Happy New Year!  A pretty oblique post to reality today.  

Up through the early twentieth century, Greek and Latin classics as a discipline was understood in a fundamentally textual way.  Texts were the material with which the field worked; philological investigations of language, language change, and language relation were the fundamental knowledge bases; and the fundamental work of scholarship was "textual criticism," the establishment of solid texts as near as possible to some hypothesized "patient zero" that came from an author's pen (or, if they were dictating, their mouth).  Much of modern European scholarship, in fact the majority of what could be called university research and teaching in Europe, was fundamentally organized around this project; other tasks, such as the emergence of what we would call natural scientific inquiry, and the development of mathematical discourse, were more or less peripheral to this central, churning activity at the heart of "scholarship" in Europe from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth.  (The "academy" as we know it today is of astonishing recent vintage; a good place to learn some of this story, though it is too Anglo-centric and more learned about the nineteenth century than the centuries that came before, is James Turner's fun book Philology; other scholars who work on this are Ann Blair, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Tony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, Peter Miller, I'm sure there are others.)

This changed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Archaeological work developed very quickly, in the Near East and around the Mediterranean; scholars such as Jane Harrison at Cambridge University learned from and deployed the insights of anthropology; and the general proliferation of scholarly methods meant that scholars developed insights in one area, then others employed it elsewhere.

Milman Parry was a young American who did his doctoral work in Paris, after doing research in Yugoslavia among folk singers.  He developed what became known as the "oral formulaic" strategy--that much of the great orally-delivered epics of pre-literate societies are built up in significant part from a collection of "oral formulas" which are standard and can be deployed in both oral composition and oral delivery to powerful effect.  Singers could tell stories lasting many hours across many days, and the narrative would be coherent and powerful.

Parry showed, through careful textual analysis, that this was operative in Homer's poetry in his dissertation at the Sorbonne in 1928.  (Think "rosy fingered dawn" or "swift-footed Achilles" or "wine-dark sea".)  He then spent the remaining five years of his life teaching in the US and on expeditions to the Balkans, where he recorded great epic singers.  The data he began to gather there showed that the oral formulaic theory was generalizable across a number of cultures.

This was hugely important for Homeric studies; it was revolutionary in the way that Friedrich Wolf's work at the end of the 18th century (arguing that the Illiad and the Odyssey both have marks of preliterate composition but were then organized into the form we have them today when they were written down--and that, threfore, there may not have been a "Homer") was revolutionary.  But it was actually more important still, for understanding many cultures far away from Homeric Greece in space and time.  Furthermore, it was fundamental in later arguments about the large-scale cultural differences between "oral" and "literate" societies.  Scholars like Marshall McLuhan and the field of "media studies" in general owes a great deal to the impetus of this work.

Parry died unexpectedly very young--in 1933, in Los Angeles--shot by his own revolver; to this day it is unclear whether he killed himself intentionally or simply by accident. His student Albert Lord went on to generalize Parry's insights and continue his ethnographic and musicological work. Lord's book, The Singer of Tales, eventually published in 1960, is still worth a read today.

Why am I telling you all about this?  Oh, it's just interesting. Plus, I found the Milman Parry Collection (which also includes Albert Lord's work), available on-line.  Check it out.