Milman Parry

study of

• Homeric epics
  • 
    In Homer: Homer as an oral poet

    …name of an American scholar, Milman Parry, that the Homeric tradition was an oral one—that this was a kind of poetry made and passed down by word of mouth and without the intervention of writing. Indeed Homer’s own term for a poet is aoidos, “singer.” The Odyssey describes two such…

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  • In classical scholarship: Classical scholarship in the 20th century

    …proof of an American scholar, Milman Parry (1902–35), that the poems show many characteristics of a poetic tradition that has passed through a long phase of oral transmission.

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  • 
    In writing: Writing as a system of signs

    The American scholar Milman Parry, writing in the 1920s, showed that the Homeric epic poems, long regarded as models of literary virtuosity, were in fact the product not of a literate but of an oral tradition. These poems were produced by bards who could not write and were…

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• oral tradition
  • In heroic poetry

    …1934 the American Homeric scholar Milman Parry transcribed an epic poem of 12,000 lines (the length of the Odyssey) from an illiterate bard in southern Serbia. Equally astonishing feats of memory and improvisation were reported by Russian scholars working among Uzbek and Kyrgyz bards.

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  • 
    In oral tradition: Discovery and rediscovery

    …for example, two American scholars, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, conducted extensive fieldwork on oral tradition in the former Yugoslavia. They recorded more than 1,500 orally performed epic poems in an effort to determine how stories that often reached thousands of lines in length could be recalled and performed by…

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