The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry

by Milman Parry, Adam Parry (Editor)

Milman Parry, who died in 1935 while a young assistant professor at Harvard, is now considered one of the leading classical scholars of this century. Yet Parry's articles and French dissertations--highly original contributions to the study of Homer--have until now been difficult to obtain. The Making of Homeric Verse for the first time collects these landmark works in one volume together with Parry's unpublished M.A. thesis and extracts from his Yugoslavian journal, which contains notes on Serbo-Croatian poetry and its relation to Homer. Adam Parry, the late son of the scholar, has translated the French dissertations, written an introduction on the life and intellectual development of his father, and provided a survey of later work on Homer conducted in Parry's glorious tradition.

Genres: History, Classics, Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Criticism

Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Milman Parry, you'll remember, is the guy who took a tape recorder and an undergrad to Yugoslavia in the 1930s to prove a very important point about Homer. Despite being American, most of his significant publications up to that point had been in French, as he obtained his PhD under Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, so in 1971 his son Adam, by then himself the chairman of Yale's Classics department, undertook to translate and publish them along with all of his other publications, many of which had become difficult to find, his MA thesis (cruelly), and redacted notes for what was presumably to become his magnum opus, never finished on account of an American moment in a hotel room in 1935, at the age of 33.
(Parry's trips were also fictionalised by Ismael Kadare in his 1981 novel The File on H, which I reviewed a while back.)

Leaving out trivialities (a review, some abstracts, a few very short essays of negligible relevancy to anything), the meat here is Parry's two doctoral dissertations (of which the former, Homeric Formulae and Homeric Metre, is by far the longest inclusion), two longer papers titled Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making, his first work after his first trip to Yugoslavia (Whole Formulaic Verses in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song), and the aforementioned fragmentary notes (Ćor Huso: A Study of Southslavic Song).
What's striking in these is how many of the ideas we (that is, broadly non-specialist classical philologists) associate with Parry today actually predate his trips—very nearly everything I already knew about Parry's positions came up in his dissertations, in 1928. Furthermore, none of it is original to him: Parry freely and correctly acknowledges the works of Homeric scholars going back decades, and is conspicuously part of an on-going academic conversation rather than its beginning and end. While it would be fair to say his positions have (in general) aged better than those of some of his colleagues, there is a definite tendency today to overstate just how revolutionary any of them were. Hell, he wasn't even the first to have the idea to study contemporary oral poets for relevancy, as he himself will also tell you.
For that matter, even his essay written after his first trip is certainly a lot of fun, but hardly world-shattering. Parry's reputation surely owes more to the efforts of Albert Lord (aforementioned undergraduate, who wrote a book of his own) than it does to his own publications.

So is there value in this collection beyond historical curiosity? Probably not really—Parry's writing, while uncommonly lucid, is hard to digest at times (a combination of translation from French, which is not a concise language, and shifting esotericity) and later writers have synthesised the salient points more effectively (certainly Adam Parry did, in his lengthy introduction), and some of it is clearly out of date (all of this was before the decipherment of Linear B, for instance, which colours the discussion of the "Arcado-Cyprian element" in Homeric Greek).
There's also the strong sense that the most interesting parts of what Parry had to say just never got written, and not just because of Ćor Huso: he spends a lot of time comparing the Iliad and the Odyssey to the Aeneid and the Argonautica (which, as clearly literary creations of a single author, present the starkest contrasts), but not to other preserved epics and epic-adjacents; more time is spent comparing the Greek of the Homers to that of Euripides than to that of Hesiod or the Homeric hymns, and e.g. the Batrachomyomachia is mentioned not at all. More could have been done there, and Parry could have done it better than most.

Historical curiosity isn't nothing, though, and Milkman Perry is a sufficiently Big Name that his work can be interesting in its own right, not just as part of the modern synthesis. If your interest is Homer first and foremost, however, I'd look elsewhere first.


(Incidentally, my own area of interest is mainly historical and comparative linguistics, and the essay arguably catering most to that is The Homeric Gloss: a Study in Word-sense—one of the shorter, less relevant ones. Unfortunately here Parry shows himself to have negligible interest in etymology unless it directly affects syllable weight (as in another essay, The Traces of the Digamma in Ionic and Lesbian Greek), which is disappointing coming from a student of Meillet's, and almost all of the words whose meanings of which he claims we are "frankly ignorant" are stunningly transparent (including the adjective αἰγίλιπος [gen.], used of cliffs, which is one of my favourite words) to the point that they actually render much of his argument moot. They can't all be winners.)

[Josh Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you know enough Greek (you probably don't need to know that much) this is absolutely worth it. The meticulousness with which Parry documents his conclusions, especially considering that he had no computers available to him, is inspiring (if a little disturbing - that he would spend such time tracking down repetitions within Homer or so many words and phrases). The last, unpublished bits are not as coherent - and the South Slavic diary entries seem quite odd - but everything else really helped open up the world of Homer to me in a way that ordinary literary criticism focused much more on the "contents" of a book doesn't usually.