36 V. Murko wrote: “I beg you to excuse my English but I hope you will understand my letter.”
37 It also described a proposed project of publishing folk songs of different languages within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by which M. Murko meant the local material gathered as part of the broader project Das Volkslied in Österreich. Interestingly, this state-financed project was initially coordinated by Wilhelm August Ritter von Hartel, a professor of classics at the University of Vienna and an influential Homeric scholar.
38 In the manner of Homeric gift exchange, sending a package of goods that were unavailable behind the iron curtain was seen as a great service that could be repaid by, for example, sending books. After much encouragement, Lord managed to send one package to Matija Murko, but he failed to send any to Ljubljana despite several requests by Vladimir.
205
York on April 22, 1951.39 The article reported on Parry and Lord’s travels to Yugoslavia, the collection of recordings at Harvard, and the relevance of fieldwork research for Homeric scholarship; it concluded with Lord’s announcement of a book project: “Professor Lord . . . is now working on a book, in which he would use the example of South Slavic epic poems in order to explain a currently less known and poorly researched topic—the system of the formation of epics in various nations.”40 I have traced the original article to the April 23, 1951, issue of the newspaper Borba, which was at the time unavailable in Prague due to political reasons. I therefore assume that someone (possibly V. Murko or his sister, Jelka Arneri) copied the article and sent it to M. Murko.41
This would also explain why V. Murko asked Lord about his “book.” Since the letter was sent in 1951, it is uncertain which book was announced in the lecture described in Borba. Lord could have been referring to Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs,which he wrote in collaboration with Béla Bartók and published in the same year, or he could have referred to Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (1953)—in neither book is any of M. Murko’s work mentioned in detail.42 But if Lord’s lecture at the Archaeological Institute of America in New York was at all similar to his lectures at the American Philological Association or the International Folk Music Council the year before, then the announced book was The Singer of Tales.43
At the time the first letter was sent, Lord was already preparing to leave for Yugoslavia for fieldwork, which lasted one month in August, 1951.44 During this trip, Lord and his wife visited Ljubljana,45 where they personally met with V. Murko. This is confirmed by the second
39 See Fischerová 2014:88.
40 “Profesor Lord je obavijestio prisutne učenjake da sada radi na djelu u kome će na primjeru jugoslavenskih epskih pjesama objasniti dosad malo poznatu i slabo obrađenu temu—sistem postajanja eposa kod raznih naroda” (“Američki Učenjak” 1951).
41 Fischerová (2014:88) argues that M. Murko himself copied the article. I believe, however, that someone sent the article to him, mainly because the same document also contains the crossed out beginning of a letter dated “5. V. [May 5], 1951, Zagreb.” M. Murko did not visit Zagreb in 1951 as he was not fit enough to travel, so I believe that the folio must have originally belonged to someone else.
42 There are no references to M. Murko in Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (1951). In the introduction to Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, Lord quotes Parry’s memory of the soutenance, briefly compares M. Murko’s and Parry’s method of recording (1953:3), and refers twice to Tragom (329 and 416).
43 Lord presented a similar paper in 1950 at the two annual meetings. In both papers (1951a and 1951b), he announced that he was preparing a book entitled The Singer of Tales, which would be published in the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature series (1960).
44 His two early research trips were carried out May-June, 1950, and in August, 1951 (Lord 1953:xii).
45 Lord’s main incentive to travel to Ljubljana was probably to meet the anthropologist Božo Škerlj, with whom he collaborated on Alan Lomax’s project, World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (See “Letter from Albert Lord to Alan Lomax (transcript), July 16, 1952” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord). This project published song recordings from Yugoslavia, recorded in 1951 by Peter Kennedy. Lord contributed an introduction, texts, and notes for the songs, and Škerlj assisted with transcribing and commenting upon Slovenian folksongs. In Ljubljana, Lord also met with Dragotin Cvetko from the Department of Musicology (see “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 31, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord). Cvetko later wrote an article in the newspaper Primorski dnevnik, in which he briefly described Parry and Lord’s work and introduced Serbocroatian Heroic Songs (see Cvetko 1952). Interestingly, this article was published together with an excerpt from M. Murko’s memoirs.
