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...