Solving Problems no. 1. How Milman Parry “Heard Homer’s Song”

My mTBI symptoms (for more on this, see my post from over 2 years ago now about my “summer of Samuel Delany”—of which more post should finally be coming) have finally wound down. I now find my writing/computer/screen/thought brain having enough energy for both work, my writing, and now some more casual writing here on this blog. I won’t promise any kind of consistency, but I will be posting and writing more moving forward here. This blog/essay series will be exploring one of my interests I’ve had a hard time putting into words. Ultimately, I’ve decided it’s an interest in the ways people solve problems and create answers across disciplines. This stretches from interesting scientific methodologies, unique heuristics and hermeneutics, etc.etc.etc. You’ll see what I mean:

I recently (re)read Robert Kangiel’s brilliant biography of classicist Milman Parry. Milman Parry is, to my lay understanding, most famous for discovering/proving that the Homeric epics were not written as we would understand it, but sung. They were created as live performances, sung in real-time and passed orally. This upended a whole lot of Homeric studies and debate at the time. The Odyssey and the Illiad were not written poems (like the later Latin Aeneid, for example), but songs.

What struck me in particular about his groundbreaking arguments and discoveries is that they were entirely exegetic. He did not make any archeological or historical discoveries, but merely examined the text, created a kind of quantitative content study of them, and made his argument so convincingly that, now, his understanding of Homer is the predominant one.

How he did this is fascinating to me. I am drawing both on a collection of Parry’s academic writings and work and Kangiel’s summary/analysis of his work as well (and seriously, it’s an awesome biography filled with a surprising amount of intrique—maybe he was killed by his wife????).

As I mentioned, Parry roots his entire argument in an intense textual study of the Homeric epics and compares them to similar epics that we know were written. He actually created what were, essentially, datasets, and I find his whole methodology a fascinating example of the ways people solve problems and make compelling arguments.

So what did he do? How can someone extrapolate the text static historical documents to make an argument about the form of its origins?

Milman Parry began his campaign to upend Homeric studies by focusing on the epithets. In epic poetry, epithets are the “tags” that usually precede and describe nouns, especially names. “Swift-footed Achillies” “Owl-eyed Athena” are two such examples. They show up ALL the time in epic poetry and Homer in particular. But how do these tell us anything about whether the epics were written or orally delivered? Here’s where his insight became, in my opinion, kind of genius. He decided to analyze the content of the epithets. How were they used, both metrically and poetically? He went through the epics (of course in their original Ancient Greek) and compilled a list of them. He then analyzed their useage and found some really interesting things. In the Homeric epics, the epithets are very frequently used in particular parts of the line to “fill in” the meter. The epics are written in dactylic hexameter (interestinly, a meter that is basically impossible to reprocude in English), and he found that way more often than not, the epithets were used in particular places of the line, serving very particular metrical purposes. Which in and of itself might not prove anything, but was a good shooting off point. From there, he also analyzed the content provided by the epithet. Did the epithets actually add any “poetic” or contextual value to the piece? Did they add understanding or texture or meaning that would not otherwise have been there without them? In the Homeric epics, he found that, often, they did not. In some instances, he even found that the epithets didn’t even, really, make sense; using an epithet about ships’ wind-struck sails while the scene describes the ships grounded on the beach, sailess. But, one might argue, perhaps this is just simply a poetic convention. After all, written poets sometimes make choices to fit a phrase into a meter or rhyme. So Parry took a text we, historically, knew was written: Virgil’s Aeneid. See, we know Virgil wrote the poem. There isn’t any historical uncertainty about its creation and origin. So how differently does a similar (epic, grounded in the greek tradition, etc.) poem treat and use its epithets? Very differently, it turns out. The use of epithets in Virgil were more heterogynous in their metrical place, and far more often added poetic content, rather than seemingly existing only for metrical stability.

The scale of his research made a deeply compelling case, and is a fascinating, almost interdisciplinary idea. Creating a dataset that is, at root, driven by a literary analysis is a powerful problem-solving invention. He went on to spend the later part of his career travelling to illiterate societies with oral poetic traditions, lugging (at the time) cutting edge, just-invented, phonographic recording equipment deep into the mountains to record poets who created and sun epics without the use of written language at all. There he was able to, essentially, prove that delivering a poem of the quality and length of the poetic epics was not only possible, but actually still happening, furthering his case even more. If you want to read one such poem, look up the work of Avdo Međedović, who is regarded as the most skilled performer Milman encountered.

I adore this story and in particular the way Parry approached proving his hypothesis that Homer did not write, but sing. His combination of literary analysis, mixed with data-driven thinking created some profound scholarship. I also think the way he ended his career, moving into the real world to see and prove that his image of sung epic poetry was possible provides a really powerful roadmap for people looking to answer deep questions about their field and the world around them.

Thanks for reading!