206
letter V. Murko sent to Lord on September 12, 1951, this time written in Serbo-Croatian.46 V. Murko started the letter by confirming that he relayed to his father Lord’s wish for the publication of M. Murko’s unpublished recordings, transcripts, and personal notes, and he expressed optimism that M. Murko would gladly accept the offer. V. Murko also reported that Spomini was in print and described in detail the additional materials that were not included in the previously published Czech edition: fieldwork photographs, M. Murko’s full bibliography, and his biographic data. He further reported on other topics that fall outside the scope of this paper, but it needs to be mentioned that this letter established an outline that V. Murko would follow in further correspondence47: he would always begin with news about his father and his work (after 1952, about posthumous publications); continue with new publications in the field of South Slavic poetry; report on new publications about Slovenian literature and on cultural events in Slovenia48; and conclude with information about his work in law and finance, concurrent events at the University of Ljubljana, and his personal life.
The archive also holds a copy of Lord’s response from September 15, 1951. In a letter written in English, Lord thanked V. Murko for his hospitality in Ljubljana and for the publications he sent with the first letter in June.49 He repeated his wish that M. Murko’s transcriptions and notes, “even if only fragments, should certainly be published.” This did not come to fruition: on October 20, 1951, V. Murko sent a letter to report that his father was delighted with Lord’s work, seeing in him a successor whom he could not find among his own students, but that he was unable to provide him with recordings, transcripts, and notes. The recordings—V. Murko conveyed his father’s message—were too fragile to be moved, while the notes were much too substantial to be published in whole. He did point out, however, that several transcriptions of songs were already published in various publications. V. Murko also asked Lord to pass his father’s regards to Roman Jakobson.
These initial letters and a meeting in Ljubljana started a long-lasting communication between the two scholars. Perhaps the most important contribution to Lord’s own research was V. Murko’s steady stream of letters about M. Murko’s publications. On October 20, 1951, for example, V. Murko reported that Spomini had been published, and on November 17, 1951, he sent Lord a copy together with M. Murko’s Die Bedeutung der Reformation und
46 See “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, September 12, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
47 See letters (MSS) from V. Murko to Lord dated September 12, 1951; October 10, 1951; November 17, 1951; December 31, 1951; May 19, 1952; December 19, 1954; and December 21, 1958 (Papers of Albert Bates Lord).
48 V. Murko’s reports on Slovenian literature and its scholarship were included due to Albert Lord’s interest in Slovenian literature, about which he made several inquiries during his time in Ljubljana. In Ljubljana, Lord also met with Mirko Rupelj from the National and University Library in order to acquire Slovenian books. In a letter to Mirko Rupelj, he later wrote: “I have so few Slovenian books at the present time that I am eager to increase my collection and my understanding of Slovenian literature” (“Letter from Albert Lord to Mirko Rupelj (transcript), September 15, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord). Lord’s interest in Slovenian literature was not completely novel. Milman Parry was also interested in Slovenian folk literature, obtaining an edition of Slovenian songs with texts and melodies (Aljaž 1923).
49 “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), September 15, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord. It is clear from this letter that Lord never replied to the first letter V. Murko sent on June 9, 1951.
207
Gegenreformation für das geistige Leben der Südslaven (1927).50 He regularly reported on the development of the publication process of Tragom, writing, for example, that his father did not include all of his findings in this publication and that many observations still remain in his personal notes.51
In a letter sent on May 19, 1952, V. Murko announced his father’s death.52 He reported that Matija Murko passed away calmly but had received neither Spomini nor Tragom before his death:
Unfortunately, he did not live to see the published edition of the Memoirs in Slovenian, which the courier brought from Belgrade a day after his death. Even less so the edition of Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike, which I sent to you on April 25 and which costs 1533 dinars in the bookstore.53
As is apparent from this passage, V. Murko sent Lord both volumes of Tragom a few weeks earlier, not failing to mention that the edition was pricey. In the letter sent after he shipped the books, he further speculated about the future of M. Murko’s unpublished work, especially the project Velika zbirka slovenskih narodnih pesmi, a large collection of unpublished Slovenian folksongs.54 V. Murko also listed those unpublished documents by M. Murko which he deemed worth publishing: his personal notebooks, correspondence, and postcards from various travels. The letter concluded with an inquiry about Lord’s planned visit to Yugoslavia in the summer of 1952.
