This limited edition contains the critical texts of eight long oral epics from four bards of northern Bosnia, the northern most predominantly Muslim district in Europe. Sung with the accompaniment of the picked tambura rather than the bowed gusle that is familiar elsewhere in the Yugoslav tradition, the epos in northern Bosnia was often strophic or stanzaic rather than stichic. This volume is the first publication in the more than century-old scholarship on South Slavic oral traditions to take note of that fact, and to document it with specific texts. The editor's Prolegomena include detailed discussions of the principles of rhythm in this epos, the sources of the tales in it, and extensive comparative commentaries linking the eight narratives with those found in other Yugoslav towns, especially with the tradition of Avdo Međedović at Bijelo Polje.

The Wedding of Vlahinjic Alija represents a unique experiment in field collecting of oral traditional epic poetry. In order to determine whether and exactly how the text of a long epic would change as the best of oral poets told and retold it, Milman Parry first made a complete audio-recording of Avdo Međedovic singing this long heroic narrative, and then some days later had the entire epic taken down again by dictation from the same singer. Both texts, the sung (6053 verses) and the dictated (5883 verses) are presented in this volume, showing precisely the effects both of recomposition and of the "intervention" of writing by an amanuensis. Osmanbeg Delibegovic i Pavičevic Luka is 13,326 verses long, a modern oral traditional epic of truly Homeric length. It is the longest complete and continuous oral epic text that has yet been recorded anywhere in the modern world.