Milman Parry

Milman Parry (June 23, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was an American

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.^[2]

He graduated from

In his dissertations, which were published in French in 1928, Parry demonstrated that the Homeric style is characterized by the extensive use of fixed expressions, or "formulas", adapted for expressing a given idea under the same metrical conditions. For example, "divine Odysseus", "many-counseled Odysseus", or "much-enduring divine Odysseus" had less to do with moving the story forward than with being in accordance with the amount of material to be fitted into the remainder of the hexameter verse. The oral nature of the poem was evident in the dependence on these devices, both as memory aids and to allow for easier improvisation. They were clues suggesting that the two Homeric epics were not the inventions of a single poet but had been gradually evolved in a long-standing tradition.^[2][4] As one scholar put it, "Parry never solved the Homeric Question [who was Homer]; he demonstrated that it was irrelevant".^[2]

Meillet introduced Parry to

Academic career

In 1928-1929, Parry began his academic career as a Professor of Latin and Greek at

The "jewel of the collection" is The Wedding Song of Smailagić Meho, by a poet named Avdo Međedović, "by far the most skillful and versatile performer whom Milman encountered".^[6] One of the songs, running to some 13,000 lines and performed over five days, was the closest analogue to Homer in quality and quantity; Parry said one "has the overwhelming sense that, in some way, he is hearing Homer". Međedović boasted he knew longer songs.^[6]

In his American publications of the 1930s, Parry introduced the

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 stealing from her without her knowledge. During his field excursions in the Balkans, Parry had developed the habit of carrying a gun, 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.[2]

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.^[2] Parry's daughter, Marian, believed for the rest of her life that her mother killed him, and pointed to her mother's insane fits and accusations of infidelity.^[2] Detailed examination of the evidence by classicist Steve Reece concurs with the contemporary official conclusion that Parry's death was accidental.^[8]

Parry's collected papers were published posthumously in The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, edited by his son Adam Parry (Oxford University Press, 1971). The Milman Parry collection of records and transcriptions of South Slavic heroic poetry is now in the Widener Library of Harvard University. The journal Oral Tradition is devoted to advancing Parry's work.

Influence

According to Steve Reece, there is "an enormous body of literature on Parry’s intellectual legacy".

Parry was married to Marian Thanhouser, who came from a German Jewish family, and endured anti-Semitic comments from some of her husband's colleagues.[2]^[8] They had two children, Marian and Adam (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.^[9][10]

Publications

• Parry, M. (1928). L'Épithète traditionelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique [The Traditional Epithet in Homer] (PhD thesis). Paris: Sorbonne University. pp. 1–190 in The Making of Homeric Verse trans. from French by Adam Parry.
• Parry, M. (1928). Les Formules et la Metrique d'Ηοmère [Homeric Formulae and Homeric Metre] (PhD thesis). Paris: Sorbonne University. pp. 191–239 in The Making of Homeric Verse trans. from French by Adam Parry.
• Parry, M. (1928). "The Homeric Gloss: A Study in Word Sense".
  JSTOR 282988
  .
• Parry, M. (1929). "The Distinctive Character of Enjambement in Homeric Verse".
  JSTOR 282817
  .
• Parry, M. (1930). "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style".
  JSTOR 310626
  .
• Parry, M. (1932). "Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. II. The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry".
  JSTOR 310666
  .
• Parry, M. (1933). "The Traditional Metaphor in Homer".
  JSTOR 264243
  .
• Parry, M. (1933). "Whole Formulaic Verses in Greek and Southslavic Heroic Song".
  JSTOR 283165
  .
• Parry, M. (1934). "The Traces of the Digamma in Ionic and Lesbian Greek".
  JSTOR 409604
  .
• Parry, M. (1936). "On Typical Scenes in Homer (rev. of W. Arendt, Die typischen Szenen bei Homer)". Classical Philology. 31: 357–360.
• Parry, M. (1937). "About Winged Words".
  JSTOR 265061
  .
• Parry, M. (1971). Parry, Adam (ed.). The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford University Press.
  ISBN 978-0198141815
  .