The Guslari of Stolac

Milman Parry and Albert Lord began their recording of oral traditional epic in the Stolac district of central Hercegovina, a region that in 1953-35 supported a strong and varied Return Song tradition. Songs by twenty-eight Stocani were gathered during the early expeditions, and later trips in the 1950s and 1960s by Lord and David Bynum added substantially to the sample of epic singing from this area. In later chapters we shall be looking both at the local tradition of the Stolac region in general and at three individual guslari who in particular help to comprise that tradition. Each has in his recorded repertoire a number of Return Songs, and it is principally to a selection of these works that we shall turn for evidence on phraseological and narrative structure in an unambiguously oral epic tradition.

Ibrahim Basic^[*]

Although he spent the greater part of his life in the Stolac area, Ibro Basic^[*] was born in Vranjevici^[*] in the district of Mostar. At the age of fourteen he left his father's household to become a servant to Ahmet-efendija, a wealthy landowner from Opijac: in Dubrava, with whom he remained for about ten years. He then entered the service of Salihagha Behmen on the occasion of his new master's wedding. After three or four years he himself married and lived for a time with his bride, Djula Dzanko, in her village of Osanjica^[*] . Subsequently they left the village and Ibro found work as an attendant in a coffeehouse (kafana ).^[51] During this period Djula became quite ill and her brother took her home to live with him in the hope of improving her health.

[50] See further Foley 1986a.

[51] Although he does not tell Nikola anything further about the coffeehouse experience, it seems safe to speculate that during this time Ibro had an opportunity to hear many, singers perform. He may well have learned from them and perhaps even performed there himself. A fragmentary description from Parry text no. 291b and an elaborate episode from no. 6598 indicate that he had at various times been paid for singing publicly. I employ the standard Parry Collection notation in citing the texts by number (for a digest of material collected through 1951, see SCHS 1:21-45); the italicized numbers indicate texts that were recorded from actual oral performance, the Roman numbers those taken down in writing from dictation.

Ibro soon followed her back to Osanjica^[*] but became bedridden himself with a tumor in his leg.^[52] He remained in the village for some eleven years after his recovery, living with a Ratkusic^[*] family. Djula died shortly thereafter, and a childless remarriage lasted only four years. By 1934-35, when Ibro was about seventy years of age, one son had moved to Belgrade and a second was with his father working at their modest woodcutting trade.

Ibro began to learn to sing at the age of eight or ten,^[53] first from his father, a skilled guslar who was part of the local tradition in which a singer characteristically performed in villages near his own. While in the service of Ahmet-efendija Ibro also often traveled to nearby villages and heard guslari sing. In those years, he recalls, he was able to hear most songs only once and remember them well enough to perform them. Along with his father, Ibro also encountered five more singers of varying age and reputation in his early years. From Sule Tabakovic^[*] he learned Djerdelez Alija and the Ban of Karlovo (Parry nos. 291, 291a , 6596);^[54] from Ibro Coric^[*] , Grga Antunic^[*] Attacks Raduc (no. 6692 ); from Osman Marijic^[*] , Hrnjicic^[*] Mujo and the Ban of Karlovo (no. 645) and The Wedding of Smailagic^[*] Meho (no. 12491);^[55] and from Selim Basic^[*] and Selim's father, Alagic^[*] Alija and Velagic^[*] Selim (nos. 291b , 1283, 6597 ).^[56]

In addition, we hear in conversation no. 6598 of a semi-legendary guslar of a previous generation, a certain Isak of Rotimlja by name, who was summoned for only the grandest occasions and was always splendidly rewarded for his performances.^[57] Isak's legendary accomplishments include invitations to play before beys and pashas, a paradigmatic triumph in a song contest with a lesser singer named Gacanin, and requests for his presence at weddings of all religious denominations. Ibro seems never to have actually met Isak, and the complete lack of historical context and personal contact as well as the stories of his remarkable feats lead one to believe that this greatest of singers belongs to the same world of folktale inhabited, for example, by the Anglo-Saxon scop

[52] This illness is a very "heroic" one, reminiscent in its hyperbole of Salih Ugljanin's account of how to behead a man (SCHS 1:63-64, 2:5).

