2025.04.05, rewritten from 2019.04.05 | By Gregory Nagy
§0. In Classical Inquiries 2019.04.05, I published a checklist of wordings I found to be particularly memorable in the course of my many re-readings, over so many years, of Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales, a pathfinding book that was originally published in 1960 by Harvard University Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Volume 24 in the series Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature. As I wrote in my introduction to my original checklist, my plan had been to supplement my checklist, in the course of time, with relevant annotations to those wordings of Lord. As I now re-start my introduction here in Classical Continuum, exactly six years after the original publication in Classical Inquiries, I hope that such annotations, yet to be written by me, will be supplemented by further annotations, to be written not only by me but also by younger generations who study the academic legacy of Albert Lord and of his mentor at Harvard, Milman Parry. The Editor for all annotations, as also for any revisions of my text as published here in 2025.04.05, is Keith DeStone, whose electronic address is kdestone@fas.harvard.edu.
§1. In my introduction dating back to the year 2019, I had already expressed my hopes about the addition of annotations to my checklist, since I had expected that the series Classical Inquiries would soon provide a set of technological tools for the annotating of content published in that series. As I wrote in my introduction dated 2019, my hopes were linked with my intent to celebrate the publication, in that same year 2019, of the third printed edition of Lord’s Singer of Tales, edited by David F. Elmer, Eliot Professor of Greek at Harvard. That latest edition of Lord’s book was Volume 4 in the series “Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature” and, simultaneously, Volume 77 in the series “Hellenic Studies,” published by Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and distributed by Harvard University Press.
§2. Most significantly, the role of the Center for Hellenic Studies—commonly known as CHS—in publishing the third edition of Lord’s Singer of Tales was linked with a related role of the CHS: the historical fact is, Harvard’s CHS is on record as the guarantor for the sustainability of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Tradition at Harvard. So, in the year 2019, when I first published online my checklist of memorable formulations in Lord’s Singer of Tales, my primary intention had been to celebrate the publication, in that same year, of the latest printed edition of Singer of Tales. I must add here, though it almost goes without saying, that the year 2019 thus became for me, personally, the high point of my twenty-one years of service, from 2000 to 2021, as Director of Harvard’s CHS and as General Editor of the over 100 printed books published in the “Hellenic Studies” series distributed by Harvard University Press.
§3. Which brings me back now to those hoped-for plans of mine, going back to 2019, about providing a system of annotations for the checklist that I had published online already in that same year. Soon after 2019, such plans were put on hold, since I stepped down, in the summer of 2021, as Director of the CHS. Though I continued as professor at Harvard, I was now no longer involved, as of autumn 2021, with the online journal Classical Inquiries, and the operations of that journal as an active publication came to a halt. Fortunately, however, the contents of Classical Inquiries continue to be hosted online by the CHS, albeit only in archival form. Even more fortunately for me, I have in the meantime found a new way to publish online the content of any new ongoing research of mine. That new way takes the form of an online journal named Classical Continuum, which has for now become the venue for my checklist here.
§4. By way of Classical Continuum, I can now also rewrite—at least selectively—some of the hundreds of essays I had published weekly between 2015 and 2021 in Classical Inquiries. Moreover, in some cases, the technological infrastructure of Classical Continuum makes it possible not only to rewrite but also to annotate. Such are the prospects in the specific case of my checklist here, originally published in 2019, since this rewritten checklist concerning Lord’s Singer of Tales is now ready for annotations, as edited by my colleague Keith DeStone, who has been put in charge of annotations written not only now by me but also by all future annotators.
§5. The comments that I have just made here about specific prospects now bring me to make a more general comment, which is equally relevant. So long as the original series Classical Inquiries remains inactive and thus merely archived, my hope is that the newer series Classical Continuum may be sustained as a medium for updating, by way of rewritings and annotations, further selections of old content as archived in the old series. In the specific case of the checklist that I present here, I should add that my write-up of this checklist, even though it is already a rewriting of something written six years earlier, is even now merely a skeletal inventory that will need to be periodically updated in an ongoing process of future annotations.
§6. As in the older version of my introduction, I continue here to celebrate, in my own personal way, the publication of the printed third edition of Lord’s Singer of Tales, as edited by David Elmer in 2019. To situate the wordings of Lord that I list below, I use primarily the page-numbering of this third edition. But I also use an older set of page-numbers, placed after a diagonal line (/) that separates the older set of pages from the newer set. The page-numberings of the older set, to the right of the newer set, indicate the corresponding page as found in an earlier printed version, the second edition, which had been published in 2000, forty years after the first edition, published in 1960. The editors of that second edition of Lord’s book, who also wrote a lengthy introduction to the book, were Stephen A. Mitchell and myself. That second edition, which had the same page-breaks as did the first, is now out of print. But, fortunately, David Elmer’s third edition in 2019, with its own page-breaks, conveniently indicates the page-breaks of the first and second editions of Lord’s printed text, and it also includes, at pages xi-xxxviii, the lengthy Mitchell-Nagy introduction to the second edition. As for the original page-breaks of the first and second printed editions, they are tracked in the online version of the second edition, the URN for which is http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.The_Singer_of_Tales.2000. Moreover, this online version has rescued the audio and video files from the compact disc that had originally been shrink-wrapped and attached to the inside of the back cover for the printed second edition.
§7. That said, I now proceed to present my personal checklist of some of Lord’s wordings in Singer of Tales, sometimes directly quoted and at other times merely paraphrased. Annotations, as edited by Keith DeStone, are situated in the right-hand margin. Each annotation indicates the name of the annotator and the date of his or her annotation.
