Albert Bates Lord (15 September 1912 – 29 July 1991) was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who carried on Milman Parry's research on epic poetry after Parry's death.
Lord became a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard in 1950. He was later promoted as a full professor there in Classics. He also founded Harvard's Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, and chaired the college's Department of Folklore and Mythology until his retirement in 1983.[1]
Lord authored the book The Singer of Tales, first published in 1960.[1] It was reissued in a 40th anniversary edition, with an audio compact disc to aid in the understanding of the recorded renditions discussed in the text.[2] His wife Mary Louise Lord completed and edited his manuscript of a posthumous sequel The Singer Resumes the Tale (published 1995) which further supports and extends Lord's initial conclusions.[3]
Lord demonstrated the ways in which various great ancient epics from Europe and Asia were heirs to a tradition not only of oral performance, but of oral composition.[1] He argued strongly for a complete divide between the non-literate authors of the Homeric epics and the scribes who later wrote them down.[4] Lord studied and made field recordings of South-Slavic heroic epics sung to the gusle, most notable of poets he worked with was Avdo Međedović.[5][6] He studied not only Homeric epics, but also Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and others.[5] Across these many story traditions he found strong commonalities concerning the oral composition of traditional storytelling.
Albert B. Lord, "Characteristics of Orality," in A Festschrift for Walter J. Ong, S.J., a special issue of Oral Tradition, vol. 2, no. 1 (1987), pp. 54–72
Albert B. Lord, "Oral Composition and 'Oral Residue' in the Middle Ages", in Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages, ed. W. F. H. Nicolaisen (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), pp. 7–29
On Lord
John Miles Foley, "Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991): An Obituary," in Journal of American Folklore 105 (1992), pp. 57–65.
^Lord, Albert Bates; Mitchell, Stephen Arthur; Nagy, Gregory (2000). "About". The Singer of Tales (40th anniversary ed.). Harvard University Press. ISBN9780674002838.