Lord responded on May 30, 1952. His short letter was a eulogy to the dead scholar, praising M. Murko’s research and stressing the influence it had on Parry and his own work:
You well know Professor Parry [sic] and my own deep debt to him [Matija Murko] for the inspiration of his courageous and pioneering field work in collecting and studying the Yugoslav epic. He blazed the path and pointed the way for us to go, and made our own work the easier by his acuteness and perspicacity. I shall never forget when I was a senior in college reading particularly his La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle. It opened up a new world for me. It was most fitting that the two volumes of his Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike arrived just before your letter. It is a great pity that your father did not see the finished books
50 Lord thanked V. Murko for receiving both publications in a letter dated December 10. See “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), December 10, 1951” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
51 “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, May 19, 1952” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
52 “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, May 19, 1952” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Matija Murko died on February 11, 1952, a date which Vladimir notes in his letter. Cf. Mazon et al. 1953.
53 “Na žalost nije više dočekao ni izdanja slovenačkih Spomina koja mu je doneo kurir iz Beograda dan posle smrti, a još manje Putovanje tragom srpskohrvatske epike narodne koju sam Vam poslao 25-IV te koje u knjižari vredi 1533 dinara.” (“Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, May 19, 1952” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.)
54 Many remain unpublished. For the afterlife of this collection, see Golež Kaučič 2005.
208
before his death. They mark a milestone of incalculable importance in the history of epic scholarship, and I am most deeply indebted to you for sending them.55
Apparent from this passage is Lord’s praise of M. Murko’s “pioneering field work,” a phrase that would later find its way into The Singer of Tales, where M. Murko is described as “a true pioneer” (1960:208). Lord also mentioned La poésie populaire épique and Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike as the two most important publications in the field, a claim that is still repeated in contemporary scholarship about oral poetry.
Three more letters dated after 1952 are preserved in the archive: two letters from V. Murko and a transcript of a letter from Lord.56 V. Murko’s letters are dated December 19, 1954, and December 21, 1958, making it apparent that Lord and V. Murko continued communicating and exchanging academic publications. The last transcript of a letter sent by Albert Lord is dated February 3, 1961. In the letter, this time written in Serbo-Croatian, Lord reported that he is sending a copy of his The Singer of Tales, “in which I speak a bit about your father.”57 He also wrote that M. Murko was “undoubtedly the best researcher of Serbo-Croatian national song in this century—as well as the past century.” The latest preserved clue58 that points towards correspondence between the two scholars is V. Murko’s article, “Sudbina literarne ostavštine i fonografskih snimaka srpskohrvatskih epskih pjesama Matije Murka” (“The Fate of Matija Murko’s Literary Legacy and His Phonographic Recordings of Serbo-Croatian Epic Poems”), published in 1963. It is kept in Lord’s archive, together with an envelope signed by V. Murko, but without a letter.59
From the correspondence between the two peers, it is possible to infer something about the role M. Murko’s research had for Lord. V. Murko first contacted Lord because he heard about his work on South Slavic oral poetry. In August, 1951, V. Murko and Lord met in Ljubljana. This meeting resulted in a productive correspondence between both scholars which lasted for a decade at least, and possibly longer. V. Murko became an important local informant on Slovenian academia and on Slovenian literature; most importantly, he supplied Lord with information about M. Murko and sent him publications on South Slavic oral tradition, including Murko’s magnum opus, Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike. The increasing acquaintance with M. Murko’s research throughout the fifties and sixties is reflected in Lord’s publications, as well: from its absence in Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs and the early papers, to brief mentions in Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, to the remark in The Singer of Tales that the “wisest accounts of singing and of
55 “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), May 30, 1952” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
56 “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 19, 1954” (MS), “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 21, 1958” (MS), and “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), February 3, 1961” (MS),Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
57 “. . . u kojoj nešto govorim o Vašem otcu.” (“Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), February 3, 1961” (MS), Papers of Albert Bates Lord.)
