SOURCE: Koljević, Svetozar. “The Singer and the Song.” In The Epic in the Making, pp. 299-321. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, Koljević focuses on the singers of Karadžić's collected oral epics and popular songs.]

The general picture of chronology, geography and achievement of Serbo-Croat oral epics seems to be fairly clear in its main outlines. The first Slav singers in the Balkans used their cithers as disguise in espionage near Constantinople in the seventh century and they gave their name to the professional practitioners of this art in the Hungarian language. But their pagan world survived only sporadically in some of the village customs in much later times. Medieval Christian Serbia, however, gave a much stronger imprint to the whole tradition of the epic art: its history provided some of the major later themes and motifs, its monastic literature left the heritage of several major legal and moral concepts as well as a few skeletons of much older Eastern legends, its frescoes kept in vivid memory the outward appearance of the medieval feudal lords, their gowns, rings, and pitchers. During the Turkish conquests and the dissolution of this medieval world in the fifteenth century, the feudal professional singers cultivated their distinctive ‘Serbian manner’ in their retreat in Hungary at least until the middle of the sixteenth century. The same ‘manner’ was absorbed into the much more popular and plebeian forms of epic singing in the Christian urban setting of some prosperous cities along the Adriatic coast. It was in this environment that the old feudal bugarštice were written down as they were dying from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. Their debris left a rich bequest of themes and motifs, stock phrases, formulas and formulaic expressions, stylistic and narrative devices to the flourishing tradition of decasyllabic village singing.

On the other hand, the irrefutable early sixteenth-century evidence makes it clear that the epic songs about the Battle of Kosovo (1389) were widely cultivated among the Christian population in the central Balkan area spreading from old medieval Serbia to Herzegovina and Bosnia, all the way to the western Turkish frontier with Croatia. For obvious political and cultural reasons these popular village songs could not be recorded, but this area, particularly the region of Herzegovina and Montenegro, is generally assumed to be the cradle of decasyllabic village singing. The earliest collection of these songs—which an unknown German wrote down, probably in or near the military camps along the northern Balkan Christian frontier in Slavonia—dates from about 1720 and its linguistic features as well as some of its subjects reflect the long travels of the epic voice through many regions, from old medieval Serbia and the Adriatic coast, to Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. This evidence also shows that many Croatian and Moslem singers must have contributed a great deal to the oral epic diction in Serbo-Croat, but as their respective cultures were dominated by urban centres which provided different modes for cultural expression, it was only among the Serbs that oral epic singing absorbed for a long time most of the available artistic national talent. The central function which epic singing had in Serbian village life and the enormous pressure of historical circumstance, particularly on some of the greatest singers, explain perhaps how the debris of the ‘high’ monastic medieval culture could come so fully alive in the ‘low’ social setting of the later epic songs. The shape and the ornamentation of some humble products of nineteenth-century village craftsmen mirror clearly what actually happened. Their chairs and flasks, for instance, often embody in an impressively simplified design their grand medieval ancestors. Thus the finely-wrought and yet sturdy village chair of Berane (Ethnographical Museum, Belgrade) reflects the medieval design of such lofty objects as the throne in the fifteenth-century Church of the Ascension in Leskovec near Ohrid. (See Pl. 5.) And the crude specimen of a popular nineteenth-century flask (Ethnographical Museum, Belgrade) was obviously inspired in its form by medieval pitchers—such as the fifteenth-century one in the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade, or the earlier one which Moses holds on a fourteenth-century fresco painting in the monastery of Dečani.¹

The most extensive and valuable body of decasyllabic oral epics, which were collected by V. S. Karadžić, represents a similar kind of achievement. But these epics also bear the social and historical imprint of the First and the Second Serbian Uprisings, ‘the first of the great nationalist movements of the nineteenth century’.² And it is, of course, significant that the geography of the oral epic song in its golden age shows that the greatest poems come from the areas in which epic singing was most intensely and widely cultivated. ‘At the present time’, claims Karadžić writing in 1823,

heroic songs are most widespread and most lively in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Montenegro and in the hilly southern regions of Serbia. In these regions even today there is a gusle in every house, and particularly in the shepherds' summer huts in the mountains. And it is difficult to find a man who does not know how to play the gusle, and many women and girls know it too. In the lower regions of Serbia (along the Sava and the Danube), the gusle are more rare in people's houses, but I still think that in every village (particularly on the left bank of the Morava) one could be found.³

On the northern banks of the Sava and the Danube, in Srem, Bačka, and Banat, which were more prosperous and had been for a long time under the Austrian and Hungarian rule, only blind men had the gusle and sang oral epic songs. Apparently, ‘other people were ashamed to hang blind men's gusle in their houses’.⁴ And it is this distribution which explains, in Karadžić's opinion, the difference in the poetic achievement in various areas:

the epic poems in Srem, Bačka, and Banat are worse sung than in Serbia, in Serbia along the Sava and the Danube they are worse sung than further inland, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the same way, as we move westwards from Srem through Slavonia to Croatia and Dalmatia, heroic songs are more and more cultivated by the people.⁵

This geographical picture shows that heroic songs were most widespread and best sung in the heart of the central mountain ranges in Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia, as well as along the military frontiers of Slavonia, Croatia, and Venetian Dalmatia.

