Wow, there is nothing like starting your day disappearing down a rabbit hole.

When I decided to write about this book this morning, I thought that maybe I should find out something more about Alfred B. Lord and the reception of his book, which was published back in 1960. I mean, I haven’t been keeping up on contemporary studies on the science behind the recitation of oral verse or the theories of the composition of the Homeric epics – Lord might have been, for all I knew, eclipsed by some hot young professor of oral verse who had completely blown his theories out of the water, right?

Four Wikipedia tabs later – enough for my purposes – it seems safe to write about this book, which I discovered in college. I think the professor who was teaching my undergrad class on oral storytelling – which consisted, I remember, of sitting in a rough circle on the floor of his apartment’s living room with other undergrads (thinking to ourselves, wow, I want an apartment like this after I graduate), listening to him talk about what he was reading – The Singer of Tales, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind¹ – and then telling stories of our own. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I signed up for the course. I think I pictured studying great modern storytellers (thinking long-form oral comedians like Tig Nitaro or Garrison Keillor; or the Appalachian storytelling tradition²), and learning to craft and tell great stories of our own. I don’t remember getting that, but I did get some great reading out of the class, and we did get to tell one story each³.

The Singer of Tales builds on the work of Lord’s mentor Milman Parry, who developed two main theories of how long-form oral poetry is crafted, and then applied those theories to written poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf, to demonstrate that these written poems derived from a long oral tradition first. To do this, they took their graduate students on a field trip to the Balkans which, at the time, had areas that were still pretty rural, and storytelling by a wandering bard was still a main form of entertainment, and recorded a bunch of different storytellers plying their craft.⁴ Although I’ve only read this book a couple of times, I remember Lord describing men in taverns, listening avidly to storytellers; some tales taking up to a week to finish.

One of the two theories he demonstrated is how poets storycrafted. Apprentices weren’t taught to memorize the poems line by line. They learned the major themes, characters, and plots. And they learned a particular poetic structure, dactylic hexameter for example, and a set of stock phrases – swift-footed Achilles or glancing-helmet Hector – that fit that structure. When they then told the stories, they put the themes, characters, plots together and slotted in the stock phrases to fit the poetic meter where they needed to. This is very different from modern musical storytellers, such as Taylor Swift or Eminem, who use the same words every time they deliver a song; and if they are then covered by another musical artist, that artist also uses the same words.⁵

The other theory has to do with how you can examine great poems like The Iliad and Beowulf and tell that they were composed orally first, only eventually being written down, based on the repetition of certain lines that occur throughout the poem, and a few other indicators. It was one of the things that settled the whole, “was Homer the person who composed these great epics” question. As much as a question like that could ever be settled.⁶

In this book, you also get exposed to the great tales of the Balkan storytellers. As told by one bard, then another, variations noted.⁷

If you get a chance to read this book, I would do it. It’s fascinating. Not an easy read, like many other books that I discuss; a little dry. Okay, a lot dry. But fascinating in its own way. I was inspired, following the reading of this book, to memorize an epic poem that I could then show off with by reciting at parties.⁸ Not having learned the lessons from this book about the best way to learn an epic poem, I think I got about 10 lines into The Aeneid – the 10 lines that our speech teacher had us memorize for speech practice anyway – before getting distracted and moving on to some other hobby.

Okay, enough about this book. It’s awesome. Read it. Don’t expect a page-turner.

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1. More on TOCIBOBM another day; I have to figure out where my copy is shelved. And look at me, rocking the real WordPress footnotes! So proud of myself for finally taking 2 seconds to figure that out. ↩︎
2. Just made the mistake of googling that and discovered a podcast that sounds awesome and yet another book that I need to get. F*ck. ↩︎
3. Mine, I remember, was about the time in high school that I dyed my hair pink – not that time, the other time. Back in those days, Easter-egg colored hair was not as normal as it is today; I was the first person to do this in my school. My mother, who had originally opposed the dying of the hair pink thing, finally decided it gave her some kind of cache as a cool mom, insisted when I did it again in the spring of my senior year, that I should use her salon instead of mine. Her salon was a beauty school and the person who dyed my hair had never done a cellophane before. She left me under the dryer waaaaaaay too long because she didn’t realize that she wouldn’t see the color while my hair was still wet. Also, I had permed my hair recently, so it was pretty porous. Anyway, when she finally took me out after 45 minutes, my waist-length hair had sucked up all that dye. When I stepped out of the salon into the parking lot, a rare afternoon sunbeam hit my hair and lit it up like a beacon. It was so pink that it looked orange. As I climbed into the Jeep Wagoneer, my mother looked at me with tears in her eyes – Cool Mom really hated the pink hair thing – and said, “The school called. You’re meeting with PTA tomorrow. They’re considering you to speak at graduation and maybe a scholarship. I called the salon but you had already gone under the dryer.” My hair was too much for our small-town PTA. I didn’t get to speak at graduation; the scholarship was small and paid for pizza that summer. ↩︎
4. Lord was not a Homeric scholar per se. He was actually a Slavic language dude. Imagine if you will, two Harvard professors in the 1930s, trekking through the mountains of Yugoslavia with a custom recording machine that used tiny aluminum records instead of vinyl, asking rough-vested shepherds to share their tales. Now that’s Indiana Jones! ↩︎
5. With the exception of Ryan Gosling who changes the lyrics to make every song about Ken now, I guess, having stolen the Barbie movie from the women of that movie, which is so ironic, given the point of the movie. Insert eye roll emoji here. ↩︎
6. Homeric scholarship trolls, begone! ↩︎
7. Somehow, in my head, I put the tales told in this book together with a story that an Armenian-American man I know told me about the tradition of the kidnapped brides. (Don’t kill me if I have this wrong, I got it from him.) He said that, historically, a man of his people would swing by neighboring tribes – who, being neighbors, were rivals – on horseback and sweep up a young woman to be his bride. Eventually bride-stealing stopped but the tradition was adapted to modern times, with young women wearing their wedding dress on the plane to their destination wedding. Not sure I’ve got that right. Too bad there’s no hand-held device containing all of the wisdom of the world that I could consult if I wasn’t feeling rabbit-holed out for the morning. ↩︎
8. Because that attracts college guys. ↩︎