Albanian epic verse

Albanian epic verse is a longstanding Balkan tradition that, unlike most known similar oral traditions, is still alive today.[1] Due to the Albanian language barrier, this tradition has lacked substantial international scholarship, translation, and recognition as an important source of cultural history.[2]

History

Searching for refuge from the Huns, the Slavic people arrived in the area now known as the Balkans, just north of Greece, in the fifth century A.D. Contact with the Greeks and Greek culture was made, and it is widely thought that the Slavic oral tradition originates from this connection. Due to this link, many scholars became interested in Slavic epic verse in order to learn more about the composition of Homeric verse. Since Albanian oral verse is extant, it has played an integral role in allowing scholars to research how Homeric verse might have been created, survived, and altered.[3]

Until the end of the 19th century, Albanian epic verse was exclusively an oral tradition. No written accounts existed. In northern Albania, Albanian Franciscan priests started to record the verse and put the written recordings into collections. In 1937, as Albanian national awareness was growing, the priests published their work in books called Visaret e Kombit (The Treasures of the Nation). This national awareness is likely to be the source of the motivation to record the songs. In the late 19th century, Romanticism in Eastern Europe triggered a desire to cultivate and solidify national cultural identities. Thus, importance was placed on the Albanian epic verse because of the cultural history it contains.[2]

Lahutar in Shala, northern Albania

Today, the Cycle of the Frontier Warriors, dubbed the Albanian national epic, is still sung by elderly men called lahutars, who sing while playing a one-stringed instrument called a lahuta or gusle.[2] The gusle is an ancient instrument thought to be brought with the Slavs on their retreat from the Huns in the fifth century A.D.[3] Many lahutars can be found in Kosovo (where the majority of the population is Albanian), northern Albania, and some in Montenegro. These men are considered to be the last traditional, European singers of epic verse.[2]

Albania

Epic Songs
  • Songs of the Frontier Warriors (këngë kreshnikësh—Albanian)
  • Cycle of Poems on Prince Marko[3]

Scholarship

Documentation

In the late nineteenth century, growing Nationalism and Romanticism raised interest in recording epic verse as a way to establish distinct ethnic and cultural history. In Albania, the first known recorder of the verse were Franciscan clergy. This initial documentation culminated in the 1937 publication of volumes titled Visaret e Kombit (The Treasures of the Nation).[2]

Meanwhile, Harvard Scholars Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord began to explore the traditional Albanian songs. Parry and Lord sought to uncover how the Homeric epics were composed. In order to answer that question, they sought to illuminate and study first-hand the extant oral traditions. This led them to the mountainous regions of the Balkans, where reciters of the ancient songs were still around. Up until this point, documentation of any oral verse had been done by hand. Recording by hand caused the documentation to be done in an unnatural manner.[4] Oral epics are "performance traditions", fundamentally a complex communication of emotion, culture, and history that imbue meaning by more than written text.[2] Because of this, these songs are not done justice by a simple transcription. A by-product of transcription is the song cannot be performed the whole way through, it must stop and start to allow the transcriber to write what they hear. Luckily, Parry and Lord were researching at the right time and had support from the right people. Doing research for Harvard, the wound up in the Balkans with audio recorders, which made the process of recording the epic verse easier and yielded a product truer to the real performance.[4]

Over the course of their research, they compiled a massive collection of transcriptions and audio recordings of the songs. The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts "is the largest single repository of South Slavic heroic song in the world".

Difficulties in Access

Albanian literature as a whole is an under-translated and understudied material, relative to similar academic areas.[5] This can be attributed to a few large reasons. First, the language barrier: Albanian is an Indo-European language, though dissimilar to all other modern languages. It maintains many archaic structures and its closest relative would be the very ancient Balto-Slavic languages. Dacian and Illyrian seem to be close relatives, predecessors, or ancestors.[6] The second impediment to scholarship of the Albanian literature is its political history. Under tight control by Stalinist leaders in the second half of the 20th century, Albania was effectively isolated from the rest of the world. The closed borders kept out outsiders and kept in Albanians who wished to leave, cutting off external study, contact, and heavily impeded the development of substantive cultural exchange and research. Albanian's lack of representation in the world literary scene is not due to quality, but to dearth of external interest and difficulty of access.

Non-English-Language Historians of Albanian Epic Poetry
  • Matthias Murko (1861–1952)
  • Gerhard Gesemann (1888–1948)
  • Fulvio Cordignano (1887–1952)
  • Maximilian Lambertz (1882–1963)
  • Joesf Matl (1897–1972)
  • Alois Schmaus (1901–1970)
  • Maximilian Braun (1903–1984)
  • Walther Wünsch (1908–1991)
  • Agnija Vasiljevna Desnickaja (1912–1992)

[1]

English-Language Historians of Albanian Epic Poetry

[1]

References
  1. Elsie, Robert. Why Is Albanian Epic Verse So Neglected? N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Apr. 2017. This paper was a part of a conference on The Albanian Epic of Legendary Songs in Five Balkan Countries: ALbania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro on August 8th, 2014
  2. Dushi, Arbnora (May 2014). "On Collecting and Publishing the Albanian Oral Epic". Approaching Religion. 4: 37–44.
  3. "84.02.01: Looking North Of The Greek World: The Slavic Folk Poetry of The Balkans". teachersinstitute.yale.edu. Retrieved 2017-04-12.
  4. "Milman Parry Collection". Archived from the original on June 4, 2017. Retrieved April 7, 2017.
  5. Elsie, Dr. Robert. "Robert Elsie: Albanian Literature in Translation". www.albanianliterature.net. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
  6. "Albanian language". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2017-05-03.
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