This agrees with the general directions of the major Balkan migrations from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century—the migrations which were so extensive that in this period ‘almost all the population in the area from the Canyon of Veles on the river Vardar (Macedonia) to the Mountain of Zagreb (Zagrebačka gora, Croatia) changed its abode’.⁶ (See Map 4.) Hundreds of thousands of people were moved by force from Serbia all over the Turkish Empire during the fifteenth century: during the single decade after the fall of Constantinople (1453) over three hundred thousand Serbs were displaced in this way.⁷ During this heavy depopulation of Serbia in the fifteenth century the bulk of the refugees moved along the central Dinaric mountains to the regions which, a little later, supplied most of the Serbian migrants moving to the areas of the Slavonian, Croatian, and Dalmatian frontiers. The second wave of Serbian migrations during the great Turco-Austrian wars in the seventeenth century left dozens of villages completely uninhabited and many towns with only a handful of people in them. Austrian reports on the demographic situation in Serbia from the beginning of the eighteenth century show that the number of deserted settlements exceeded that of inhabited ones: at this time there were probably only about one hundred thousand people in the whole of Serbia (four to five per square kilometre).⁸

These migrations supplied a vast army for the Hungarian, Austrian, and Venetian military frontiers. The nineteenth century, however, marked the beginning of vast movements in the opposite direction: the extent of the repopulation of liberated Serbia is reflected in the fact that in the area of the river Morava and the river Drina about eighty per cent of the total population at the beginning of the twentieth century had come from somewhere else.⁹ The linguistic and thematic impact of these migrations on the art of oral epic singing can hardly be overestimated: it explains why this art had to be not only ‘anachronistic’ but also ‘anatopistic’ from the moment when the first two complete songs were written down in the middle of the sixteenth century.¹⁰

For the singer and the song followed these main historical streams, and not only their social status but also the range of their voice was affected. The pre-Christian Slav singers in the Balkans seem to have been ordinary people sharing in a popular entertainment, but in the early Christian times they were already known as professionals in Hungary and among some other nations. In the monastic literature of feudal times there are references to ‘the devilish songs’ of common people,¹¹ to the lascivious ‘harmful songs of youthful desires’, to the collective epic singing about themes of public importance, to the various forms of royal and feudal entertainment by professional singers.¹² The evidence of strong epic traditions, absorbing hagiographical legends and apocryphal material, in the patrician setting of Bar is also significant.¹³ However, the whole world of medieval feudal song—performed by foreign and native jongleurs, by various types of medieval entertainers, singers, actors and drummers, by wandering scholars (‘dijaci’) and composers of popular religious songs (‘začinjavci’)—was mainly absorbed either into the literary or into the oral culture in the sixteenth century.¹⁴ The new type of popular epic singer was a different man in a different social setting.

To begin with, he might have been just any peasant, farmer or fisherman, in any rural area under the Turkish rule, or in any village or city on the Christian side of Turco-Christian frontiers. More specifically, he was often an outlaw, a border raider, a soldier, a gifted articulate man often from a distinguished village family in a patriarchal community, a slightly bohemian or artistic ‘misfit’, a village ‘character’, a self-made merchant, a clever shepherd, a blind man or woman making a living by his art. However, the popular image of the guslar as a blind visionary is exaggerated, even if it is a true description of Filip Višnjić, the most popular and perhaps the only true professional among Karadžić's best singers. But how did the personality, the biography, and the social setting of the greatest singers affect their art? There is sufficient evidence about some of the greatest of the nineteenth-century singers to suggest in outline some answers to this question.

Karadžić's family history is in itself significant. The family of the great collector came originally from Herzegovina, the heart and cradle of Serbo-Croat decasyllabic heroic songs. They lived at Tršić, near Loznica, in the hills of north-western Serbia, where the neighbouring monastery provided not only the initial education for the greatest Serbian man of letters, but also ammunition for the Serbian rebels and fighters against the Turks. And it is not surprising that Karadžić himself, one of the few literate laymen in his country, served as a clerk in the rebels' army during the First Serbian Uprising. When this Uprising was crushed in 1813, Karadžić crossed the river Sava and emigrated, with tens of thousands of his compatriots, to Austrian territory. It was here—near the monastery of Šišatovac—that he recorded many of his songs. And it was from his father that he wrote down the few fragments of Kosovo poems, perhaps among the finest in the language, and certainly central in the general epic landscape of the whole tradition.¹⁵ His father was a pious and serious farmer—perhaps not too serious to indulge in epic song-making, but certainly serious enough not to admit to the indulgence. Karadžić—who made it clear on many occasions that poems were improvised rather than memorized¹⁶—seems to have believed his father when he told him that he was not responsible for the songs, because they were, in fact, old grandfather's responsibility.¹⁷ There was also an uncle in the family who was capable of making up heroic songs as soon as the occasion arose—for instance, four or five days after Smail-bey Begzadić was killed.¹⁸ This song is not a particularly significant achievement, but it is a clear and adequate description of a contemporary event of public importance. There are no jarring notes in it and this suggests a correspondence between the whole of the traditional epic diction (its formulas, its stylistic and narrative devices, its basic moral concepts) and the popular response to history as well as the way in which it was immediately understood and interpreted.

