Milman Parry

Well, how are we to explain the discrepancies that are so great between these worlds? The answer that almost everybody now accepts without argument is that these poems were created orally and passed on orally, that they were not written down and so that what we have in the poems of Homer reflects centuries of bards passing on bits of the poem or the poem in various versions, being always creative.

I mean, any bard, if by analogy we know about bards in the modern world, we have some evidence on that, Milman Parry is a Harvard scholar, back in the 20's went to Yugoslavia to live in the mountains, in the backwoods, and he lived with people who still had these bards around who created epic narratives of considerable length, nothing resembling Homeric length, I must say, nothing that long, but long enough in which they would tell the same stories in verse and music, and you could recognize the story as you went from bard to bard.

but every bard added and subtracted things to suit his own talents.

That's the idea of the game.

Yes.

That question of orality, it reminded me of the, um, something that Walter Ong said about Milman Parry sort of recording the, you know, going to, going to the Yugoslavia to record the oral poets there and, and saying that he had this idea that Parry's special type of interest in Homer was made possible by the fact that he lived when the typographical era was breaking up, and this idea of, you know, so the arrival...

The orality of telephones, radio, and television, it meant he, the arrival of those new forms of orality made it possible to imagine what it might have been like before writing, and so it made it possible to imagine the oral culture that, that Homer then came out of, and, you know, and even more so now than 100 years ago.

I was completely taken aback to read the other day that Charlemagne wasn't necessarily able to read and write, that he began to learn, try to learn to read, uh, later in his life.

That's a controversial question.

When I was in graduate school, when you read Ab- Albert Lord or Milman Parry, it was considered purely oral poetry.

And Milman Parry in the 1920s, a famous classicist, went over to Serbia-Croatia, and he saw oral boards, bards up in the Balkans, and he said to them, "Can you give me some songs?" And they recited, not in hexameter, but in a metrical pattern with formula, with type scenes.

And then he said, "Tell me a, write a poem about me." And it took them a little while, and they said, "Once upon a time, came across Albert Lord, da, da, many wisdomed Albert Lord." Uh, and they showed the re- repetition.

So he wrote, he was a student of Milman Parry.

And Milman Parry, and he then said...

So when I was a graduate student 50 years ago, everybody thought they were purely oral.

Since then, people said, "If you go back and look at oral poetry, it's hard to get that level of detail by memory and by formulaic." So they might have had prompt cards because it was the age of writing, and Homer, maybe he wrote a, a little thing down that said, "Cyclops scene, then Calypso, flashback," et cetera, 'cause they're so intricate with flashbacks ahead and back in time.

It goes pretty far back actually.

You can find people in the 1700s even talking about the orality of the ancient epics, but I think the scholarship on it really gets going with a pair of researchers named Milman Parry and Albert Lord.

Uh, Milman Parry was writing his thesis starting in 1928, and he realizes over the course of his work, like, how these formulaic phrases all fit together.

He says, "This could never be the work of any one man."

Hmm.

[singing]

And just gives us a lot of insight into how the tradition worked.

Milman Parry ended up dying tragically young at the age of 33, I believe, but Albert Lord ended up going on to do additional field work in the coming decades.