3 - Oral poetry

Summary

INTRODUCTION: ORAL POETRY AND ORALITY

Modern study of Greek orality — perhaps even of orality itself — is founded on Homeric epic poetry. In a brilliant series of articles between 1928 and his untimely death in 1935, Milman Parry argued that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were traditional oral poetry, the product of a long tradition rather than the creation of one poetic genius. Parry and his pupil Albert Lord turned to the contemporary illiterate bards of southern Yugoslavia in the 1930s and 1950s. Here they could see how an oral poet actually composed in performance and, in particular, how he used a traditional stock of set pieces, formulae and set themes to help him compose as he sang. Parry's detailed analysis of Homer seemed to reveal a similar system of traditional formulae: thus the Homeric epics were oral poetry.

This theory had precedents in earlier work but it proved to be revolutionary. Homer is now widely known at an oral poet. Oral poetry was put on the map. The ‘oral theory’ or ‘Parry—Lord theory’, as it is sometimes known, has been applied to other poetic traditions of epic or archaic nature — Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, African epic, Karakirghiz poetry, to name only a few.