The Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature

Abstract

When he assembled the recordings and texts that today form the core of the collection bearing his name, Milman Parry was pursuing very different goals than many, if not most, folklorists and collectors of his time. Partly, perhaps, that is because he was not himself a folklorist by profession. At the time of his death in 1935, Parry was Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University, specializing in the study of the Iliad and Odyssey. When he set out for what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the summer of 1933, he was interested above all in testing a hypothesis he had formed about the way in which the Homeric poems had been composed—a hypothesis that later became known as the “Oral-Formulaic Theory.” 1 Parry approached his task as a scientist and an experimentalist. While others might have focused on discovering previously unknown epics, Parry deliberately spent time recording multiple versions of songs he had already documented, so as to understand better the manner in which they were recomposed in performance. Of course, like any collector, Parry looked for the most knowledgeable and proficient informants he could find. But instead of always striving to record such informants at their best, Parry not infrequently devised ways of disrupting performances or asked singers to perform novel tasks (for instance, to translate a song from one language into another). 2 Again, his purpose was to learn how master craftsmen handle the tools of their art. Parry nevertheless managed to create one of the most comprehensive archives of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian oral traditions in existence. In the course of two field campaigns —an initial survey in the summer of 1933 and an extended expedition from June 1934 through August 1935—he collected a vast number of recordings and written documents. There are 12,554