Milman Parry

Milman Parry (June 23, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was an American Classicist. A pioneer in the study of oral tradition, his theories on the origin of Homeric epics have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Darwin of Homeric studies".

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. and studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) where he became proficient in ancient Greek and the Classics. As one scholar put it, "Parry never solved the Homeric Question [who was Homer]; he demonstrated that it was irrelevant". 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

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).

The musical part of his recordings made in Yugoslavia was later notated and published postumum in the fifties by Béla Bartók, commissioned by the Columbia University in 1942. This publication is provided with a long Introduction by Bartók.

Death and commemoration When Parry returned to the United States in 1935, he learned that his wealthy mother-in-law had fallen in with some people who were exploiting her without her knowledge. During his field excursions in the Balkans, Parry carried a gun with him, and he packed one in his luggage for a visit to California with his wife for the purpose of aiding his mother-in-law. In the late afternoon of December 3, at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles, Parry was dressing for a dinner with friends, while his wife was in another room. Accounts differ, but she either heard a muffled shot or Parry groaning, and found him shot in the heart. He died soon afterwards. Police detectives determined that the gun was fired accidentally as he was removing clothing from his luggage. The safety had not been set and the trigger had become entangled in a shirt, which bore gunpowder burns.

Various rumors circulated, including the ideas that Parry committed suicide because he was despondent over Harvard's failure to give him a permanent appointment, or that his wife killed him. They had two children, Marian and Adam Parry (1928–1971). The latter was the chairman of Yale University's Classics Department, until his untimely death, together with his wife Anne Amory, in a motorbike accident.

Publications