Oral Poetry and Performance
Video Clip
Milman Parry's pathfinding research on Homeric poetry in the 1920's and 1930's revealed that the Homeric poems were not only traditional but oral, composed in and for performance without the use of writing. Parry used comparative study of a living song culture to demonstrate this fundamental principle of Homeric poetry.
In two trips to the former Yugoslavia in 1933-35, Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord collected 12,544 songs, stories and conversations from 169 singers of the still flourishing South Slavic epic song tradition. Their unparalleled fieldwork has been matched only by the work of Albert Lord himself, who took additional trips in the 1950s and 1960s. No two of the songs collected are exactly alike, nor do any two of the singers have exactly the same repertoire.
In 1960 Albert Lord published The Singer of Tales, a masterpiece which was the culmination of his decades of fieldwork and research in the study of South Slavic oral poetic traditions. In it he described in detail the training, techniques and practices of an oral poet in that tradition. And even more significantly, he fulfilled the intention of his teacher Milman Parry, who died a tragically early death in 1935 at the very beginning of his careeer, by comparatively applying their work to the poetry of Homer. The Singer of Tales, as Milman Parry's work had begun to do before his death, demonstrated how the system of oral traditional poetry, within which the Homeric poems had been composed, worked.
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Parry and Lord had a star singer named Avdo Mejedovic, who once at Parry's request performed an epic over 12,000 lines in length, which is comparable to the length of the Odyssey.
They showed how a singer, trained in techniques that were centuries if not millennia old, could draw upon a storehouse of traditional language, tales and heroic figures and compose epic poetry on any given occasion.