This situation will soon change, but it can be most clearly demonstrated in the life and work of Filip Višnjić, Karadžić's most popular singer. He was a man who carefully collected first-hand information from the Serbian rebels about the battles in which they fought and which became the subjects of his songs.¹⁹ At the same time, however, he was a man ‘who could move his audience to tears’.²⁰ This can be explained, in so far as such things can be explained, by his command of the epic language and by his imaginative gifts, but it might also have something to do with his own personal experience of history. He was born in Bosnia, ‘on the other side of the river Drina’,²¹ and it was in his native part of the country, in the vicinity of Bijeljina, that he came to witness some of the common forms of Turkish terror. When he was twenty, blind after smallpox from the age of eight, a group of Turks raped one of the women in his uncle's household, where he lived after the death of his father. In revenge the family killed a Turk and ‘hanged another one on a plum tree by his horse's halter’.²² As a result all the members of the family were tortured and most of them killed. What survived this punishment was the story of his heroic uncle Marko, the head of this large farming household, who ‘sang through the town of Zvornik as he was going to the gallows’.²³ Homeless Filip, a very gifted young man, travelled for years and lived on his voice. He sang to the Christian rayah in many Bosnian villages and to the crowds on popular feast days at the monasteries. But he also cultivated a special repertoire for ‘the great Turks’ whom he entertained when his travels took him to towns.²⁴ During the First Serbian Uprising his native region was sometimes a major battlefield: in 1809, for instance, the Serbian rebels crossed the river Drina and, under the command of Stojan Čupić and Luko Lazarević, who were to become great heroes in Filip's songs,²⁵ besieged Bijeljina and fought some severe battles in this region. When they were forced to retreat, Filip joined them. Stojan Čupić, who had risen from the position of a servant to that of a great captain of the rebels' army, gave Filip a white horse for his song ‘The Battle of Salaš’. The song described one of the major battles in 1806 and Stojan Čupić is presented in it as a man of immense courage and equal sensitivity for the social position and suffering of his peasants.²⁶ During 1810—after Višnjić's retreat to Serbia—his song kept up the spirit of the twelve hundred rebels, besieged in Loznica and exposed to Turkish fire and poisoned water supply. They waited for twelve days for the relief which was led by Karadorde himself, the chief commander of the Serbian armies. After the Serbian victory Višnjić's song moved Karadorde who, ‘a man of few words’, came to talk to him.²⁷ After the Uprising was crushed in 1813, Višnjić crossed the river Sava and came to live in Srem. He had a hut in a farmer's courtyard and some stools for the villagers who would come to listen to him during the winter. In summer he travelled round the villages in the whole area and wherever he came he was well-received and richly rewarded for his songs. The peasants in his own village Grk remembered him for a long time; when he died in 1834, they carved a gusle on his oak cross.

The nature of Višnjić's achievement becomes clearer in the light of his personal and historical fate. It is the fate of a blind seer who experienced some of the most atrocious forms of Turkish terror in his young days and found himself at the heart of one of the greatest historical national upheavals. But it is also the fate of a persevering and widely travelled craftsman who learned his art in the large central areas of oral epic singing where he mastered its full range. For Višnjić sings about Stefan Nemanja, St Sava, Marko Kraljević, the outlaws and the border raiders and, above all, about the greatest captains and the common soldiery of the First Serbian Uprising. Moreover, he also sings about Sultan Murad, the Great Dahijas, many Turkish and Moslem heroes, their mothers and wives—often at considerable length and sometimes with a vocabulary which reflects his appreciation of their human involvement in tragic history. This is why his dramatic sense of history, his intense feeling for concrete detail, his visionary image of the whole landscape and his imaginative response to the human impact of gory realities are so impressive.

His blindness explains why in his songs St Sava claims that his father Stefan Nemanja spent his treasure not only building churches and monasteries but also, among other things, ‘giving alms to the crippled and to the blind’²⁸—a detail not to be found in blind Stepanija's version of this poem who did not respond so quickly to the occasion of interweaving a moving personal element into a traditional epic tale.²⁹ And this ability is not mirrored only in Višnjić's long list of monasteries which Nemanja built, including many Bosnian ones which Nemanja did not build but which Višnjić, a widely travelled singer, knew. It is even more clearly demonstrated in Marko Kraljević's bequest of his treasure—part of which is again to be given ‘to the crippled and to the blind’:

‘Let the blind walk the roads of the world
And let them sing of Marko in their songs’.(30)

Besides, as blind professional singers were much more dependent on their public performances, often at the monasteries on great festivals, and as they were generally much more influenced by hagiographical literature, it may be also Višnjić's blindness which accounts partly for his outstanding sense of the miraculous—sometimes according to the epic standard, but often quite exceptional in its frequency and in the importance of its epic function. Thus, for instance, the ominous dream at the beginning of ‘St Sava and Hasan Pasha’ is a standard epic narrative device, but the melting of the Pasha's sword when he tries to slash the relics of St Sava, the fire which burns his tents, the Pasha's blinding and the crippling of his arms and legs, his wailing for mercy, the abbot's prayer and the miraculous healing of the Pasha are much more in keeping with the song's distinctly hagiographical tenor which is usually characteristic of blind singers.³¹ Some of the miraculous elements in the story about the death of Marko Kraljević—particularly the appearance of the vila and her prophecy of Marko's death—are also according to the epic standard. But the ominous stumbling and weeping of Marko's horse, the evocation of ancient beliefs in the miraculous properties of water, Marko's reflection in a well which forebodes his death—these give the whole tale a visionary colouring which is not common in the songs about Marko.³² And the heavenly omens in ‘The Beginning of the Revolt Against the Dahijas’ as well as the stars, ‘trapped’ in a dish of water which mirrors the headless bodies of the Turkish rulers, are certainly quite unique in a story about a contemporary historical subject.³³

