Milman Parry (June 23, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Darwin of Homeric studies". In addition, he was a pioneer in the discipline of oral tradition.
Early life and education
Parry was born in 1902 in Oakland, California. He grew up in a house full of books, with a father who was self-taught and widely read. He and his siblings often recited poems from memory as a game.
He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1919, and studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) where he became proficient in ancient Greek and the Classics. He then studied for a PhD at the Sorbonne in Paris and was a student of the linguist Antoine Meillet.
In his dissertations, which were published in French in 1928, Parry demonstrated that the Homeric style is characterized by the extensive use of fixed expressions, or "formulas", adapted for expressing a given idea under the same metrical conditions. For example, "divine Odysseus", "many-counseled Odysseus", or "much-enduring divine Odysseus" had less to do with moving the story forward than with being in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter verse. The oral nature of the poem was evident in the dependence on these devices, both as memory aids and to allow for easier improvisation. They were clues suggesting that the two Homeric epics were not the inventions of a single poet but had been gradually evolved in a long-standing tradition. As one scholar put it, "Parry never solved the Homeric Question [who was Homer]; he demonstrated that it was irrelevant".
Meillet introduced Parry to Matija Murko, who had worked on oral epic traditions in Yugoslavia and had made phonograph recordings of some performances.
Academic career
In 1928-1929, Parry began his academic career as a Professor of Latin and Greek at Drake University. Between 1933 and 1935 Parry, at the time an assistant professor at Harvard University, made two visits to Yugoslavia, where he studied and recorded oral traditional poetry in Serbo-Croat with the help on his second visit of his assistant Albert Lord, and a native singer and fixer named Nikola Vujnović, who became essential to finding and communicating with other singers, known as the guslar. They worked in Bosnia, where literacy was lowest and the oral tradition was, in the term used by Parry and Lord, "purest". They made thousands of hours of recordings in remote mountain villages of illiterate farmers who sang epic songs of prodigious length from memory. Parry and Lord recorded on newly invented equipment, flat aluminum records instead of vinyl, custom made for the expedition, with only a five minute recording time. Discs were continually swapped with a special two-disc machine to create a single long recording, later transcribed. They also recorded conversations between guslari after it became apparent this was also part of the creative process that fertilized improvisation.
The "jewel of the collection" is The Wedding Song of Smailagić Meho, by a poet named Avdo Međedović, "by far the most skillful and versatile performer whom Milman encountered". One of the songs, running to some 13,000 lines and performed over five days, was the closest analogue to Homer in quality and quantity; Parry said one "has the overwhelming sense that, in some way, he is hearing Homer". Međedović boasted he knew longer songs.
In his American publications of the 1930s, Parry introduced the hypothesis that the formulaic structure of Homeric epic is to be explained as a characteristic feature of oral composition, the so-called Oral Formulaic Hypothesis. After Parry's death, the idea was championed by Albert Lord, most notably in The Singer of Tales (1960).