It is said that pre-literate people can recite poems as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey. We might think that this is too fantastical a notion to be believed, but can this really be true? Can pre-literate people really remember so many lines of poetry? You might not believe it, but they can.
Enter Milman Parry, who burst on the scene in the late 1920s and became a professor at Harvard University in 1929. Parry used textual analysis, anthropology, and field work to show that pre-literate or semi-literate peoples could, in fact, recite long poems. Inspired by the Slavicist Matija Murko, who attended his thesis defense at the Sorbonne, Parry headed to the hills of what is now called Bosnia in the early 1930s. There he used aluminum disks to record pre-literate bards, guslari, who performed epske pjesme, epic oral songs. These bards used “the very same kinds of structures and patterns that Parry had found in the texts of Homer,” according to the late oral-communications scholar John Miles Foley.
Amazing!
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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