But in Višnjić's poems the visionary and the miraculous—and in this he is different from many other blind singers—often illuminate the historical and the immediate which are given with exceptional factual accuracy. For Višnjić is above all the singer of contemporary history and his descriptions of the beginning of the Serbian revolt and many of the historical battles—at Čokešina (1804), near Salaš (1806), in the field of Mišar (1806), at Loznica (1810)—are not only broadly true to historical facts but also distinguished by a lively sense of many particular details. The shortage of ammunition in ‘The Battle of Čokešina’ and the subsequent use of guns as clubs, the bleating sheep and the lowing cattle which are driven away from their homeland in ‘The Battle of Salaš’ and many other of Višnjić's great scenes are unique both in their physical precision and their imaginative sense of the Serbian soil and history.³⁴ Moreover, Višnjić's sense of realistic detail ranges from the heroic and the tragic to the genuinely comic and humorous. Such are the moments when Ilija Birčanin frightens the powerful Dahija out of his wits as he throws at him the bag with the tax-money which he had collected, when the cowardly Captain Ćurčija explains that he cannot afford to fight a stronger enemy because he is not like a willow-tree, once cut, to sprout again, when Bey Ljubović challenges Bajo Pivljanin to a duel and threatens, if the challenge is refused, that he will send his enemy raw wool and a distaff to make a shirt and a pair of pants for himself.³⁵ Similarly, we well may ask why it is that the hands of the great Serbian captain Anto Bogićević tremble so that he cannot write a message requesting help for besieged Loznica. Is he so frightened of the Turks, or is he illiterate and frightened of paper—or perhaps just an old man with trembling hands?³⁶

The interplay of such vivid realistic elements with the invocations of Kosovo itself, with the visionary and miraculous illuminations of history suggest an almost medieval imaginative genius flourishing in the setting of much later times. Višnjić's ability to merge such diverse and often anachronistic elements into a unified vision of his tales make him an exemplary epic singer. In short, his ‘darkened sun’ is as much a heavenly omen as it is the result of the fog of gunpowder in Mačva and this is perhaps why he succeeded—to paraphrase his favourite image—in ‘tying the red flame into the skies’.³⁷ And last but not least, it was perhaps his singing to ‘the great Turks’ in Bosnia that enabled him to master their moral and psychological idiom and push the frontiers of the epic drama so far as to include the great and humane Turkish characters, like Sultan Murad and Old Fočo, within the scope of his vision.³⁸ In short, the maturity of his epic voice—that of a young blind boy, a victim of Turkish terror, a professional singer and craftsman, an entertainer of the Serbian rebels and an elderly exiled man—was not unearned.

A different but equally significant historical and biographical pattern is reflected in the life of Tešan Podrugović, the greatest of Karadžić's poets—for he did not sing but used to ‘speak’ his poems. He was born in the village of Kazanci in Herzegovina and he also travelled quite extensively, at first making his living as a trader. He was a huge man—as big as a man and a half (po drugog čoveka); hence Podrugović instead of Gavrilović which was in fact his original family name.³⁹ His courage equalled his stature: as a young man he was unperturbed when a group of Turks tried to rape one of the girls in his household and everyone ran away. He killed one of the Turks and drove away the others, so that at the age of about twenty-five he had to leave his home and take to the woods. As an outlaw he made a name for himself; when the Serbian Uprising broke out he crossed the river Drina and joined the rebels. He distinguished himself in the battles near the river Drina, but when his captain did him an injustice, he left the Serbian army so that he should not have to kill his superior. Before the defeat of Serbian rebels in 1813 he crossed the river Sava and came to live in Srem in utter poverty.⁴⁰ Karadžić found him making his living by cutting reeds and selling them in towns—a reticent and serious man, with a strange sense of humour, ‘scowling’ as he told his often funny stories.⁴¹

‘He was clever and, for an outlaw, an honest man’;⁴² and it was at this time, when Podrugović was about forty, that Karadžić recorded twenty-two poems from him. ‘I have never found anyone who knew the poems as well as he did. Each of his poems was a good one, because he—particularly as he did not sing but spoke his poems—understood and felt them, and he thought about what he said.’⁴³ He had a large repertoire and knew, in Karadžić's opinion, at least another hundred poems apart from the recorded ones; moreover, Karadžić claims that if Podrugović were ‘to hear the worst poem, after a few days he would speak it beautifully and in proper order which was characteristic of his other songs, or he would not remember it at all, and he would say that it was silly, not worth remembering or telling.’⁴⁴ However, Karadžić's recording of Podrugović's songs in the monastery of Šišatovac in Srem was suddenly interrupted. About Easter time in 1815 the news came that the second round of fighting against the Turks in Serbia had just started; it was, Karadžić tells us, ‘as if a hundred thorns had got under his skin’.⁴⁵ And it was with great effort that Karadžić kept him for a few more days to write down some more of his poems before Podrugović left for Serbia to ‘fight the Turks again’.⁴⁶ Obviously, he had more important business on hand than the most enlightened man in Serbia of his time could understand.

However, in the summer of the same year, he left the Serbian army again, went to Bosnia, killed a bey and became an outlaw. A little later he tried to get back to Serbia, but on his way he quarrelled with some Turks in an inn. He killed a few of them and, himself wounded, tried to escape. However, the Turks caught up with him and as he had no ammunition, he defended himself by throwing stones as he retreated up the mountain. With two more wounds he managed to escape, but they went bad and he had to return to a village in which he died a few days later.⁴⁷

Podrugović's courage and suffering, his physical stature and his irascible temper, his grand sense of personal, family, and national honour, his love of funny stories defying his experience of history suggest the characteristic figure of a great outlaw who becomes a fighter for national independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Besides, his personal fate and character also explain his imaginative attachment to certain themes. His sense of patriarchal loyalties—which turned him into an outlaw at the age of twenty-five—is clearly mirrored, for instance, in the poems in which the ideals of family village life dominate the heroic feudal scene. Thus in ‘Dušan's Wedding’ Miloš Voinović, the historical military commander who represented the emperor in his dealings with Dubrovnik, is turned into a shepherd who rides a horse covered by a bearskin and defends his imperial uncle in spite of the latter's credulity and slanderous insults. His outstanding stature, cunning and courage, and above all his skill in outwitting his enemies and making fools of them are clearly the reflections of Podrugović's own personality. A sense of patriarchal values also dominates his great song about the Battle of Kosovo in which Tsaritsa Milica obtains Tsar Lazar's blessing to have one of her brothers stay with her, but each of them feels in duty bound to die in the battle. Similarly, when a Turkish girl helps the wounded King Vukašin and accepts him as her brother-in-God but is betrayed by her own brother, Marko Kraljević will kill the treacherous brother when he offers King Vukašin's sword for sale (‘Marko Kraljević Knows His Father's Sword’).

