Albert Lord

Lord was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1930 and attended Harvard College, where he received an A.B. in classics in 1934 and a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1949.^[1]

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.

His wife, Mary Louise Lord née Carlson, taught classics at Connecticut College; they had two children. Lord died in July 1991 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[1]

• 1940 - Junior Fellow - Harvard Society of Fellows
• 1949 - Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1956 - Fellow - American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1959 - Honorary Curator - Milman Parry Collection - Widener Library - Harvard College
• 1969 - Fellow - American Folklore Society
• 1972 - Becomes the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature - Harvard University
• 1988 - Recipient of the Yugoslav Star - Yugoslav Consulate
• 1990 - Awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Novi Sad

• Albert B. Lord, Bela Bartok, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951)
• Albert B. Lord, Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs, vols. 1 & 2 (Cambridge & Belgrade, 1953–4), vols. 3 & 4, with David E. Bynum (1975)
• Albert B. Lord, Beginning Serbocroatian (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1958)
• Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960)
• Albert B. Lord, Umbundu: Folk Tales from Angola (Boston, 1962)
• Albert B. Lord, David E. Bynum, Beginning Bulgarian (The Hague, 1962)
• Albert B. Lord, A Bulgarian Literary Reader (Cambridge, 1962)
• Albert B. Lord, The Wedding of Smailagic Meho (Cambridge, 1974)
• Albert B. Lord, Bela Bartók, ed. Benjamin Suchoff, Yugoslav Folk Music (Albany, NY, 1978)
• Albert B. Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs and Instrumental Pieces from the Milman Parry Collection (Albany, NY, 1978)
• Albert B. Lord, ed. John Miles Foley Festschrift: Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates Lord, (Columbus, OH, 1981)
• Albert B. Lord, "Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula," in Oral Tradition, vol. 1, no. 3 (1986), pp. 467–503
• 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, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991)
• 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

• John Miles Foley, "Albert Bates Lord (1912-1991): An Obituary," in Journal of American Folklore 105 (1992), pp. 57–65.
• "Albert Bates Lord, 78, Scholar of Folk Tales," New York Times, August 3, 1991.
• Morgan E. Grey, Mary Louise Lord, and John Miles Foley, "A Bibliography of Publications by Albert Bates Lord," in Oral Tradition, vol. 25, no. 2 (2010), pp. 497–504.

• Albert Lord at the Database of Classical Scholars
• Albert and Mary Louise Lord Collection at the University of Missouri Libraries