4 / 4… definition of formula, following Milman Parry: “By formula I mean ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’.” Also on this page: “…every performance is a separate song.”
5 / 5… “What is important is not the oral performance but rather the composition during oral performance.”
13 / 13… “An oral poem is not composed for but in performance.” Same page: “… we are not in the habit of thinking of the performer as a composer.”
17 / 17… “One of the reasons also why different singings of the same song by the same man vary most in their endings is that the end of a song is sung less often by the singer.”
19 / 19… About… “…the information which we heard indirectly concerning the blind singer Ćor Huso…”
20 / 20… “It is a great pity, of course, that someone did not collect songs from him [= Ćor Huso] a couple of generations ago, but he seems to have escaped the attention of collectors—just why would be interesting to know.”
21 / 21… About three stages of learning for the singer: (A) period of listening and absorbing; (B) period of application; (C) period of singing before a critical audience
27 / 27… How performers may not be aware of changes in their own reperformances, claiming that they are repeating “word for word and line for line”
29 / 29… “And the picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver of tradition and creative artist; it is rather one of the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it.”
31 / 30… On the “method” of focusing on “repetitions”… “Yet it seems to me that in confining ourselves to this method we tend to obscure the dynamic life of the repeated phrases and to lose an awareness of how and why they came into being.”
32 / 31… “For the singing we hear today, like the everyday speech around us, goes back in a direct and long series of singings to a beginning which, no matter how difficult it may be to conceive, we must attempt to grasp, because otherwise we shall miss an integral part of the meaning of the traditional formula.”
33 / 32… “The fact of narrative song is around him [= the singer] from birth; the technique of it is the possession of his elders, and he falls heir to it. Yet in a real sense he does recapitulate the experiences of the generations before him stretching back to the distant past. From meter and music he absorbs in his earliest years the rhythms of epic, even as he absorbs the rhythms of speech itself and in a larger sense of the life about him. He learns empirically the length of phrase, the partial cadences, the full stops.” Same page… “Basic patterns of meter, word boundary, melody have become his possession, and in him the tradition begins to reproduce itself.”
34 / 33… “Only in performance can the formula exist and have clear definition.” Same page… “Usually the rhythms and melodies that the youth learns at this period of initial specific application will stay with him the rest of his life.”
36 / 35… “substitution system”
36–37 / 35… “Again we may turn to language itself as a useful parallel.”
37 / 36… “…the ‘grammar’ of the poetry”
38 / 37… “at least one oft-repeated melodic pattern for sustained narrative” …
42 / 38… “the feeling for the mid-line break is very real”
44 / 42… On assonance as a factor in choices of alternative wording.
44 / 43… “The remembered phrase may have been a formula in the other singer’s songs, but it is not a formula for our singer until its regular use in his songs is established.”
47 / 45… On invocations… Nagy connects with what is said further at pp. 69–70 / 66–67.
47–50 / 46–48… On the logical outcome of underlining “repetitions” if you have a potentially infinite input…
49 / 47… “There is nothing in the poem that is not formulaic.”
47–48 / 49… On numbers of themes, numbers of formulas…
51 and following / 50 and following… On the principle of “thrift” or “economy”…
52 / 51… On other factors, like chiasmus, etc., that determine choices of wording…
55 / 53… On thrift vs. “acoustical context”…
56 / 54… “The need for the ‘next’ line is upon him even before he utters the final syllable of a line.” How this “need” relates to questions of enjambment.
58 / 55–56… On alliteration, assonance, etc. …
59 / 57… On a zigzag effect (Nagy compares the idea of iconicity)…
68 / 65… One of the most important pages in the whole book! A favorite sentence for me: “It is certainly possible that a formula that entered the poetry because its acoustic patterns emphasized by repetition a potent word or idea was kept after the peculiar potency which it symbolized and which one might say it even was intended to make effective was lost—kept because the fragrance of its past importance still clung vaguely to it and kept also because it was now useful in composition.”
68 / 65–66… On the “pathetic fallacy”…
68–69 / 65–66… On the “drunken tavern” syndrome… (Nagy introduces related ideas: transferred epithet, metonymy, etc.)
69 / 67… A precious general statement by Lord on the “ritual” background!
69–70 / 66–67… On invocations of goddesses, and how the use of these invocations may be related to the use of epithets.
100 / 94… A most valuable formulation… “In a traditional poem, therefore, there is a pull in two directions: one is toward the song being sung and the other is toward the previous uses of the same theme.”
103 / 97… Another most valuable formulation: “The habit is hidden, but felt.”
107 / 101… “…we cannot correctly speak of a ‘variant,’ since there is no ‘original’ to be varied!”
108 / 102… On the pitfalls of searching for “the original”…
127 / 119–120… On the idea of “multiform”…
128 / 120… “Multiformity is essentially conservative.”
158 / 147… “He is the tradition.”
160–161 / 150… How writing per se cannot nail down an oral tradition.
164 / 153… Homer and the “Cycle”…
164 and following / 153 and following… prototypes of a dictation theory
169 and following / 158 and following… Lord chooses to analyze the Odyssey before analyzing the Iliad.
194 and following / 181 and following… On the poetics of the “return” narratives…
198 and following / 186 and following… the pattern of “WDR” = withdrawal, devastation, return.
206 / 195… On Patroklos as the “double” of Achilles
211 and following / 198 and following … “medieval epic” (such as Beowulf, Roland, Digenis): problems with reapplying concepts of “formula,” etc.