[53] On the special gift of youth in learning to sing, Ibro says (Parry no. 6598 ): "A child of four years naturally remembers more than if he were twenty. The child is a great wonder; he can learn and retain it in his head. It's in the nature of a child." Cf. Lord's description, "Singers: Performance and Training" (1960, 13-29).

[54] In text no. 291b he credits Selim Basic^[*] , his father, as the source of this song; this is the only contradiction about sources, however.

[55] This last text, recited without the gusle and imbedded in the very lengthy conversation no. 6598 , demonstrates the important pacing function of the instrument. Hypersyllabic lines abound; compare SCHS 1:107-16 and 117-26.

[56] Ibro explains that he heard the last song first from Selim himself and later from Selira's ninety-year-old father, who claimed to have been a "standard-bearer" (bajraktar ).

[57] In text no. 6598 Ibro says that "Isak was the best singer in Hercegovina" and that he was always paid because, unlike all the other guslari , "it [singing] was his profession" ("to je njemu zanat bijo").

Widsith.^[58] At any rate, Isak seems to serve for Basic^[*] , and for other singers, as a folk anthropomorphization of the epic singing tradition that they also embody.

Other sections of Ibro's conversations with Parry's native assistant Nikola make it clear that the guslar considered his songs "true," and yet that he also had a concept of what has often been called "ornamentation." For example, when asked whether the story had truth (istina ) in it, Ibro says: "All is true, I believe, yes, even though some things are added (as you know)^[59] to make it more fitting [zgodnije ]; but there were all sorts of things then—there were heroes (and in yet earlier times there was a great number of them), and there were horses and swords and all. It was not then as it is today" (no. 6598 ). In other words, in singing he is recalling or re-creating a heroic age when the events that make up his and others' songs actually took place, and although that time is far removed from the present day, he believes in its reality. In order to portray that age and those events in the most "fitting" way possible, he and others "add" the stateliness and grandeur of the epic tradition. This concept of the truth and its embodiment echoes Lord's (1970, 28) memorable observation on the relationship between historical truth as we know it and its representation in oral epic tradition; he notes that the stories are primary because "their matrix is myth and not history; for when history does have an influence on the stories it is, at first at least, history that is changed, not the stories."

Ibro also gives us an insight into the singer's craft in his response to Nikola's probing about the "accuracy" of repeated performances of a song—whether he composes and re-composes "word for word" each time—and about the very nature of a "word" (rijec or rec ) in a song. Consider this excerpt from conversation no. 6598 :

Nikola : What is, let's say, a rijec in a song? Give me a rijec from a song.

Ibro : Here's one, let's say, this is a rijec : "Podranijo od Kladuše Mujo, / Na vrh tanke nacinjene kule" ["Mujo of Kladusha arose early, / At the top of the slender, well-made tower"].

Nikola : But these are lines.

Ibro : Well yes, but that's how it is with us; it's otherwise with you, but with us that's how it's said.... But here's one, let's say, that is [a rijtc ]: "Podranijo od Kladuše Mujo," let's say, a rijec for "podranijo" ["arose early"]; "Prije zore i ogranka sunce" ["Before dawn and the sun's rising"], that's a rijec for "podranijo, uranijo, podranijo," so.

Apart from clearing up the confusion over what guslari really mean when they claim to perform songs "word for word" (rijec za rijec ) each time,^[60] these observations illustrate how the singer conceives of the units in his songs. Simply

[58] See further Foley 1978b.

[59] Nikola was also a practicing singer, and Ibro here assumes his knowledge of the role of ornamentation in the making of a song.