However, Podrugović's greatest heroes—like Miloš Voinović who can jump over three horses with three fiery swords on them, or Marko Kraljević who plays by throwing his mace into the clouds and catching it again—are not only men of uncommon physical strength. They also illustrate Podrugović's unique sense of realistic comedy which often takes place within the framework of exalted heroic ideals. Thus Karadžić's claim that Podrugović liked to tell funny stories with a scowl defines the comic tenor of “Marko Kraljević and Ljutica Bogdan” in which two hot-headed Serbian heroes come to blows and frighten each other so much that their final reconciliation reflects above all their desire never to meet again.⁴⁸ An equally rich and often much more complex sense of comedy pervades, as we have seen, Podrugović's greatest songs about Marko Kraljević: “The Wedding of Marko Kraljević”, “Marko Kraljević Knows His Father's Sword”, “Marko Kraljević and the Daughter of the Arab King”, “Marko Kraljević and Musa Kesedžij”, “Marko Kraljević and Demo of the Mountain”. For it was in the traditional songs about Marko Kraljević and his exploits that Podrugović found the richest scope for the expression of his own genius—the genius of great comic dignity, of a hot-headed, irascible and clumsy, but also exalted sense of personal and communal honour. And, finally, it is also significant that this great outlaw has left us several of the classic lines about ‘the bad craft’ of outlawry,⁴⁹ about the ‘bitterness’ of the outlaws' fate, about the skill and courage of the man

Fit to overtake and run away
And stand his ground in terrible places …
Who fears no one but God Himself.(50)

To sum up, Karadžić's greatest epic poet, who knew that fighting was more important than singing, created the heroes who have to face—and use—the tricks and treacheries of history and Realpolitik to defend the dignity of human life on this earth.

The links between the singer's personal fate, his interest in particular themes of the epic heritage and his ability to make them live as poetry can also be discerned in the four outstanding songs—running to almost three thousand lines—which Karadžić recorded from Old Milija (Starac Milija). The honorary title of ‘starac’ was not the privilege of ‘just any elderly man’, but of ‘the wise man and the sage who knew the tradition’, who was held in high esteem, next to the village chief.⁵¹ This suggests that Karadžić's recording of Old Milija's songs took place when a wise and, as we shall see, tough man was breaking under the burden of old age, personal misfortunes and drink. For Old Milija was also, like Podrugović, born in old Herzegovina, in the vicinity of Kolašin (now in Montenegro) and, like Podrugović, he was also involved in a fight against ‘some Turks’, which forced him to leave his native area.⁵² Unlike Podrugović, however, he was not twenty at the time, but at least in his fifties. This is not the age when a farmer would easily leave his land; and there is no doubt that some great trouble must have driven Old Milija to escape to Serbia.⁵³ When Karadžić met him in 1822 in Kragujevac, the souvenirs of this trouble were still vivid: ‘all his head was scarred with cuts’, Karadžić tells us.⁵⁴ Besides, Karadžić had great difficulty getting in touch with the gifted, decrepit singer: the efforts of the head of the Serbian administration in the district of Požega were not sufficient to secure his presence. So in the autumn of 1822, when Karadžić came to Serbia on the invitation of its ruler Prince Miloš Obrenović, the illiterate Prince himself gave strict orders to his head clerk ‘to have Milija brought alive or dead’⁵⁵ and make special arrangements for normal work on Milija's farm in his absence. When Old Milija turned up, he was so weak with old age and his wounds that he was unable, and unwilling, to sing without ‘slivovits’. As soon as the drink was brought, he would pour it all into his own flask and disregarding the custom of offering it to other people present, he would start sipping and singing. People in the audience often teased him about this and asked him what the ‘slivovits’ was like. ‘He used to answer, shuddering and frowning: “Awful, my son, so bad, it couldn't be worse; Heaven forbid that you should drink it!”’⁵⁶ The recording itself did not go smoothly: Milija was unable to sing his songs with the required pauses. So he drawled out his phrases as best he could and Karadžić wrote as fast as he could, and this had to be repeated several times for each song. Four songs took more than fifteen days to write down. Finally, one of the loitering local louts—‘such as can be found in many courts, worrying only about how to turn everything into a joke’⁵⁷—persuaded Milija that all his harvest would go to the dogs if he went on wasting his time with such an irresponsible and mad fellow as Karadžić who cared, obviously, only for songs.⁵⁸ Milija soon disappeared—having collected his fee from the Prince's office—in the utmost secrecy. When Karadžić enquired about him again a year later, he was already dead.⁵⁹

