Available via license: CC BY-NC-ND
Content may be subject to copyright.
37
Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
On Collecting and Publishing the Albanian
Oral Epic
arbnora dushi
The aim of this paper is to examine how the Al-
banian epic known as the ‘Cycle of the Frontier
Warriors’ has been presented in Albanian folk-
lore collections. I will examine seven written versions of
the song ‘The Wedding of Ali Bajraktari’, which belongs
to this epic cycle. The ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors’,
has been an object of collection since the beginning
of the twentieth century. There are now dozens of vol-
umes published, but the studies published to date con-
centrate on historical, thematic and comparative rather
than contextual and textual issues.
Introduction
I understand the term ‘oral epic’ to refer to long nar-
rative poems that, in an elevated manner, recount
the struggles of legendary or historical heroes. is
is, more or less, the denition that has come down
to us from Aristotle, who formulated it in the con-
text of Homeric epic. Oral epics have continued to be
thought of in this manner. is denition is still true
regarding the thematic content of epics. But the den-
ition has evolved, and today there are many dierent
denitions of epic. According to Lauri Honko, oral
epics are performance traditions, and performance is
to be understood as a multidimensional communica-
tive and emotional experience that cannot be encap-
sulated in a simple verbal text (Honko a: ). is
means that the text or content alone do not suce in
dening an epic. According to John Miles Foley, the
epic is a master genre of the ancient world (see Foley
) and he elaborates further the ways in which
epic played a major role in ancient societies. Barbara
Graziosi denes epic as a genre by means of many
dierent criteria, including the mode of discourse,
the length, its relationship to other genres , subject
matter, theological framework, national or ethnic
signicance, elevation of diction, mode of composi-
tion, mode of dissemination and metre (see Graziosi
and Haubold ).
e denition of epic in Albanian scholarship has
not evolved very much, since the commencement of
collection, when researchers mainly focused on its
content, origin, length, composition and metre, and
sometimes its interpretation, as well as its inuence
on other national epics. e epic songs have been
treated as texts, not as performances or as multi-
dimensional communicative experiences. Alfred Uçi
(: ) suggests that epic should considered as a
special folk genre, possessing relevant features such
as heroic and legendary aspects, combined with a
specic method of artistic expression, which makes
it dierent from other forms of oral poetry. Qemal
Haxhihasani denes epos as ‘related to the great and
originating epochs of the history of our nation, where
are gathered in a unique work the entirety of its soul,
culture and history’ (Haxhihasani : ). e
problem of denition is always related to the issue of
authenticity, origin, authorship and autochthony.
Albanians also live as discrete ethnic populations
in neighbouring countries. e Albanian national
epic, known as the ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors’,
is still sung by elderly men playing the one-stringed
instrument, the lahuta. e epic songs which make
up this cycle are literary reections on legends por-
traying and glorifying the heroic feats of warriors of
the past. e leaders of the band of thirty warriors,
or agas, are Gjeto Basho Mujo and his brother Halili,
who inhabit a frontier region between the Ottoman
Empire and Austria-Hungary. While the Bosnian
Slav epic seems to have died out as a living tradition,
the Albanian epic is still very much alive. Even as the
twenty-rst century marches on, one can still nd
a good number of lahutars in Kosovo, in particular
38 Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
in the Rugova highlands west of Peja, and in north-
ern Albania, as well as a few singers in Montenegro,
who are able to sing and recite the heroic deeds of
Mujo and Halili and their thirty agas as part of an
unbroken oral tradition. One can safely assume that
these elderly men constitute the very last traditional
native singers of epic verse in Europe (see Elsie and
Mathie-Heck : xi).
e folk epic songs of the Albanians were rst re-
corded by Albanian Franciscan priests and scholars
working in northern Albania at the end of the nine-
teenth and beginning of the twentieth century. ey
collected dierent folk material from the villagers
who lived in those remote and mountainous zones.
is coincided with a growth of national aware-
ness in many European countries. On the th year
of the independence of Albania, in , the work
of the Franciscans and Jesuits in Shkodra (Albania),
were published in a series of books called Visaret e
Kombit (e Treasures of the Nation).
At the same time, in the s, Milman Parry
and Albert Bates Lord from Harvard University
visited the Balkan countries and recorded the long
epic verses . While in Bosnia, they recorded several
Albanian songs from the Bosnian singers who sang
in both languages (see Kolsti ). Some of these
bilingual singers were Albanians (Elsie and Mathie-
Heck : xii).