[60] Compare the very different and limited perspective of G. S. Kirk (1962, 100) on the South Slavic guslari : "These particular poets pay lip-service to the ideal of complete accuracy in reproduction, and are under the impression that they come very close to it. They are, in fact, far too optimistic; and their very confidence and lack of self-criticism prevents them from trying to achieve a higher standard of accuracy, which certainly lies within their power. The truth remains that even within their simple and unsophisticated oral tradition, with its incomplete formular technique, poems—not merely 'substance' or 'technique'—are transmitted, though with some variation and contamination."

put, his words are poetic lines, units that epitomize what Parry called an "essential idea" and which are governed. by the metrical structure of the tradition. Ibro is telling us that the idea "arose early" equals, or can be expressed by, a decasyllabic expression in a song, and implicitly that lines, groups of lines, and perhaps metrical segments of lines are his rijeci . Units of typographic description, demarcated by white spaces that serve as silent reading mnemonics, have no place in his "emic" or "ethnic" grammar of poetic diction. We would do well to keep his quite sophisticated observations in mind as we embark on a study of Serbo-Croatian oral epic phraseology.^[61]

Halil Bajgoric^[*] :

The second of our three gudari from the Stolac region, Halil Bajgoric^[*] , lived in Dabrica, a village so remote that he had to travel for three to four hours to reach the town in which Parry and Lord were recording and interviewing singers from that region. At the first encounter in 1934, Bajgoric^[*] was only thirty-seven years of age, unusually young for a guslar of his accomplishment (Lord was to record more songs from him seventeen years later). Of his personal history this singer says less than most. He relates stories of beys and their descendants in Dabrica and an engaging account of his grandfather's being tricked by a bey into forfeiture of his land over an unpaid loan. This unhappy turn of events in Montenegro led the old man to settle in the village of Blagoja, where both Halil and his father were born. Such family history follows story-patterns well known in the epic songs, such as escape from captivity, and the singer ornaments them with details from the epic tradition, such as lengthy catalogs of items or people. Throughout his conversation with Nikola, Halil time and again summons this kind of traditional idiom to tell legendary stories from his family's and district's past.

Bajgoric^[*] began to learn to sing as a young boy, first in emulation of his father and specifically in order to join him in performing in the coffeehouse or at a wedding or other celebration.^[62] Although his father was, like himself,

[61] See further chapter 5. On the distinctions between "emic" or "ethnic" categories on the one hand and "etic" or "analytic" categories on the other, see Ben-Amos 1969 and Dundes 1962. In the case of the guslar's description of his compositional units, however, we should take the "emic" perspective especially seriously, since these same units are responsible for the compartmentalization and articulation of traditional meaning. See Foley 1986a.

[62] It is typical of Bajgoric^[*] that he speaks somewhat romantically of the first stages of this process (no. 6698 ): "So I stole the gusle from my father. I went into another room, and when he went to sleep I would sing a little."

a farm laborer and not a professional in any sense, he enjoyed a reputation for being the finest guslar "in three districts." Bajgoric^[*] makes no secret of the fact that he too is held in high esteem by his fellows, nor that he is customarily rewarded generously (albeit in kind) for his performances. While most of the songs in his repertoire came directly from listening to other singers, Halil admits that he did learn one, Tsar Scepan's^[*] Wedding , from a songbook by having it read to him. In fact, he might well have learned more from that same source had not the process been so time-consuming and the selection, in his view, so parochial.^[63] As it stands, then, he designates his father and one Ilija Braduric^[*] , the latter of whom he says with some approbation was literate and could therefore draw his material directly from songbooks, as the sources for his own songs.

In addition, Bajgoric^[*] was among many guslari who spoke of a legendary singer from the past, an idealized figure whom they characteristically distinguished from the men who actually taught them their craft. Gifted with special talents and sought after in many quarters, Hasan Coso^[*] —as Halil called this figure—was a singer of wide experience: "He traveled everywhere throughout the world. And he lived for one hundred twenty years." Despite Halil's efforts to locate Hasan in real time and space (he is said, for example, to have spent most of his life in Dabrica), the nature of the biography reveals that this best of singers, like Basic's^[*] Isak, was more a symbol than a fact: "My God, he died very long ago; from what they say it was probably seventy years ago. He was not even my father's father."^[64] While he claims that his father learned to sing from Hasan, Halil himself denies any personal contact with the man. And although he indicates that his father and Hasan lived no more than a kilometer apart, it becomes apparent that this greatest of singers was unique in the community that surrounded him: "It is said that he could still jump twelve paces a half-year before he died. People say he neither dug nor plowed, nor did he ride a horse, but he always carried a rifle and some goods on a beast of burden, and thus traveling lightly he enjoyed himself and played the gusle. " From these and other indications, it is clear that Bajgoric^[*] effectively understood Hasan as a kind of personification of the epic tradition—an anthropomorphic focus for the stories and wisdom of oral epic not unlike Ibro Basic's^[*] Isak.

