This article belongs to a special issue of Oral Tradition published in honor of John Miles Foley’s 65th birthday and 2011 retirement. The surprise Festschrift, guest-edited by Lori and Scott Garner entirely without his knowledge, celebrates John’s tremendous impact on studies in oral tradition through a series of essays contributed by his students from the University of Missouri- Columbia (1979-present) and from NEH Summer Seminars that he has directed (1987-1996). http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/26ii This page is intentionally left blank. Oral Tradition, 26/2 (2011): 329-352
Matija Murko, Wilhelm Radloff, and Oral Epic Studies
Aaron Phillip Tate
Introduction
In modern histories of folklore scholarship, when the topic concerns pioneers of oral epic fieldwork prior to Milman Parry and Albert Lord, no scholars are mentioned more often than Wilhelm Radloff and Matija Murko.1 Though the two worked in different language families and belonged to different scholarly generations (Radloff was nearly a quarter-century older than Murko), the reasons for their influence are well known: Radloff was one of the first to collect oral epics from Turkic-speaking peoples in Russia and Siberia, doing so throughout the 1860s and 1870s, while Murko, in his time as a professor in Vienna, Graz, Leipzig, and Prague, conducted extensive fieldwork in Yugoslav lands among epic and lyric singers as early as 1909 and as late as 1932.2 Today both are regarded as two of the earliest observers of oral epic to have provided substantial firsthand documentary accounts of performances they witnessed in the traditions within which they worked, and both are frequently cited in debates surrounding the role played by oral epic in the twentieth-century form of the “Homeric Question.” What has never before been recognized or discussed, however, is the fact that the two were also personal acquaintances who spent time together in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the years 1887-89. In what follows I report and translate the Slovenian-language source, written by Murko himself, that mentions the friendship in a single passage (M. Murko 1951b:70-71), and I then discuss their scholarly acquaintance in a more elaborated historical context of institutions, methodological traditions, and technologies influential (but mutating) at the time.
1 I would like to thank Prof. E. Wayles Browne for his advice in the translation of the Slovenian passages and for comments on the article as a whole; my presentation has substantially benefited from his expertise. Tanja Perić-Polonijo and the Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku in Zagreb, Croatia, also deserve thanks for their assistance with research and fieldwork during the academic year 1999-2000. Above all I would like to acknowledge John Miles Foley for his inspiring example as both scholar and teacher, as well as for his groundbreaking contributions to the study of oral tradition. In the spirit of his work as philologist, comparativist, and historian of an emergent discipline, I offer this article to a volume celebrating his research.