During the period of communism in Albania,
folklore, that is to say, the country’s national heritage,
epics included, was researched, recorded and studied
by scholars, whose academic institutions published
volumes and series of monographs. is cultural con-
tent had almost the same status as national heritage
in Kosovo, where Albanians comprise the majority of
the population. But when Kosovo became a province
of the Yugoslav federation, research into and the pub-
lication of national folk heritage items, especially epic
songs, was restricted. Today Albanians have studied
and published dozens of volumes of collected ma-
terials in both of the major cultural centres, Tirana
(the capital of Albania) and Prishtina (the capital of
Kosovo). Most of them are in the Albanian language.
e language barrier has prevented the Albanian epic
from becoming known to the public internationally.
A few good introductory monographs on the subject
have, nonetheless, been published in English, among
them: Albanian and South Slavic Oral Epic Poetry
(, ) by Stavro Skendi (–); Albanian
Folk Verse, Structure and Genre () by Arshi Pipa
(–); and most recently e Bilingual Singer:
A Study of Albanian and Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic
Tra diti on s () by John Kolsti. ere is also the
German-language Die Volksepik der Albaner ()
by Maximilian Lambertz (–) (Elsie and
Mathie-Heck : xiv).
Steps in the collection and study of Balkan epics
When folklore began to be seen as an attractive eld
of study in the nineteenth century, the predominant
ethos was informed by Romanticism, epitomised by
the raising of consciousness of peoples on the basis
of their ethnicity and marking out the nations as dis-
tinct from each other. is was the time when written
epics emerged, their characteristically extensive form
being the product of the desire of Romantics to con-
struct national cultural identities. Until then songs
about heroes and songs of praise had mainly only ex-
isted among epic singers.
Great changes were made in the study of epics in
the research and work of Milman Parry and Albert
Lord who, in search of the archetype of the creator of
the Homeric epic, travelled to the Western Balkans
and recorded the works of Bosnian bilingual singers
in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the s. ey visited
Frontispiece of the first edition of Visaret e Kombit
(‘Treasures of the Nation’), published in 1937.
39
Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
towns in Bosnia and recorded epic singers and their
entire repertoires. But this was not all. ey would
begin by recording the whole repertoire of a singer
and then those of other singers in the same region,
in relation to the singer they had initially recorded.
ey noted every fact about the singer; apart from
the repertoire, they noted the personal details of each
singer, facts about their culture and the place from
which they came, as well as manifold linguistic data
which emerged from the recordings. Apart from the
songs Parry and Lord recorded, their work also tells
us the names of the singers: Qorr (‘Blind’) Huso, Sali
Ugljanin, Avdo Međedović and so on (see Elsie and
Mathie-Heck ). We also know about Nikola
Vujnović, the local man who put the Americans in
touch with the singers. It was from this time that the
epic began to be seen as oral material linked with the
person who sang it.1 ey then began to record all
the details that the singer of an epic brought to bear
in his work, considering each line or displaced word a
characteristic feature of his creation. Today the song
does not only consist of the text, but the whole per-
formance. e studies of Parry and Lord linked ex-
amples of epics with empirical studies on the compo-
sition and performance of oral epic (see Lord ,
)).
is change in the documentation of the epic was
in part connected to the use of recording equipment.
In the nineteenth century folklore had been recorded
by means of pencil and paper, and all that was con-
sidered to be relevant was the text. Other elements
– such as those related to the performance – were
le unrecorded. For these early recordings the sing-
ers had to dictate the text to the collector, who then
wrote it down, and this process certainly impacted
negatively on the performance. In the twentieth cen-
tury, along came audio recording equipment, the
dictaphone and the tape recorder, which made pos-
sible the recording of the song, the voice, the text
and the sound. Singers were able to perform the song
freely, expressing themselves to the full. In ,
Stavro Skendi wrote in his book Albanian and South
1 In the Visaret e Kombit (rst published in , it is
notable that the collectors were conscientious in col-
lecting the folklore as accurately as possible. Beside
the text there appears the name of the singer and a
few contextual details in connection with the events
described in the song. is shows that the authors
of Visaret e Kombit may have been aware of contem-
porary methods of folklore collection. See Palaj and
Kurti and Zheji : .
