Certainly there was a great deal of balladry practiced everywhere in the Balkans from the earliest historically recorded moments onward, and there were always numerous individuals with personal or familial antecedents or other strong connections in what Karadžić thought was the preeminent epic-singing region, who for one reason or another had emigrated from that region to other places outside it, taking with them when they departed some limited personal part of that region's culture of epic poetry into neighboring lands. Such persons and their inheritors typically knew what they knew when collectors tapped them, but had no means any longer to hear or to learn in traditional fashion any other, further epic tales beyond those already in their possession. Through such persons, the tradition had for centuries a certain penumbral radiance in all directions beyond its own borders.

    Within its proper borders however, oral epic singers' experience was typically quite different. At any given moment throughout an entire lifetime, a singer might find himself in close proximity to, if not actually in the immediate physical presence of, other singers better, worse, or equal to himself. Whether reluctantly, gladly, or indifferently, each singer had thus inevitably to expect from time to time a certain commerce in epic narration with other singers; and where this happened continuously over the course of successive generations, the tradition throve—that is to say, there really was an active, ‘living’ tradition properly speaking. Conversely, where such cross-fertilization ceased, there was no dynamic, productive, changing tradition, but only the afterglow of a tradition that had once been, but died. For as in any other aspect of traditional culture, it was not only what the men of each new generation learned in youth from their forebears and continued thereafter to reproduce when the previous generation had passed that mattered, but also the creative competition of men who lifelong learned from and emulated each other in the practice of a tradition shared within their own generation.

    We can now say with much more precision than Vuk Karadžić could where the outer limits of the Serbo-Croatian oral epic tradition so defined were situated. The Heimat of that tradition lay within natural geographic boundaries delineated at their westernmost extremity by the watershed of the Una River along its whole course from its origin at the northern foot of the Dinaric Alps to its confluence with the Sava River. The northern frontier ran thence eastward along the middle course of the Sava River to the mouth of its tributary, the Drina River, then southward along the Drina to the eastern declivity of Mount Tara. From that region the frontier extended eastward again along the valley of the Western Morava to its confluence with the Ibar River, then southward the whole length of the Ibar to and across the mountain ridge that separates the upper Ibar from the upper Lim (Mount Smiljevica). The headwaters of the River Lim and the Prokletije Mountains were the active Serbo-Croatian tradition's southernmost confines.

    From there the frontier lay along the watershed of the Morača and its tributaries, along the ridge of mountains overlooking the Bay of Kotor, and northward thence the length of Popovo Polje and the Trebišnica River in the hinterland above Dubrovnik. The marshy estuary of the Neretva and the crest of the Dinaric Alps along their entire extent from Imotsko Polje in the south to the headwaters of the Una River in the north completed the perimeter of the tradition's home territory.

    Many legendary events celebrated in the epos were set in lands north or west of the Una, Korana, and Kupa Rivers (especially the Pannonian lowlands, the Lika, and Dalmatia), but there is no good evidence that the tradition ever flourished on those territories. The Dalmatian coast and the islands in particular belonged to another culture, that of the Adriatic littoral, just as they had from Hellenic, Illyrian, and Roman times, and the sporadic epic singing found there was never more than an occasional infusion from Dalmatia's tramontane hinterland.

    Throughout the epic-singing region as a whole, singers in the present century who were willing to suggest any one part of the region as being in some sense more significant than others told their collectors (if the singers were Orthodox) to look to Montenegro; but if the singers happened to be Muslim, then they considered the poets on the northernmost confines of Bosnia to be the best.

    Part of the northern Bosnian singers' succès d'estime among their own kind elsewhere was surely due to the fillip given their reputation, directly or indirectly, by Luka Marjanović's published collection of epics from that very region. [Bishop Petar Njegoš's bookish influence was similarly responsible for the high reputation of Montenegrin heroic poetry among the Orthodox. Another perceptible reason also was the closer proximity of northern Bosnia than of any other locale in the epic-singing territory to the principal places celebrated in the epos as the scenes of heroic encounters: places in the Lika, coastal Dalmatia, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and so forth. Northern Bosnia too, as the northernmost precinct of permanent Muslim settlement in European Turkey, naturally enjoyed a certain aura of special cultural as well as political and military significance among Muslims.

    But even when one has suitably discounted all three of the foregoing essentially spurious reasons for the uppermost reputation of northern Bosnian epic singers, a certain kernel of fact remains that is difficult to ignore. For one thing, many cryptic or puzzling allusions and references occurring in the songs of other regions—things which even the singers themselves in those places evidently did not understand rightly or at all—were well and amply rationalized in the epics collected by various unrelated hands from Northern Bosnia, where the singers more often than not understood such elsewhere-cryptic things at least plainly, and sometimes even quite profoundly.

    Moreover, the diversity and complexity of narratives found in northern Bosnia make it easy for one who is already familiar with them to understand whatever he may meet in the epic singing elsewhere, which will present him few difficult new puzzles or surprises. But for someone who is acquainted first with the epos in other districts, quite the reverse will be true: nothing heard elsewhere (and certainly not in Montenegro) ever sufficiently prepares one for the teeming variety and ramifying legends of the northernmost epic singing. Singers in other districts sometimes sang longer, but no others sang so multifariously as those of northern Bosnia. Correspondingly, no one can claim to have understood the character and scope of the Serbo-Croatian tradition who does not know its northern Bosnian manifestations.