Milman Parry

Milman Parry was born in 1902 and died on December 3 1935. A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies. Between 1933 and 1935, Parry, in collaboration with Matija Murko, studied the oral poetry of South Slavs in the former Yugoslavia. These Slavic bards recalled formulae from a repertoire of formulae adapted for various places in the metre of the poems. Parry applied his field research among Slavic bards to the oral poetry of Homer. Milman Parry died in 1935 but his legacy and the dissemination of the idea of Homer as an oral poet was continued by his student Albert Lord, most notably in The Singer of Tales (1960).

Related Topics:
December 3 - 1935 - Antoine Meillet - 1933 - Matija Murko - Yugoslavia - Milman Parry - Albert Lord

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Parry's collected papers were published posthumously: The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers on Milman Parry, edited by Adam Parry, his son (Oxford University Press, 1971).

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