The songs passed down from such a paragon are of course "true," Bajgoric^[*] assures Nikola, and he is prepared to gloss any item or feature of the story as he related it. One of these textual footnotes, most of which concern names or minor events in a given narrative, offers a glimpse of the guslar's own

[63] The book in question, which, while never identified, sounds a great deal like some version of the poems collected and published by Vuk Karadzic^[*] , contained only Serbian songs and therefore no Moslem songs, particularly no licke pjesme ("songs of the Lika").

[64] Further probing established this last expression as an idiomatic way of denoting relative age rather than as an assertion of kin relation.

attitude toward traditional diction. On being asked for the origin of the ubiquitous toponym Markovac, Bajgoric^[*] replies that the term designates the mountain village in which the great Serbian hero Marko Kraljevic^[*] was nursed. This assignment of the toponym naturally means that the village bears a name unsurpassed for its honorific and heroic import. But then Nikola confronts Halil with a problem: if this interpretation is correct, how does he explain the verse formula "Pa eto ga niz Markovac kleti " ("There he is below accursed Markovac")? His suggestion of Markovac as the revered cradle of Serbia's most significant hero is at odds with a line he has himself sung; Bajgoric^[*] therefore falls back on the explanation that in a song "mora da se rekne" ("it has to be said [like that]"). As Lord and others have argued, the tradition speaks diachronically in the synchronic performance of the individual guslar , and that person need not—and often does not—consciously analyze and understand the nature of the idiom he is employing by right of succession. It is enough for Bajgoric^[*] to know that "Pa eto ga niz Markovac kleti" constitutes a rec , a traditionally defined and indivisible "word," which he can draw from his compositional lexicon in the making of his song.

Like Ibro Basic^[*] , Halil conceives of the action described in his songs as having actually taken place much earlier, in some sort of "Golden Age," and he offers the observation that most of the heroes involved, such as Aliagha Stocevic^[*] and Mustajbeg of the Lika, lived at approximately the same unspecified period in history. When he sings of these and other heroes, moreover, they are subject to the same traditional ornamentation used by Basic^[*] . At times this compositional flexibility—that is, the multiformity that is the lifeblood of the oral epic tradition—leads to what we might term an outright error or omission, the kind of narrative blemish that has so often influenced Homeric scholars to picture the great poet "nodding." A case in point is Nikola's calling to Halil's attention the omission of the hero's preparations for travel from a second version of a particular song.

Nikola : Yesterday you sang this song, but today when you sang it you skipped over one whole section that is usually sung—for example, when Marko readies himself and his horse for travel.... So did you shorten [the song]?

Halil : It's possible that I shortened some "words" [reci ].

Nikola : Yes, yes. Did you do it intentionally?

Halil : No, I didn't; it was only an oversight [in the] heat of performance.^[65]

On closer inspection it becomes apparent that the "words" that the guslar "skipped over" amounted to the usually paired themes of the hero arming for battle and readying his horse. We may draw two conclusions from these observations. First, Bajgoric^[*] understands the omitted section of the song in terms of reci or "words," the same unit described by Basic^[*] in reference to a

[65] Bajgoric^[*] speaks here of a velika vatra (literally, "great fire") that temporarily addled his thinking and caused him to stray from what he considered the proper story line.

line or group of lines in a song. Second, he not only is aware of the possibility of ornamentation by means of multiforms but also falls victim to the other side of the same process; flexibility of narrative structure means that occasionally a singer will delete one or more elements from what is customarily a sequence. As we shall see again in reference to the works of the next singer, this deletion may take place without the guslar's conscious notice. It is the price one pays for a generative compositional idiom that tolerates substitution and variation within incremental limits.^[66]