Slavic Oral Epic Poetry that whilst today, recordings
are made on tape, ‘We should take another step, so
we might have the text and the music, the singer and
the audience, as well as the surroundings in the same
place, in a lm that talks and sings. All these elements
are necessary for a profound evaluation of epic oral
poetry’ (Skendi sa: ).2
Lauri Honko divides the development of the study
of the epic into three phases:
. e pretextual phase, based on content, informa-
tion contained in the text, but not the text itself or
its form or boundaries (Honko b: ).
. e ‘text is king’ phase, when the new academic
discipline of folklore began (in the nineteenth
century), which was based on epics recorded in
written form. e invention of the historic-geo-
graphical method greatly assisted in this, making
the analysis of variants possible.
. e ‘performance is king’ phase, based on
the study of oral discourse (morphology and
poetics ), the analysis of performance, the analysis
of context, the study of understanding, ethnic
and intracultural categorisation and the dierent
positions of systems (functionalisation, ecology,
structuralisation etc.). (Honko b: )
e historic-geographical method emphasised re-
corded variants and multiple publications of the
same song. is brought about the acceptance of the
variant , which today is considered to be one of the
main features that distinguish oral culture from the
written forms. While the written text has only one
form, the oral text exists in many forms because it
exists within oral culture and as such diers from
one performer to the next. Each of its forms, that is
to say each of its variants, contains its own distinc-
tive details and so each variant must be analysed and
studied separately.
What makes the variants of a particular epic song
interesting to the scholar, besides the text, is the con-
text.3 According to Honko the verbal element is only
2 Albanian and South Slavic Oral Epic Poetry was trans-
lated into Albanian by Xhevat Lloshi and it is titled
Poezia epike gojore e shqiptarëve dhe e slaveve të jugut
(sine anno) and I am here referring to this Albanian
translation.
3 e rst contextual studies in folklore were made by
the American folklorists Richard Bauman, Américo
Paredes, Dan Ben-Amos, Alan Dundes etc.
40 Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
a part of the text, not its entirety. e text must in-
clude many other things connected with the verbal/
non-verbal relationship between the performance
and the audience, among them gestures, body lan-
guage, use of space, and props (instruments, ritual
objects). To ‘read’ the verbal text in its entirety we
need two documents: ) a ‘performance record’; and
) a ‘performance report’. e rst is the text, the
oral material recorded, while the second comprises
the elem ents that cannot be presented, such as the
history of the performer, contextual information,
cultural histories, types of genre and so on (Honko
: ). Every performance of folklore transmitted
orally is unique and needs to be studied in full.
e textualisation of folklore is a complex pro-
cess. e data comes to us from various informants
in dierent historical periods, from dierent collect-
ors, with diering levels of education and with dier-
ing motives for publishing oral material.
Documentation of the Albanian epic
e documentation of the Albanian oral epic tradi-
tion began with a non-Albanian publication by an
Austrian Albanologist, Gustav Meyer. In his book
Albanesische Studien ( vols), published in Vienna
in , he included een lines (a fragment) of an
Albanian epic song from the cycle concerning the
brothers Muji and Halil (Neziri : ).
At the beginning of the twentieth century some
complete epic songs from ‘e Cycle of the Frontier
Warriors’ were published.4 ey were collected and
edited by Albanian diaspora authors who published
the materials in Albanian journals and newspapers
edited abroad. is was during the period when the
Albanian population was under the Ottoman rule
and didn’t have a right to have their own schools.
People who wanted to be educated needed to study
abroad. ere they had contacts with dierent cul-
tural institutions and groups which inuenced their
academic interests toward traditional culture. Epic
songs and other oral forms were published not only
in cultural journals but also schoolbooks written by
Albanian intellectuals educated abroad.
Albania declared its independence from the Otto-
man Empire in . One year later its independence
was recognised. A proportion of Albanian-inhabited
land remained, however, outside the state borders.
4 e published materials can be found in Mbledhës të
hershëm të folklorit shqiptar (1635–1912) , vol. :
, , .
A project to produce a denitive version of the ‘Cycle
of the Frontier Warriors’ began with the publication of
een volumes of Visaret e Kombit (‘Treasures of the
Nation’), a collection of Albanian folklore, in .
e rst two volumes of this collection are devoted to
the ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors’ (Zheji : ).