58 It should also be noted that Lord visited the sixth International Congress of Folklorists that was organized in Bled, Slovenia, September 14-17, 1959 (Zupančič 1960). Perhaps both scholars met again at that time.
59 See the folder entitled, “Murko, Matthias,” among the Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
209
field work are to be found in the writings of Matija Murko,” illustrated by a short bibliography of his work on the topic (Lord 1960:280-81). The acquaintance with M. Murko’s research is hence largely due to V. Murko’s regular correspondence with Lord.
Conclusions
The historical evidence surrounding Matija Murko, Milman Parry, and Albert Lord presents a different view of M. Murko’s contribution to oral theory than the one currently held by most scholars. In this paper, I have argued that M. Murko was at least partially acquainted with contemporary Homeric scholarship; that Parry had a limited knowledge of M. Murko’s work before 1934, and was perhaps more interested in the work of other scholars such as John and Alan Lomax; and, finally, that Lord acquired publications by and about M. Murko through his son Vladimir, who was, I suggest, Lord’s most important source of information on M. Murko’s life and work.
Nevertheless, M. Murko has been persistently described as someone who worked before Parry and is relevant for oral theory only as a forerunner. Lord’s short note that I found stored among his other personal papers is especially telling in this regard:
While Murko noted some of the same things that Parry did, Murko’s lessons were not learned by scholars in other disciplines. Homerists did not read Murko, because he was not a classicist, but they were soon to read Parry.60
The statement confirms the narrative proposed above, in which M. Murko came to similar conclusions as Parry but, because he was not a classicist, became a lesser known “pioneer.” Parry, on the other hand, was a classicist at Harvard and so his radical ideas about Homer and South Slavic epic revolutionized classical scholarship and literary studies more generally.61 Ironically, M. Murko fought such disciplinary inequality throughout his career and was therefore wary of classical philology, even if he was acquainted with Homeric scholarship and made some impact on the “analyst-unitarian” debate.62 More than anything else, then, Lord’s note seems to suggest that M. Murko’s arguments about oral literature were merely an inspiration for Parry’s big idea about Homer.
What Lord failed to mention, however, was that it was his own work, and especially The Singer of Tales, that put Parry on the map of literary scholarship—along with M. Murko, as his predecessor. As Robert Kanigel recently wrote, it was “Albert Lord, saddled with all those aluminum discs in 1935, who would further establish Parry’s reputation and fix him in the mind of the scholarly world” (2021:11). He studied the materials gathered by Parry, further developed
60 Written on a small piece of paper in the folder entitled, “Murko, Matthias,” among the Papers of Albert Bates Lord.
61 The influence was such that the comparativist Claudio Guillén later called “Parry-Lord theory” its own field within comparative literature (1993:173-79).
62 See the discussion of Murko and Drerup in the first section of the article.
210
his ideas about oral poetry and Homer, made additional research trips, and promoted Parry’s work to scholars in classics, comparative literature, Slavic studies, and other disciplines. Along the way, he also replicated the story about M. Murko which he picked up from Ćor Huso. So he wrote about M. Murko’s pioneering work, how he inspired Parry, and at times even described “some of the same things” that he noted about oral poetry. With that, he established a scholarly genealogy from M. Murko to Parry to himself.
