SOURCE: Holton, Milne, and Vasa D. Mihailovich. “Introduction: Vuk Stafanovic Karadžić and Songs of the Serbian People.” In Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžić, pp. 1-12. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Holton and Mihailovich provide an overview of Karadžić's work, with an emphasis on his collection of oral folksongs.

The oral poems translated herein are taken from a single work of collection undertaken by one man, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864), a scholar and linguist living in the city of Vienna in the early years of the nineteenth century. He began his work in 1813, around the time of the collapse of the first Serbian insurrection against the Turks.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was born in 1787 in the village of Tršić in Western Serbia, the son of a Serbian peasant. A sickly child, he was...