X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Milman Parry


Makurakotoba

The article “L’Épithète Traditionnelle dans Homère and les Formules et la Métrique d’Homère” by Milman Parry argues for Homer's use of formulaic epithets in the Greek epics.

Milman Parry

For example "swift footed Achilles" can be seen as looking forward to Hector and Achilles' race around the walls of Troy.

The Milman Parry collection of records and transcriptions of South Slavic heroic poetry is now in the Widener Library of Harvard University.

Havelock argues that the fixed expressions Parry identifies can be understood as mnemonic aids used to help the poet remember the poetry, which was indeed vital to the well-being of the society, given the importance of the information carried by the poetry.

Odysseus Unbound

At that final resting place for the migration of the Ionians, then, roving bards of the type described by Milman Parry picked up the "Ithacan" tales, perhaps, and wove them together into the Odyssey: for the entertainment and edification of audiences who knew Paliki well, and initially were very homesick, and longed for it.

The File on H.

The expedition of the two scholars is an obvious allusion to the research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in Bosnia, whose effect was to make the oral epic tradition in Serbo-Croatian far better known, at least in Western scholarship, than it had been before.



see also

Zlatan Čolaković

From 1984-1988, as a Fulbright scholar, he worked with Albert Lord at Harvard University in Milman Parry Collection, the Slavic division of the Widener Library.