Consequently, scholars today tend to believe that M. Murko was merely a forerunner to Parry. They therefore exclusively consider the early work (in German and French) that supposedly influenced Parry, if they consider his work at all. Although M. Murko was a generation older than Parry, it is not especially productive to look for his arguments in Parry’s work, not least since he worked out his most significant theses about oral literature after Parry’s death. To understand his contribution to oral theory, his status as a “pioneer” should be reassessed, and more attention should be paid to what later scholars learned from him. For example, historical evidence I have analyzed in this paper suggests that Lord was well acquainted with M. Murko’s late publications; was aware of his vast oeuvre; brought it into consideration when writing The Singer of Tales; tried to obtain his personal documents; and personally knew his son, V. Murko, with whom he regularly exchanged literature. Clearly, Lord benefitted from the work of “Parry’s predecessor” more than Parry himself; however, because he reproduced his teacher’s narrative about M. Murko and underplayed his own involvement in the advancement of oral theory, this has hitherto passed by unnoticed. If we were henceforth to turn to M. Murko’s later studies (in Czech, Slovenian, and Serbo-Croatian) and to the reception of his research by Lord, a different picture might emerge: one in which his contribution to the development of oral theory might be more important than previously thought.
University of Ljubljana
References
Unpublished Manuscripts
Harvard Donation Records. UAIII 50.15. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lord, Albert. “Letter from Albert Lord to Alan Lomax (transcript), July 16, 1952.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Albert Lord to Mirko Rupelj (transcript), September 15, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), September 15, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
211
________. “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), December 10, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), May 30, 1952.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Albert Lord to Vladimir Murko (transcript), February 3, 1961.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Murko, Matija. Personal Papers. MS 1392. Manuscript Collection. National and University Library. Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Murko, Vladimir. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, June 9, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, September 12, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, October 10, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, November 17, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 31, 1951.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, May 19, 1952.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 19, 1954.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Letter from Vladimir Murko to Albert Lord, December 21, 1958.” Accession 2018.170. Papers of Albert Bates Lord. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. Personal Papers. MS 1986. Manuscript Collection. National and University Library. Ljubljana, Slovenia.
________. Personal Papers. SI AS 1250. Manuscript Collection. Archive of the Republic of Slovenia. Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Parry, Milman. Ćor Huso. Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Widener Library. Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
212
________. “Project for a Study of Jugoslavian Popular Oral Poetry.” Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Widener Library. Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Report on Work in Jugoslavia (June 18-October 19).” Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Widener Library. Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
________. “Report on Work in Jugoslavia (October 20, 1934-March 24, 1935).” Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. Widener Library. Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Parry, Milman et al. Letters to Milman Parry and His Wife, Marian Thanhouser Parry, 1914-1936. HUGB P159.6. Harvard Faculty Archives. Harvard University Archives. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Published Sources
Aljaž 1923
Jakob Aljaž, ed. Slovenska pesmarica. Vol. 1. Prevalje: Družba sv. Mohorja.
“Američki Učenjak” 1951
“Američki učenjak o jugoslavenskim narodnim pjesmama.” Borba (newspaper). April 23, 1951. p. 3.
Bartók and Lord 1951
Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord. Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs: Texts and Transcriptions of Seventy-Five Folk Songs from the Milman Parry Collection and a Morphology of Serbo-Croatian Folk Melodies. Columbia University Studies in Musicology, 7. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bethe 1914-1927
Erich Bethe. Homer: Dichtung und Sage. 3 vols. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.
Bošnjak 2002
Blanka Bošnjak. “Matija Murko in ljudsko pesništvo.” Slavistična revija, 50.3:389-99.
Bulger 2006
Peggy A. Bulger. “New Folk Music Resources.” Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter, 36.1:11, 15.
Buturović 1992
Đenana Buturović. Bosanskomuslimanska usmena epika. Sarajevo: Institut za književnost and Svjetlost.
Buturović 1999
________. “Doprinos Matije Murka proučavanjima južnoslovenske epike.” Traditiones, 28.2:69-79.
Čubelić 1961
Tvrdko Čubelić. “Matija Murko kao proučavač srpskohrvatskih narodnih epskih pjesama.” Slovenski etnograf, 14:171-82.
213
Cvetko 1952
Dragotin Cvetko. “Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs.” Primorski dnevnik. February 17, 1952. p. 4.