Aer the Second World War, the project was contin-
ued by the Albanological Institute of Prishtina, which
also produced a collection of twenty-ve volumes
of folklore. ree volumes, edited under the super-
vision of Anton Çetta,5 are dedicated to the ‘Cycle of
the Frontier Warriors’. Songs of this cycle are still be-
ing edited and published as works of individual folk-
lorists, based on eld recordings and eldwork. Such
projects include the work of Qemal Haxhihasani at
the Institute of Tirana and the work carried out in
Prishtina under the supervision of Zymer Neziri.
Today there is a good amount of published mater-
ial from the ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors. ese
publications, however, lack contextual informa-
tion. ey contain very little information about the
creators of the songs, the historical circumstances of
their creation, about the audience or any other infor-
mation that would shed light on the performance.
To examine the process of documentation, I have
chosen variants of one song, ‘e Wedding of Ali
Bajraktari’ .
Contextual information in the publication of Albanian
epic
According to Honko, ‘the performance report’ is very
important for the study of oral epics. It should always
be accompanied by ‘the performance record’, since
such data enables an unlocking of the context of the
creation of the epic itself. In my research I look for
such contextual information in the published var-
iants of the epic song ‘e Wedding of Ali Bajraktari’.
e oldest published variant of ‘e Wedding of
Ali Bajraktari’ was published as part of the collection
Visaret e Kombit, vol. (‘Songs of Frontier Warriors
and Legends’) collected and edited by Fr Bernardin
Palaj and Fr Donat Kurti in Tirana in . It says in
the introduction ‘We have before us a collection of
5 Anton Çetta (–) is considered to be the found-
er of Albanian folklore studies in Kosovo. When the
Albanological Institute in Prishtina was reopened in
, Çetta was head of the Department of Folklore,
which started the extensive, long-term project of col-
lecting and publishing Albanian folklore. Professor
Çetta also organised eld research expeditions.
41
Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
songs, valuable material collected at great pains
by the Franciscans over nearly forty years’ (Palaj and
Kurti : xi). e Franciscans had been, in other
words, collecting Albanian folklore since the end
of the nineteenth century, when there was a rise in
consciousness about the elements of national cul-
ture in many countries. e Franciscans of Shkodra
followed this cultural movement and, through the
publication of Albanian folklore, bore witness to its
value and to the place of this material alongside the
folklores of the other peoples of Europe. In the in-
troduction to the volume we nd general informa-
tion on the ways in which the study of folklore had
developed in the world. e songs are preceded by a
‘Preface’ in which various aspects of the epic material
are presented. Fairly comprehensive information is
provided about the songs that follow, including their
themes, their origin (albeit in the form of a hypoth-
esis), the variants, the history of their publication, the
characters in the songs, the identity of the collectors
and the singers, the region they are from, the rhythm
of the songs and the instruments with which they
were sung. Furthermore, before each song the editors
provide a short summary of the events described in
the song, which greatly assists readers who have dif-
culty in understanding the linguistic characteristics
of the dialect in which the songs were sung.
As with all the other songs, there is a preface to
this song entitled ‘e Plot’ which explains the events
described in the song:
Ali Bajraktari’s betrothal to the daughter of the
king of Kotor. He has paid the money and sets
the marriage day three weeks aerwards. But
in the meantime he gets sick. His ancée waits
for him for three years. Aer three years, she
sends him a letter asking for the last time if he
will marry her or not. Ali answers that he can’t
marry her. en Old Man Qefanak engages her.
On the day of the marriage, when friends and
relatives come to take the bride and send her
to the groom, they pass through Ali Bajrak-
tari’s village. e bride hears the groans of Ali’s
sister crying over her brother’s fate. en the
bride asks the wedding guests to stop at Ali
Bajraktari’s house, because she wants to visit
Albanian rhapsodist performing an epic song.
Valon Shkodra
42 Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
him. She uses a magic spell to get into the house
and cures Ali, who marries her. en the wed-
ding guests return to Old Man Qefanak without
the bride. (Visaret e Kombit : )
is song has lines and at the end there is a note
about the identity of the singer as well as his birth-
place. e few facts given about this song conform to
the conventions of the period at the beginning of the
twentieth century.
