This is the third edition of a monograph originally published 1960, an unusual fact in a time in which libraries are reduced in favour of digitized versions for online reading. What is so special about exactly this book?Lord's book has also been influential on Hebrew Bible studies and Ugaritic studies.
The answer is, of course, that Lord’s Singer of Tales is a modern classic. Milman Parry’s sensational research which combined careful, even pedantic, studies of the Homeric poems with fieldwork investigation of oral epic in Yugoslavia was known to scholars working with archaic Greek poetry, but relatively unknown elsewhere. Had it not been for Lord’s book the situation might have remained like that. The Singer of Tales first describes the theory constructed from the fieldwork and next suggests how this theory changes our understanding of Homer. Lord was a charismatic author, and the enthusiasm emanating from every page makes his book a great read. It was received with admiration, and with it the ambitious project of defining the general characteristics of oral poetry became deeply influential not only in Homeric studies but in related fields as well, such as the philologies concerned with early poetry from other parts of the world, anthropology, folklore, and psychology, to mention only the most obvious. ...
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