Danek 1998
Georg Danek. “Darstellung verdeckter Handlung bei Homer und in der südslawischen Heldenlied-Tradition.” Wiener Studien, 111:67-88.
de Jong 2007
Irene J. F. de Jong. “Homer.” In Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Ed. by Irene J. F. de Jong and René Nünlist. Leiden: Brill. pp. 17-37.
de Vet 2005
Thérèse de Vet. “Parry in Paris: Structuralism, Historical Linguistics, and the Oral Theory.” Classical Antiquity, 24.2:257-84.
Drerup 1915
Engelbert Drerup. Die Anfänge der hellenischen Kultur: Homer. 2nd ed. Mainz: Kirchheim.
Drerup 1920
________. “Homer und die Volksepik.” Neophilologus, 5.3:257-73.
Drerup 1921
________. Das Homerproblem in der Gegenwart: Prinzipien und Methoden der Homererklärung. Würzburg: C. J. Becker.
Elmer 2025
David F. Elmer. “South Slavic Epic and the Philology of the Border.” In The Oxford Handbook of Slavic and East European Folklore. Ed. by Margaret H. Beissinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 541-75.
Finsler 1913
Georg Finsler. Homer. Vol. 1, “Der Dichter und Seine Welt.” 2nd ed. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.
Fischerová 2014
Sylva Fischerová. “HABENT SUA FATA INVENTIONES. The Role of Czechoslovakian Slavistics in the Forming of the Parry-Lord Oral-Formulaic Theory.” In Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress. Ed. by Tomáš Kubíček and Andrew Lass. Olomouc: Palacký University. pp. 77-101.
Foley 1985
John Miles Foley. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland.
Foley 1988
________. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Förster 1988
Waldtraut Förster. “Matthias Murko als Etymologe.” Linguistische Studien, Reihe A: Arbeitsberichte, 186:109-14.
214
Gantar 2020
________. “Odmevi Murkovih raziskav v homeroslovju.” In Matija Murko: slovanski filolog v najširšem pomenu besede. Ed. by Marko Jesenšek and Marija Stanonik. Razred za filološke in literarne vede, 24. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. pp. 101-12.
Garbrah 2000
Kweku A. Garbrah. “The Forerunners of Milman Parry: I. Matthias Murko on South-Slavic Popular Epic.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 27.1-2:274-306.
Golež Kaučič 2005
Marjetka Golež Kaučič. “Slovenske ljudske pesmi (SLP): sodobni znanstveni korpus.” In Znanstvene izdaje in elektronski medij: razprave. Ed.by Matija Ogrin. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC, ZRC SAZU. pp. 239–46.
Guillén 1993.
Claudio Guillén. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 42. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gutschmidt 1988
Karl Gutschmidt. “Matija Murkos Beitrag zur belorussischen Philologie.” Linguistische Studien, Reihe A: Arbeitsberichte, 186:115-20.
Hall 2008
Edith Hall. The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey. London: I. B. Tauris.
Kambič 1991a
Marko Kambič. “Bibliografija dr. Vladimirja Murka: dela z zgodovinsko tematiko.” Zgodovinski časopis, 45.3:485-88.
Kambič 1991b
________. “Univ. prof. dr. Vladimir Murko kot zgodovinar.” Zgodovinski časopis, 45.3:479-84.
Kanigel 2021.
Robert Kanigel. Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Kay 1995
Matthew W. Kay. The Index of the Milman Parry Collection, 1933-1935: Heroic Songs, Conversations, and Stories. New York: Garland.
Kozak 2000
Krištof Jacek Kozak. “Comparative Literature in Slovenia.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2.4. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/11/
Kunej et. al. 2020
Drago Kunej, Jasmina Talam, Tamara Karača Beljak. “The Importance of Matija Murko’s Research for Understanding the Musical Tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Traditiones, 49.2:31-52.
215
Lesky 1963
Albin Lesky. Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur. 2nd ed. Bern: Francke Verlag.
Lord 1951a
Albert Bates Lord. “Yugoslav Epic Folk Poetry.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 3:57-61.