Milija's personal misfortune which struck him in old age and drove him away from home is mirrored in all his poems in the imagery of ravaged homes when the heroes are far away or terrible miseries which befall them on their long journeys. In “Banović Strahinja”—running into eight hundred and ten lines, probably the greatest single epic poem in the language—the hero's home is devastated, his mother and his love are captured, while he feasts far away with his in-laws. This provides not only the moving force of the narrative, but also the most important inner link of Ban's sympathy with a noble-minded old Turkish dervish, a solo drinker like Milija himself.⁶⁰ For the two enemies understand each other much better than any of their friends: the old dervish had been humanely treated as Ban's prisoner a long time ago and he touches Ban to the quick when he tells him his story of his return to his ravaged home in which elder had come to grow in the doorposts. In “The Wedding of Maksim Crnojević”—one of the outstanding poems in the epic tradition, running to 1,226 lines⁶¹—the hero is disfigured with smallpox while his father is far away in Venice, looking for a bride for him. The universal catastrophe—the quarrel and the slaughter of the wedding party with far-reaching historical consequences—also occurs on their journey, far away from home. The long journey which takes Marko Kraljević, Miloš Obilić, and Winged Relja of Pazar to Captain Leka's castle results in the tragic maiming and blinding of the prospective bride who insults her great Serbian suitors (“Captain Leka's Sister”).⁶² And in ‘Captain Gavran and Limo’—with its magnificent image of the loot equally divided among the living and the dead outlaws—there is also a very long journey which takes the Montenegrin fighters to north-western Bosnia and the frontier area near the town of Bihać.⁶³ Long journeys are not, of course, uncommon in the epic tradition, but no other singer makes them a source of personal tragedies in all his poems. It is in this sense that Milija's songs embody a vivid awareness of his own personal tragedy as well as a wider concept of patriarchal village culture, the assumption that being far away from home is one of the main sources of misfortune and misery in human life.

Karadžić's description makes it clear that Old Milija tried to extinguish his sense of misfortune and misery in drinking, just as the old Turkish dervish does in “Banović Strahinja”. Besides, Milija's representation of Marko Kraljević, a notorious drinker in the songs of many other singers, is outstanding, not perhaps because Milija's Marko drinks a whole ‘tub’ of wine and gives one to his horse, but because this enormous amount of wine makes the horse red up to his ears and Marko only to his eyes!⁶⁴ And when the wedding party in ‘The Wedding of Maksim Crnojević’ comes to the sea, everyone does what he likes best:

Every drunkard tips up his flask.(65)

The number of drunkards suggested shows that a common element in the tradition must have been exceptionally near to the singer's heart.

Finally, the poetic genius of the unfortunate old drunkard saw everything on a magnificent scale. His Strahinić Ban is not only richly dressed like so many other epic heroes: the rosy colour of his clothes surpasses that of the sun, their redness is redder than water—presumably at sunset.⁶⁶ In “Captain Leka's Sister” Marko Kraljević appears all in gold and his horse is covered in lynx fur;⁶⁷ Miloo Obilić has ‘three storeys’ of rich clothes on him;⁶⁸ the Winged Relja of Pazar makes both of them look shabby by his appearance.⁶⁹ The gold shirt which the mother-in-law gives to the prospective bridegroom in “The Wedding of Maksim Crnojević” has a serpent's head under the throat with a precious stone so brilliant that the groom will need no candle when he takes his bride to their bedroom.⁷⁰ Moreover, the cruelties of Milija's heroes and heroines are on the same scale: no other epic heroine ever dared insult the three great Serbian dukes as Captain Leko's sister did, no other epic hero was as generous as Strahinić Ban who spared the life of his unfaithful love. This is why it has sometimes been claimed—not perhaps with any reliability and certainly with little sense of what Old Milija's art is about—that the behaviour of his heroes and heroines suggests a certain decline of patriarchal moral norms in actual life, characteristic of Milija's times and perhaps of his own personal experience.⁷¹ Be that as it may, in Milija's songs we are faced with a tragic range and intensity which endorse the broken moral patterns and reveal an outstandingly generous and perceptive poetic mind.

Far less is known about Karadžić's other singers. But it is worth noting that Old Raško—the singer of several of the best poems with motifs from Serbian medieval history, such as the splendid, if highly controversial ‘Building of Skadar’ and the universally acknowledged ‘Uroš and the Mrljavčevići’—was also born in Kolašin, in old Herzegovina, and came to Serbia at the beginning of the First Serbian Uprising.⁷² Stojan the Outlaw—the singer of ‘The Wedding of King Vukašin’, one of the greatest poems with medieval heroes—was also born in Herzegovina. But when he came to Serbia and gave up outlawry, he ran into trouble for having killed an old woman who, he believed, was a witch who had ‘eaten’ his child.⁷³ His idea of women and witches may go some way towards explaining his interest in such characters as the faithless Vidosava, the villain in the story of ‘The Wedding of King Vukašin’ and one of the greatest ‘bitches’ in the Serbo-Croat epic tradition.⁷⁴ It is also noteworthy that the greatest of Karadžić's Montenegrin singers Duro Milutinović, the singer of the two best poems from this area, ‘Perović Batrić’ and ‘The Piperi and Tahir Pasha’, was a blind man who brought a letter from the Montenegrin Prince Bishop to Karadorde in 1809 and stayed in Serbia.⁷⁵

