Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women
The 40 oral ballads, many appearing in multiple versions, were
performed by Bosnian women and gathered in the Gacko region of
Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1930s. Using Parry and Lord as a
starting point, Vidan supplements their theories with broader
ethnological, cultural and historical data. She seeks to understand
issues such as the stability of the ballad, its transmission and
dissemination, and its ties to mythology. She addresses an
imbalance created by the pronounced focus on South Slavic epic
songs in scholarly work. While showing that each of the narrative
genres in verse maintains its own stylistic features, she
demonstrates that they nevertheless consist of the same basic
compositional elements. In addition to comparative analysis of the
materials from the Parry Collection, Vidan discusses numerous
examples from published and unpublished sources in Croatian and
Serbian.