Lord 1951b
________. “Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 82:71-80.
Lord 1953
________. “Introduction.” In Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, Vol. 1. Ed. by Albert Bates Lord. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 1-20.
Lord 1960
________. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lord 1991
________. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mazon 1928
André Mazon. “Informations.” Revue des études slaves, 8.1-2:169-70.
Mazon 1936
________. “Antoine Meillet, III: Le Président de l’Institut d’études slaves.” Revue des études slaves, 16.3-4:205-10.
Mazon et al. 1953
André Mazon, André Vaillant, André Grabar, Paul Lemerle, Boris O. Unbegaun, and Élie Borschak. “Nécrologie.” Revue des études slaves, 30.1-4:316-29.
McMurray 2019
Peter McMurray. “After the Archive: An Archaeology of Bosnian Voices.” In The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation. Ed. by Frank Gunderson, Robert C. Lancefield, and Bret Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 606-26.
Merritt Sale 1996
W. Merritt Sale. “Homer and Avdo: Investigating Orality through External Consistency.” In Voice into Text: Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece. Ed. by Ian Worthington. Leiden: Brill. pp. 21-42.
Mitchell and Nagy 2000
Stephen A. Mitchell and Gregory Nagy. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” In The Singer of Tales. 2nd ed. Ed. by Stephen A. Mitchell and Gregory Nagy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp.vi-xxix.
M. Murko 1906
Matija Murko. “Die serbokroatische Volkspoesie in der deutschen Literatur.” Archiv für slavische Philologie, 28:351-85.
M. Murko 1913a
________. “Bericht über eine Bereisung von Nordwestbosnien und der angrenzenden Gebiete von Kroatien und Dalmatien behufs Erforschung der Volksepik der bosnischen Mohammedaner.” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 173.3:1-52.
216
M. Murko 1913b
________. Bericht über phonographische Aufnahmen epischer, meist mohammedanischer Volkslieder im nordwestlichen Bosnien im Sommer 1912. Berichte der Phonogramm-Archivs-Kommission der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 30.
M. Murko 1915a
________. “Bericht über eine Reise zum Studium der Volksepik in Bosnien und Herzegowina im J. 1913.” Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 176.2:1-50.
M. Murko 1915b
________. Bericht über phonographische Aufnahmen epischer Volkslieder im mittleren Bosnien und in der Herzegowina im Sommer 1913. Mitteilungen der Phonogramm-Archivs-Kommission der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 37.
M. Murko 1919
________. “Neues über südslavische Volksepik.” Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, 22:273-96.
M. Murko 1927
________. Die Bedeutung der Reformation und Gegenreformation für das geistige Leben der Südslaven. Prague and Heidelberg: Česká grafická unie and C. Winter.
M. Murko 1929a
________. La poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du xx siècle. Travaux publiés par l’Institut d’études slaves, 10. Paris: Champion.
M. Murko 1929b
________. “Velika zbirka slovenskih narodnih pesmi z melodijami.” Etnolog, 3:5-54.
M. Murko 1930-1931a
________. “Za národní epikou po Jugoslávii I.” Československo-jihoslovanská revue, 1.3:111-14.
M. Murko 1930-1931b
________. “Za národní epikou po Jugoslávii II.” Československo-jihoslovanská revue, 1.4:154-60.
M. Murko 1931a
________. “Auf den Spuren der Volksepik durch Jugoslavien.” Slavische Rundschau,3:173-83.
M. Murko 1931b
________. “Zpráva Prof. M. Murka o vědecké cestě po Jugoslavii r. 1930.” Ročenka slovanského ústavu, 3:103-04.
217
M. Murko 1933a
________.“Kod Meštrovića i njegovih: Ivan Meštrović kao pjevač epskih narodnih pjesama.” Nova Evropa, 26.8:345-50.
M. Murko 1933b
________. “Nouvelles observations sur l’état actuel de la poésie épique en Yougoslavie.” Revue des études slaves, 13.1-2:16-50.
M. Murko 1951a
________. Spomini. Trans. by Vladimir Murko. Ljubljana: Slovenska Matica.
M. Murko 1951b
________. Tragom srpsko-hrvatske narodne epike: putovanja u godinama 1930-1932. Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti.