To sum up, the existing evidence about Karadžić's greatest singers—and it is evidence recorded by an outstandingly shrewd and objective observer, whose sober judgement is illustrated by everything he wrote, including his historical writings, his great dictionary and grammar—seems to point not only to the basic routes of the Serbian migrations but also to a very lively interplay of the oral epic traditions with the personal involvement of the singers in the burning issues of contemporary history. But if this is a major part of the picture there is also another vast and important area which tells a completely different story and which is not usually fully recognized. It is the area of the great epic songs of blind, pious old women who did not move about and were sometimes linked with particular monasteries. Their greatest achievements are to be found in the songs about medieval feudal times and their sense of the distant past seems to be stronger and sometimes more accurate than that of other singers. So, for instance, ‘Momir the Foundling’—a great song originating perhaps from a bugarštica which derived its story from Byzantine sources and, ultimately, from 1001 Nights—was recorded from ‘blind Živana who sat in Zemun’.⁷⁶ Two more songs about Marko Kraljević—one of them being ‘Marko Kraljević and Alil-aga’, one of the finest in Karadžić's collection—were written down from the same singer.⁷⁷ Blind Jeca who, apparently, also ‘sat’ in Zemun was the singer of ‘The Death of Duke Prijezda’, deservedly one of the best-known poems in the language, the greatest example of a tragic feudal drama in the Serbo-Croat oral epic tradition.⁷⁸ One of the very few songs about the Battle of Kosovo in Karadžić's collection, ‘Tsaritsa Milica and Duke Vladeta’, was written down from blind Stepanija of whom we know only that she was born in Jadar in Serbia.⁷⁹ Karadžić also notes that he received a variant of this song—‘almost the same as this one’—from another source.⁸⁰ What ‘almost the same’ exactly means is difficult to say—but does it suggest a higher degree of memorizing than we usually find in the tradition? And last but not least Lukijan Mušicki, a learned versifier and the abbot of the monastery of Šišatovac in Srem, recorded—or had someone record for him—from a blind woman in the neighbouring village of Grgurevci some of the finest poems about feudal times in Karadžić's collection: ‘The Downfall of the Serbian Empire’, ‘The Kosovo Girl’ and ‘Marko Kraljević Abolishes the Wedding Tax’.⁸¹ ‘The Kosovo Girl’ is one of the finest songs in the tradition and it is astoundingly accurate in historical detail—the communion of the Serbian army on the eve of the battle, and the representation of the silver gilt rings, feudal gowns with monograms and circular ornaments, the scarves woven with gold threads and given in token of betrothal. S. Radojčić—one of the most distinguished Serbian art historians—has checked these details against the evidence of contemporary Byzantine military tracts, Serbian monastic literature and medieval fresco painting. This has led him to claim that their survival can only be explained by the assumption that the poem was memorized by generations of singers and repeated ‘like Paternoster—with or without understanding—but accurately, line by line’.⁸²

Of course, this need not have been the case. But even if generations of singers memorized only stock phrases, formulas, and clusters of formulas hardly ever running beyond a few lines, even if they learned only how to handle some specific narrative and stylistic structures, this does not imply merely the command of a poetic language. This language itself was a way of memorizing history, many of its physical details, actual events and social concepts. At the same time this language was not being mastered in the abstract, but within narrative structures which were a way of responding to history and interpreting its significance. These narrative structures were open to change and adaptation, they could absorb new concepts and new material; and it was in a dramatic interplay of the past and the present, the imaginative interplay of anachronistic and anatopistic features, that the singers created their greatest achievements. For the oral epic singing at its best was both a way of coming to terms with history and a means of getting out of it. This is why its ultimate significance cannot be grasped in the analysis either of the technique of its composition or of the diverse historical sources of its social concepts, motifs, and themes. For a song about fighting is not the same thing as fighting or even as the recording of an actual response to it. Similarly, songs about great defeats, vassalage, outlawry, or rebellions attempt to grasp in language not only their historical but also their moral significance. They interpret the actual in terms of what it means as a challenge to the human spirit and to the whole tradition of oral poetic language in which it expresses itself. This is why the way in which diverse stylistic and narrative devices, the whole anachronistic heritage of the historical material embedded in the nature of the oral epic convention itself, has to be the object of inquiry: what sense—if any—does the Serbo-Croat oral epic language at its best make of what it remembers of several centuries of the Balkan history?

Notes

1. See V. Han, ‘Putevima narodne tradicije od srednjovekovnih fresaka do folklornih originala’, Zbornik Svetozara Radojčića, Filozofski fakultet, Belgrade, 1969, pp. 391-8.

2. D. Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić 1787-1864, p. 28.

3. ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, i, p. 529.

4. Ibid., pp. 529-30.

5. Ibid.

6. Enciklopedija Jugoslavije, vii, p. 506.

7. See ibid.

8. See ibid.

9. See ibid., pp. 506-7.

10. See above pp. 49-58.

11. See V. Latković, ‘O pevačima srpskohrvatskih narodnih epskih pesama do kraja xviii veka’, Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju i folklor, xx (1954), p. 188.

12. See above pp. 12-15.

13. See above pp. 16-19.

14. See V. Latković, op. cit., pp. 191-2.

15. See above pp. 160-1, 164-7.

16. See below p. 322.

17. Karadžić refers to his father as ‘a pious and earnest man who cared little for songs except in so far as he memorized them, almost accidentally, from his father Joksim and his brother Toma, who not only knew many songs and were glad to sing and tell them, but also made up songs themselves’ (‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 374).

18. See ibid., pp. 374-5.

19. ‘Višnjić told Lukijan Mušicki how he began his songs about the Uprising. He asked the fighters, he said, as they were coming back from the battlefield: “who was their commander”, where they fought, “who was killed, who they fought against”. This is to say—he collected his material. The singer did not tell Mušicki how he turned the dry details into poetry. He himself was not aware of the secret.’ V. Nedić, ‘Filip Višnjić’, Narodna književnost, p. 331.