Mujo Kukuruzovic^[*]

The third of the Stolac guslari whose recorded works we shall be examining, Mujo Kukuruzovic^[*] , lived originally in the village of Grbavica in the district of Mostar and was forty-three at the time of the initial Parry-Lord fieldwork. Like both Basic^[*] and Bajgoric^[*] , he could neither read nor write, and like Bajgoric^[*] he earned his living farming land he had inherited from his father. Although he seems to have learned the craft of singing in the customary way, Mujo was unique among this group in the variety of sources he claims for his songs: he attributes his repertoire of thirty-eight different items to a long list of singers, eleven in all, none of whom was apparently related to him.^[67] He also classified each of these singers into one of two categories, the narodni (or "folk") guslar who was not for hire but could be rewarded for his services with food and drink, and the coffeehouse singer (guslar u kafani ) who was paid by the proprietor for his performances according to a pre-arranged agreement. We find both kinds of singers among his putative tutors, although Mujo's own preference is for the less commercial and less professional narodni guslar .

Mujo's conversation with Nikola proves him a lively informant, not least because of his willingness to offer an opinion on nearly every aspect of the singer's métier. While we cannot accept everything he says without critical evaluation, especially since like other guslari he tends to spice answers to questions about his personal history with the heroic details of his oral epic tradition,^[68] his comments on the art and process of singing are without doubt the most perceptive of those made by any of the three Stocani. For example, he knows of songbooks but says he does not use them because as a rule they contain only the newer songs, not the longer Moslem epics to which he feels a special affinity. And he is never slow to affirm his own ability to master the songs he has heard from others or had read to him. During discussion of the

[66] On the meaning of such variation and its context, see Foley 1984b.

[67] Note, however, that the two accounts of attribution, one in the repertoire (no. 1287) and the other in the conversation (no. 6619 ), at points differ on which singer is to be credited as the source for a given song.

[68] He claims, for example, to have been imprisoned in Hasan Pasha Tiro's tower! Hasan Pasha Tim is a character from the epic, most prominent in The Wedding of Smailagic^[*] Meho , (see SCHS , vols. 3-4).

Zenidba bega Ljubovica^[*] (The Wedding of Bey Ljubovic^[*] ), for instance, he tells Nikola how easily he can pick up songs to enlarge his repertoire:

Mujo : So now, brother, you go ahead and find some song I don't know; then, brother, read it to me and give me the gusle ; if I get confused, I'll give you a finger off my hand.

Nikola : And you'll sing the whole song this way?

Mujo : I'll repeat every, single rec .

Nikola : Well, that's a wonder to me.

Mujo : It'll be so, I guarantee it.

We might view this exchange as mere bravado on Kukuruzovic's^[*] part, and perhaps it is just that, at least on one level;^[69] but later on in the conversation he glosses the term rec memorably by echoing Ibro Basic's^[*] and Halil Bajgoric's^[*] concept of the traditional "word." After defining a rec as "an utterance [besjeda ] which comes after another as that [former] one passes forth, as it goes, as it falls out all in order—from beginning to end, as it is ordered and placed and so on," he prescribes one or more lines as the unit rec :

Nikola : Let's consider this: "Vino-pije-licki-Mustajbeze" ["Mustajbeg of the Lika was drinking wine"]. Is this a single rec?

Mujo : Yes.

Nikola : But how? It can't be one : "Vino-pije-licki-Mustajbeze."

Mujo : In writing it can't be one.

Nikola : There are four reci here.

Mujo : It can't be one in writing. But here, let's say we're at my house and I pick up the gusle —"Pije vino licki Mustajbeze"—that's a single rec on the gusle for me.^[70]

Nikola : And the second rec?

Mujo : And the second rec —"Na Ribniku u pjanoj mehani" ["At Ribnik in a drinking tavern"]—there.

Nikola : And the third rec?

Mujo : Eh, here it is: "Oko njega trides' agalara, / Sve je sijo jaran do jarana" ["Around him thirty chieftains, / All the comrades beamed at one another"].