Almost the same method of collecting and reg-
istering both reports appears in the second publi-
cation, Kangë popullore shqiptare të Kosovë-Metohis
(‘e Albanian Folk Songs of Kosovo and Metohia’,
), which presents folk materials collected from
among Albanians living in Kosovo, part of the
Yugoslav feder ation at that time. e book presents
the history of Albanian folklore in general, including
Kosovo. e ‘Introduction’ goes on to give informa-
tion associated with each type, concluding with some
remarks about language and phonetic details that had
been taken into account during the transcription of
the material. As in Visaret e Kombit, the texts of the
songs are summarised in standard language, while
the language of the songs is that of the singer. ere is
an appendix in the back of the book which gives some
information about the time or the place in which the
song was sung. ese ‘Notes’ give some facts about
the identities and the educational levels of the collec-
tors and which songs they collected. ere is also in-
formation about each of the singers: name, age, place
of birth and residence, educational level, profession
and the number of songs sung. ere is also informa-
tion about the districts in which the songs were col-
lected, about the dates of recording and people who
assisted on the project.
‘e Wedding of Ali Bajraktari’ is called ‘Martesa
e Ali Agës’ (‘e Wedding of Ali Aga’) in this volume.
It is lines long. e notes at the end of the book
give us the name and aliation of the collector, the
identity, date and place of birth of the singer as well
his education and skills, the place and time of record-
ing, and also the names of the team of collectors. is
early volume provides elementary facts about the oral
texts and reects the awareness of the collectors that,
while the text is considered to be central, accompany-
ing information about the singers must be provided.
When comparing the above versions with the
ones that will follow, it becomes apparent that there
is an increasing lack of contextual information from
one edition to the next. In some way this can relate to
the idea that authorship in folklore is collective and
data on individuals unimportant. During the rst
decades of the twentieth century, the inuence of
Eastern Bloc methods of research dominated in Al-
bania and Yugoslavia. As Propp claimed in his stud-
ies, folklore never has an author and this is one of its
specic characteristics (Propp : ).
e subsequent publication in which this song ap-
pears dates from . It was edited by Anton Çetta
at the Institute of Albanology in Prishtina, Kosovo.
e material published in this volume comprises not
only folklore of Albanians in Kosovo, but also from
Montenegro, Serbia and Macedonia. In the short in-
troduction the general situation of the ‘Cycle of the
Frontier Warriors’ in Kosovo is presented (Çetta
: iii). It is stated that the epic tradition is still
alive.
is volume contains epic songs, transcribed
according to the language of the singer. Below the
title of each song is a note indicating where it was
collected but no other information. At the end of
the texts there is a glossary of rare words and a two-
page list of all the singers, the names of their fathers,
the date and place of their births, their professions,
their levels of education and the number of songs
each singer has sung. is information is not, how-
ever, given for every singer. Aer the list of singers,
there follows a list of the names of collectors and the
number of songs each has collected. e date and
place of birth and level of education of some collec-
tors are mentioned also. At the very end of the book,
there is a two-page table of contents giving each song
a number, stating the year it was recorded and the
page on which it can be found. Here ‘e Wedding of
Ali Bajraktari’ is called ‘Ali Bajraktari merr Fatimen e
Pashës së Vidimit’ (‘Ali Bajraktari Marries Fatima, the
Daughter of the Pasha of Vidim’). is book follows
the methods of the text-centred school of recording
folkloric material, which was characteristic of aca-
demic folklore research in Yugoslavia at that time.
e next three editions came out in the years
, and . ey give the data only per-
taining to the identity of the singer and the collector,
as well as the place and the year when it was collected,
nothing more (Epikë legjendare nga Rrethi i Kukësit
; Berisha et al. ; Çetta et al. ).
e process of producing traditional epic forms
with the old themes, such as the battles of the fron-
tier warriors is no longer in its creative phase. So ex-
amples of the theme are dicult to collect because
they are no longer happening as events. e rhap-
sodists usually say that the old epic songs are hard to
sing because they are very long and the theme is not
43
Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
relevant any more. Sometimes they can sing a frag-
ment, but not the entire song. Other factors aecting
the continuity of the epic include the impact of glo-
balisation and the advent of mass literacy. e young-
er generation has a reduced capacity for reproducing
oral epic, and less time and interest in continuing the
old traditions.