20. L. Ranke, A History of Servia and the Servian Revolution, London, 1847, p. 76. See also below pp. 322-3.

21. V. S. Karadžić, ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 365.

22. V. Nedić, ‘Filip Višnjić’, Narodna književnost, p. 324.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Both these heroes figure in the famous ‘Battle of Loznica’ (Karadžić, iv, No. 33) and ‘Luko Lazarević and Pejzo’ (Karadžić, iv, No. 34). Stojan Čupić also figures in ‘Čupić's Boast’ (‘Hvala Čupićeva’, Karadžić, iv, No. 36) and in ‘The Battle of Salaš’ (Karadžić, iv, No. 28).

26. See above pp. 286-7 and below pp. 340-1.

27. V. Nedić, ‘Filip Višnjić’, Narodna književnost, p. 325.

28. ‘Dijeleći kljastu i slijepu’, ‘Sveti Savo’, Karadžić, ii, No. 24, l. 42.

29. See above pp. 142-3.

30. ‘(Treći ćemer) kljastu i slijepu, / Nek slijepi po svijetu hode, / Nek pjevaju i spominju Marka’. ‘Smrt Marka Kraljevića’, Karadžić, ii, No. 74, ll. 110-12.

31. See ‘St Sava and Hasan Pasha’ (‘Sveti Savo i Hasan-paša’), Karadžić, iii, No. 14. For the miraculous element in the songs of blind singers see above pp. 107-9 and, particularly, pp. 161-2.

32. See ‘The Death of Marko Kraljević’, Karadžić, ii, No. 74, ll. 12-14, 49-66.

33. See ‘The Beginning of the Revolt Against the Dahijas’, Karadžić, iv, No. 24, ll. 1-68.

34. See above pp. 280-95 and below pp. 340-2.

35. See ‘Bajo Pivljanin and Bey Ljubović’ (‘Bajo Pivljanin i beg Ljubović’), Karadžić, iii, No. 70, ll. 14-19.

36. See ‘The Battle of Loznica’, Karadžić, iv, No. 33, ll. 291-2.

37. See above p. 267.

38. See above pp. 292-4.

39. See V. S. Karadžić, ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 364.

40. See V. Nedić, ‘Tešan Podrugović’, Narodna književnost, pp. 344-6.

41. See ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 364.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., pp. 364-5.

44. ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 378.

45. Ibid., p. 364.

46. Ibid.

47. See V. Nedić, ‘Tešan Podrugović’, Narodna književnost, p. 346.

48. See ‘Marko Kraljević i Ljutica Bogdan’, Karadžić, ii, No. 39, ll. 12-37, 113-16.

49. See above p. 246.

50. See note 10, p. 246.

51. M. Lutovac, ‘Ibarski Kolašin’, Srpski etnografski zbornik, lxvii (1954), p. 114.

52. ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 366.

53. Lj. Zuković suggests that Old Milija was, if not a ‘real outlaw’, at least ‘an outlaw of the Montenegrin type, i.e. from time to time he joined an outlaw company and when the danger was over, he returned home’ (‘Vukov pjevač starac Milija’, Putevi, xi [1965], p. 604). Zuković's argument rests partly on the interpretation of Karadžić's note that Old Milija ‘escaped to’ (‘dobežao’), not just ‘came’ or ‘moved’ to Serbia.

54. ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 367.

55. See ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. See ibid.

59. See ibid., pp. 367-8.

60. See above p. 136.

61. ‘Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića’, Karadžić, ii, No. 89.

62. ‘Sestra Leke kapetana’, Karadžić, ii, No. 40.

63. See above p. 240-2.

64. See ‘Sestra Leke kapetana’, Karadžić, ii, No. 40, ll. 56-63.

65. ‘Ko l' bekrija, naginje čuturom’, Karadžić, ii, No. 89, l. 594.

66. ‘The cloth was redder than the water, / The cloth was pinker than the sun’ (‘Što od vode čoha crvenija, / A od sunca čoha rumenija’), ‘Banović Strahinja’, Karadžić, ii, No. 44, ll. 24-5.

67. See ‘Sestra Leke kapetana’, Karadžić, ii, No. 40, l. 54.

68. ‘Tri kata haljina’, ibid., l. 144.

69. See ibid., ll. 187-92.

70. See ‘Ženidba Maksima Crnojevića’, Karadžić, ii, No. 89, ll. 791-8.

71. See P. Bakotić, ‘Starac Milija’, Školski vjesnik, xii (1962), No. 8, p. 26.

72. See ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 368. For the discussion of ‘Uroš and the Mrljavčevići’ and ‘The Building of Skadar’ see above pp. 138-41, 147-151.

73. See above p. 127 and particularly note 10 on that page.

74. See above pp. 128-31. There is also an example of a treacherous wife in Stojan the Outlaw's song ‘Vuk Jerinić and Zukan the Ensign’: Hajka, Zukan's ‘faithful love’, takes hold of a broken sword and helps Zukan's enemy to slaughter her husband (see ‘Vuk Jerinić i Zukan barjaktar’, Karadžić, iii, No. 54, ll. 209-17).

75. See ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 369.

76. Ibid., p. 370. See also above pp. 115-17.

77. See above pp. 199-201. The other song which Karadžić recorded from blind Živana is ‘Marko Kraljević and the Twelve Arabs’ (‘Marko Kraljević i 12 Arapa’, Karadžić, ii, No. 63).

78. See above pp. 89-91 and below pp. 337-8.

79. See ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 372. See also above pp. 170-1.

80. ‘Predgovor’, Karadžić, iv, p. 372.

81. See above pp. 161-2, 171-2, 203-4.

82. S. Radojčić, ‘Kosovka djevojka’, Uzori i dela starih srpskih umetnika, p. 239.