M. Murko 1990
________. “The Singers and Their Epic Songs.” Trans. by John Miles Foley. Oral Tradition, 5.1:107-30. https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/5i/7_murko.pdf
M. Murko 2017
________, collector. Epic Folk Songs from Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Collections of Matija Murko (1912, 1913). Sound Documents from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: The Complete Historical Collections 1899-1950, Series 16, OEAW PHA CD 40, 2017.
V. Murko 1953
Vladimir Murko. “Moji spomini na očetovo potovanje po sledovih Srbsko-Hrvatske narodne epike.” Ptujski zbornik 1893-1953. Ptuj: Muzejsko društvo v Ptuju. pp. 76-81.
V. Murko 1958
________. “Vzpomínky na cesty Matyáše Murka za jihoslovanskou epikou.” In Franku Wollmanovi k sedmdesátinám: sborník prací. Ed. by Artur Závodský. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. pp. 464-73.
V. Murko 1963
________. “Sudbina literarne ostavštine i fonografskih snimaka srpskohrvatskih epskih pjesama Matije Murka.” Narodna umjetnost, 2.1:107-37.
V. Murko 1967
________. “Končna usoda literarne zapuščine Matije Murka, zlasti posnetkov srbskohrvaških epičnih pesmi.” Slovenski etnograf, 20:181-84.
Nagy 2001
Gregory Nagy. “Orality and Literacy.” In Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. by Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 532-38.
Nagy 2003
________. Homeric Responses. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
A. Parry 1971
Adam Parry. “Introduction.” In The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. by Adam Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. ix-lxii.
218
Parry 1971
Milman Parry. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Ed. by Adam Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
“Prof. Matija Murko” 1951
“Prof. Matija Murko: devetdesetletnik.” Tovariš (newspaper). February 1, 1951. p. 57.
Ready 2018
Jonathan L. Ready. The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saussy 2016
Haun Saussy. The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
Scodel 2008
Ruth Scodel. “Zielinski’s Law Reconsidered.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 138.1:107-25.
Szwed 2010
John Szwed. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York, NY: Viking.
Talam 2014
Jasmina Talam. Folk Musical Instruments in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Talam 2015
________. “Creation, Transmission and Performance: Guslars in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Musicological Annual, 51.2:203-21.
Tate 2011
Aaron Phillip Tate. “Matija Murko, Wilhelm Radloff, and Oral Epic Studies.” Oral Tradition, 26.2:329-52. https://journal.oraltradition.org/wp-content/uploads/files/articles/26ii/06_26.2.pdf
Tsagalis 2020
Christos C. Tsagalis. “The Homeric Question: A Historical Sketch.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic Online, 4.1:122-62.
West 2012
Martin L. West. “Unitarians.” In The Homer Encyclopedia. Ed. by Margalit Finkelberg. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 911-13.
Zabel 2020
Blaž Zabel. “Matija Murko, predhodnik Milmana Parrya?” In Matija Murko: slovanski filolog v najširšem pomenu besede. Ed. by Marko Jesenšek and Marija Stanonik. Razred za filološke in literarne vede, 24. Ljubljana: Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti. pp. 113-30.
Zabel 2023
Blaž Zabel. “Matija Murko o Homerju in sočasnem homeroslovju.” Clotho, 5.2:27-45.
219
Žele 2003
Andreja Žele. “Murko’s Lexicology as a Synthesis of Linguistics and Ethnology.” Trans. by Margaret Davis. Slovenski jezik,4:3-11.
Zelenka 2020
Miloš Zelenka. “Le rôle de la slavistique française dans l’essor institutionnel et l’orientation intellectuelle de la slavistique tchèque après 1918 (André Mazon et Matija Murko dans les années 1920).” Revue des études slaves, 91.1-2:45-63.
Zupančič 1960
Danica Zupančič. “Šesti kongres folkloristov na Bledu.” Slovenski etnograf, 13:217-19.
220