Besides the ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors’ there
are historical epic songs, which are based on the deeds
of historical gures, the national heroes. ese songs
date back to medieval times and the Albanian nation-
al hero Gjergj Kastrioti (Skenderbeu), who served in
the Ottoman army and fought against the Ottomans
with the aim of liberating his homeland. e Alba-
nian historical epic is lled with heroes who fought to
liberate Albanian lands from foreign invaders .
Even today we can nd so-called ‘new’ epic songs,
which are created out of stories of new heroes and
new battles and based on the bloody events which oc-
curred in Kosovo years ago. ese songs belong
to the genre of the historical epic, because of their
topics, but they are shorter than the old epic songs;
they glorify the heroism of young boys who are killed
while protecting civilians and their homes against at-
tacks by the Serbian army and paramilitary forces.
ey are not long, but the composition techniques
follow the old ones used in singing of the old frontier
warriors. e heroes are new and the events are fresh,
but the singing model is old. As Zymer Neziri writes,
these songs present the latest cycle of the Albanian
historical epic, reecting the epic motifs of magni-
cent scenery as well as the display of sublime feelings
about the sacrice of the blood spilled by the young
heroes who struggled for national liberation (Neziri
: ).
The growing importance of contextual information
e latest publication of ‘e Wedding of Ali Bajrak-
tari’ contains some contextual information. is song
is found in the collection of ‘Songs of the Frontier
Warriors’ of the lahuta-player Haxhi Meta-Nilaj, col-
lected and edited by the Albanian folklorist Zymer
Ujkan Neziri, Epika legjendare e Rugovës (‘e Leg-
endary Epic of the Rugova Region, vol. , ). is
is the rst time that Albanian epic songs have been
published according to a singer’s repertoire rather
than on a thematic basis. e song about the wed-
ding of Ali Bajraktari, called ‘Ali Bajraktari dhe çika
mejdanxhi’ (‘Ali Bajraktari and the Girl of the Battle-
ground’) is lines long and describes the wed-
ding of Ali Bajraktari to the daughter of the old man
Mehmet Aga. Before the girl is married, she appears
dressed as a man and kills a sea giant in a duel, so
defending her honour and that of her elderly father.
On the evening before her duel with the sea giant, she
spends time disguised as a man at the house of Ali
Bajraktari, skilfully hiding her identity. While there,
he (she) promises Ali, the frontier warrior, that he
(she) will survive the duel and come to the wedding
as a friend. She marries Ali Bajraktari on the day ap-
pointed aer having explained to him that she was
indeed the ‘friend’ who had killed the sea giant.
Apart from the song’s text, attention is paid also
to the performer, the singer Haxhi Meta-Nilaj, who
accompanied himself on the lahuta. Aer a brief in-
troduction, the editor continues with a detailed biog-
raphy of the singer and gives the particulars of the
region he comes from – altogether almost six pages.
It starts with the geography and history of the village
and the wider area, continues then with particulars
of the families and older generations who were killed
in conicts with neighbouring Montenegrins. ere
is also information about the religious identity of the
singer and other facts distinctive of the local people :
pagan rites, various rituals, initiation rites, the dia-
lect spoken in the area, traditional costumes, and
the songs and dances still performed. ere is also
a piece on the life of Haxhi Meta-Nilaj’s close family,
his way of life, his personality, character and honour
as a lahuta-player, accompanied by a photograph of
the singer and a map of the area.
Conclusion
Examining the published examples of ‘e Wedding
of Ali Bajraktari’ and analysing them from the view-
point of the question concerning the textualisation of
oral epic, it is safe to say that the Albanian epic can
be located in what Honko calls the second phase; that
with the ‘text at the centre’. Albanian authors have
been concerned with the text only, not with the con-
text or performance. is, however, is not entirely the
case. It was general nationalistic ideology that deter-
mined whether the material was to be published and
whether the identity of a singer was disclosed or not.
is can clearly be discerned from the publications
examined in this paper. Exceptions to this rule are
the volumes of epic songs published aer the fall of
communism, under the supervision of Zymer Neziri.
e publication of the epics is an ongoing process
while the epic song continues to have an active life
in the mountainous areas of Kosovo, especially as a
method of singing.
44 Approaching Religion • Vol. 4, No. 1 • May 2014
Albanian epic, rich in themes and stylistic fea-
tures and artistic expression as well as rich in verse,
although collected as literary text, lacks data on its
performance and as such remains decient in docu-
mentation. But the opportunities for nding its
themes, as well as the techniques of its formation,
which are still active in the eld, make possible the
reconstruction of the socio-cultural context of old
songs while analysing the current context of creating
oral epics.