In fact, not only does Kukuruzovic^[*] sense what Lord has called the "adding style" of oral epic and manage to communicate to Nikola a rather sophisticated notion of the functional kernel of traditional composition, but he is also able to conceive of the separateness of the four units that we, outside of the traditional idiom, would call "words." Although Mujo's comments on the sources of his songs may be contradictory and his estimate of his own ability as a guslar a bit inflated, his analysis of the units of compositional meaning—the reci that make up his song—is extremely enlightening. Quite naturally, with-

[69] See the discussion of his revealing departure from the story line in chapter 10 below.

[70] Notice that Kukuruzovic^[*] has metathesized the words vino and pije in this second mention of the line. Such flexibility is just one characteristic of the compositional "word" employed and deployed by the guslar . See further chapter 5.

out the scholarly precision possible only for an outsider but from a perspective available only to a traditional singer, he is very close to describing formulaic composition.

Kukuruzovic^[*] is also aware of the possibility for okitinje , or ornamentation, of the story as it is performed. In response to Nikola's questions about exactly what such ornamentation consists of, he is less than clear, but he does comment, for example, that he can sing a song that will prove "more harmonious" or "more integrated" than those customarily found in songbooks. He considers the stories basically true, although he retains a pragmatic attitude toward the relative "truth" of versions by various singers: "You know, I count as true that which I've more often heard." As we shall see in chapter 10, the question of multiformity at the narrative level—of ornamentation and different versions of a song—looms large with Kukuruzovic^[*] . For along with generic song-types of (a) Return and (b) Alliance with the enemy, he includes in his repertoire what we shah call a song amalgam , that is, a third type that is an additive combination of (a) and (b). We shall be able to watch the progress of traditional tale combination by tracing the outlines of the two constituent songs in the larger song and by observing the kind of connective tissue provided by the tradition to bind the two into a greater whole. What is more, the suture had not entirely healed at the moment that Mujo's repertoire was recorded, and the "narrative inconsistencies" (this time of major proportions) in one of the composite texts will allow us to follow the logic of guslar and tradition in the act of song-making.

The Parry Collection Texts Used for Comparison

For phraseological analysis I have chosen a unified group of five Moslem epic songs from the singers of Stolac, as summarized in table 1.^[71] These selections, made from a total of twenty-one songs I have edited from the singers of this region, reflect a mixture of media (three dictated and two sung texts) but a near unanimity of subgenre (four Return Songs and one Wedding Song). The sample thus includes both sung and dictated material from two singers and represents a unified local tradition. Taken together, the five songs total 7,287 decasyllabic lines, an extensive textual basis on which to found an analysis of oral traditional phraseology first within the local Stolac tradition and, by example, elsewhere within the Serbo-Croatian epic tradition.

For the major part of the thematic analysis, I have selected a group of eight Stolac songs in the Return subgenre that were sung or dictated by Basic^[*]

[71] The titles given here were assigned by Parry and Lord or, if they provided none, by me. Strictly speaking, titles are quite irrelevant to the guslar , who remembers a song in relation to its major figures and central action. The code numbers assigned reflect the protocol of the concordance and will be used in chapter 5 on traditional phraseology in Serbo-Croatian. See further chapter 5, note 23.

or Kukuruzovic^[*] (table 2). Near the end of chapter 8 comparisons are also drawn to a single song by Salih Ugljanin of Novi Pazar (SGHS 2 , no. 4). Once again we have both sung and dictated texts by each of two guslari from the same local tradition, all of them in the same subgenre, with the total sample amounting to 11,363 lines.^[72] This large and multi-layered inventory of songs and versions will allow exploration of individual, local, and pantraditional features of the narrative theme.

Before these analyses can begin, however, we must turn to an examination of the prosodies that exist in symbiosis with the ancient Greek, Old English, and Serbo-Croatian epic phraseologies, and which thus ultimately figure in the verbal expression of narrative patterns.

[72] Line-count per se is of course not as important a consideration in thematic as in phraseological analysis, but it does afford some idea of the extent of the sample used for thematic investigation. See further chapter 8.