Oral Poetics and Homeric Poetry

Abstract

The concept of oral tradition, especially as we see it redefined in the work of Milman Parry (1971) and Albert Lord (espec. 1960/2000), has had a major impact on the understanding of Homer and Homeric poetry in the field of classics. Volume 1 of Greek Literature (Nagy 2001) features reprints of twenty studies illustrating this impact, along with an extensive introduction and bibliography. The introduction and bibliography are available gratis at http://chs.harvard.edu/chspubs/ninevol/index.htm. Nowadays, classicists who publish on Homer generally acknowledge the relevance of Parry's and Lord's work, though all too many publications still reveal a woefully superficial understanding of this work (for a list of ten common misunderstandings, see Nagy 1996:19-27). A most pressing problem in the field of classics is that the concept of oral tradition tends to be applied—however superficially—only to Homer, while the rest of Greek literature continues to be studied without an awareness of any need for applying the same concept (for a corrective, see Lord 1991:espec. ch. 2). Another problem is that some influential classicists, in their publications on Homer, have separated the work of Parry from that of Lord (Nagy 2003:ch. 3, with bibliography). A most prominent example is the introduction written by Adam Parry to the collected papers of his father (Parry 1971:ix-lxii). Since most of Milman Parry's work on Homer predated his study of living oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, the separating of his work from Lord's leaves the relevance of oral traditions to Homeric studies seriously undervalued. This problem folds into a larger problem. Those who have no direct knowledge of oral traditions generally assume that orality, as distinct from literacy, can be universally defined. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to attempt any universalizing definition of oral or even of written tradition. In