In the examination of ‘e Wedding of Ali Bajrak-
tari’, a clear pattern emerges of the changes in how
Albanian folklorists have operated in relation to the
eld, moving from a generalised, ‘anonimised’ con-
ception of ‘the people’ towards an idea of the import-
ance of the individual informant and the social and
anthropological background of the performance.
Arbnora Dushi is research as-
sociate at Folklore Department
of the Institute of Albanology in
Prishtina, Kosovo. Her interests
are focused on observing Alba-
nian folklore within the scope of
modern research and the study
of the methodology of folklore.
She has published several books
on Albanian folklore. Email:
arbnoradushi(at)hotmail.com
Bibliography
Berisha, Rrustem, Sadri Fetiu, and Adem Zejnullahu
(eds) . Këngë kreshnike, vol. (Prishtina, Instituti
Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
Çetta, Anton (ed.) . Këngë kreshnike, vol. (Prishtina,
Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
Çetta, Anton, Fazli Syla, Myzafere Mustafa, and Anton
Berisha (eds) . Këngë kreshnike, vol. (Prishtina,
Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
Elsie, Robert, and Janice Mathie-Heck . Songs of the
Frontier Warriors (Wauconda, IL, Bolchazy-Carducci
Publishers, Inc.)
Epikë legjendare nga Rrethi i Kukësit . Epikë legjen-
dare nga Rrethi i Kukësit (Tirana, Instituti i Kulturës
Popullore, Akademia e Shkencave e RPS të Sh-
qipërisë)
Foley, John Miles . ‘Introduction’ in A Companion to
Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley (New York, Black-
well Publishing)
Graziosi, Barbara, and Johannes Haubold . Homer:
e Resonance of Epic (London, Duckworth)
Haxhihasani, Qemal . ‘Mendësi zotëruese në Ciklin e
Kreshnikëve’ in Gjurmime Albanologjike, seria folklor
dhe etnologji (Prishtinë, Instituti Albanologjik)
Honko, Lauri a. ‘Introduction: oral and semiliterary
epics’ in e Epic: Oral and Written, ed. Lauri Honko,
Jawaharlal Handoo and John Miles Foley (Mysore,
Central Institute of Indian Languages)
—b. Textualising the Siri Epic, FF Communications
(Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica)
—. ‘Introduction’ in ick Corpus, Organic Variation
and Textuality in Oral Tradition, ed. Lauri Honko,
Studia Fennica Folkloristica, (Helsinki, SKS)
Kolsti, John . A Study in Albanian and Serbo-
Croatian Oral Epic Traditions, Harvard Dissertations
in Folklore & Oral Tradition, (New York, Garland
Publishing Inc.)
Lord, Albert B. . e Singer of Tales (New York,
Atheneum)
—. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (London, Cornell
University Press)
Mbledhës të hershëm të folklorit shqiptar (1635–1912),
vol. . Mbledhës të hershëm të folklorit shqiptar
(1635–1912), vol. (Tirana, Instituti i Folklorit)
Neziri, Zymer Ujkan . Epika legjendare e Rugovës, vol.
(Prishtina, Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
—. ‘Gustav Majeri dhe llet e botimit të këngës
kreshnike shqiptarei in Gustav Majer (Gustav Meyer)
(Prishtina, Instituti Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
—. Studime për folklorin vol. (Prishtina, Instituti
Albanologjik i Prishtinës)
Palaj, Bernardin, and Donat Kurti (eds) . Visaret e
Kombit: Kangë Kreshnikësh dhe Legjenda, nd edn
(Shkodra, Botime Françeskane)
Propp, Vladimir . eory and History of Folklore,
trans. A. Y. Martin and R. P. Martin, ed. A. Liberman,
th edn (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press)
Skendi, Stavro sa. Poezia epike gojore e shqiptarëve dhe e
sllavëve të jugut, trans. Xhevat Lloshi (Tirana, Instituti
i Dialogut dhe i Komunikimit)
Uçi, Alfred . ‘Epika heroike dhe roli i saj në folklorin
shqiptar’ in Çështje të folklorit shqiptar, vol. (Tiranë,
Akademia e Shkencave e RPSSH)
Zheji, Gjergj . Folklori shqiptar (Tirana, Argeta-LMG)