As is well known, Parry and Lord returned from the Balkans in 1935 with a large body of not only epic materials and interviews with singers, but also a trove of ballads and lyric songs that served as the source for Bartók and Lord’s volume Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (1951). Instead, I wish to underscore only those elements directly relevant for this article. For this reason I will not analyze them in detail here.

The new research practices introduced by Parry and Lord during their trips to the former Yugoslavia in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s (the last two undertaken by Lord alone) are now seen to have set a standard and have been treated in multiple scholarly contributions. In this article I will focus on one such example, namely the transmission of oral songs within the circle of an extended family. Karadžić, the Matica hrvatska archives and publications (Zagreb), and the manuscripts and recordings in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature (Harvard University), it is exactly the shorter verse genres that offer possibilities for investigation unavailable with other types of oral materials. And yet, owing to the wealth of sources preserved in the collections of Vuk S. By contrast, shorter lyric songs and ballads from the same region traditionally performed by women (and sometimes simply called “women’s songs,” a problematic term to which I will return), while collected and published along with the epics, have rarely received the same scope of analysis.

From the time of the Homeric epics down to the period when Milman Parry and Albert Lord discovered “new Homers” such as Avdo Međedović in the Slavic part of the Balkans, the epic tradition has captivated the attention of both scholars and audiences.

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