Milman Parry

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Milman Parry in the Oakland Technical High School yearbook (1919)

Milman Parry (* 1902 in Oakland , California, USA; † December 3, 1935 in Los Angeles ) was an American classical philologist and Homer researcher. He is considered one of the most important researchers on oral transmission .

life and work

Parry was born on June 20 or 23, 1902, to the pharmacist Isaac Milman Parry and his wife Marie Alice. He had two sisters, twins Mary Allison (called Alice) and Mary Addison.

Parry attended local compulsory schooling where he earned a Rotary Club Youth Award , and graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1919 . Parry then studied at UC Berkeley and married Marian Thanhouser, three years his senior, in 1923. In 1924 Parry obtained his master's degree with his work A Comparative Study of Diction as One of the Elements of Style in Early Greek Poetry and became the father of Marian Parry. A little later the young family moved to Paris, where Parry studied as a pupil of Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne and also met Matija Murko . He published his dissertation in 1928 with the title L'Epithète traditional dans Homère in Paris.

Parry is best known for his works on Homer's epics Iliad and Odyssey and the study of their tradition. His publications changed the understanding of Homer and offered a new perspective on the Homeric question . Parry put forward the thesis that the epithets were linguistic formulas that were used again and again, which were optimal formulations for the poets, which made it possible to improvise long and complex stories while observing the rules of the hexameter . With practice, the poets could further deepen their language skills. Such formulations could be "passed on from singer to singer" and continuously improved. This is an important evidence for the long controversial thesis among classical scholars that the Homeric epics are based on a long tradition of oral tradition.

In 1932 Parry was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1934 Parry moved with his family to what was then Yugoslavia to conduct case studies there and to confirm his thesis on the oral tradition of heroic poetry . Parry was accompanied by his student Albert Lord and the interpreter Nikola Vujnović , with whom he collected around 12,000 texts and 3,500 sound recordings between June 1934 and September 1935 (according to other sources over 12,500 texts and around 750 sound recordings). The collection is now part of the Harvard Library and much of it is accessible online.

Death and survival

On December 3, 1935, Parry died in a Los Angeles hotel room from a gun he owned. The police treated the incident as an accident and the local press referred to it as a "weird mishap". Parry's widow testified that Parry went to his room immediately after arriving at the hotel and was struck by a shot from his unsecured pistol while unpacking his travel bag. Nevertheless, minor inconsistencies appear in the article, such as the fact that Parry was made a year younger in the article and that his widow's first name was misspelled, which ultimately led to a series of rumors about Parry's death. In particular, suicide was often assumed because the evidence of an accident was considered insufficient for many.

According to an attempt to explain it by Erich Segal , Parry had to carry a weapon with him in the "wild and primitive" Yugoslavia of the 1930s, which accidentally went off when the suitcase was unpacked. Steve Reece of the journal Oral Tradition notes, however, that Parry's death also quickly became the subject of lore: Parry, like Ajax, is said to have shot himself out of anger that he was denied honors, which he considered himself worthy ( at Aias the armor of Achilles , at Parry the permanent position at Harvard University ). In his article, however, Reece argues in favor of the accident variant, drawing on some previously unpublished information from Parry's relatives and friends.

Romanticization and mythification

Parry's life exploring oral tradition has often been the subject of romanticizing comparisons by his students and colleagues. In obituaries, Parry was compared to TE Lawrence , who had died just a few months earlier, had shown a similar enthusiasm for foreign cultures and had been declared a hero by his followers soon after his death. Parry's contributions to classical philology were often equated with those of Charles Darwin to biology , and references were made to artists such as John Keats , Paul Gauguin and Igor Stravinsky , who, like Parry, were only appreciated after their deaths. Still others reminded Parry's enthusiasm for Don Quixote and his achievements in the academic field reminded of the military successes of Alexander the Great , who had also tragically passed away at the age of 33.

There is also a heroic song about Milman Parry, which Guslar Milovan Vojičić invented in his honor and in which not only Parry himself is richly adorned with epithets. The song of Milman Parry is reprinted in Albert Lords The Singer of Tales (1960).

Scientific survival

Lord began studying comparative literature in the following years and continued Parry's work. While Lord's findings formed the basis for much further research, the singers documented by Parry and Lord are increasingly being scientifically investigated. In particular Avdo Međedović , a Guslar from today's Montenegro , was the subject of research by renowned classical philologists such as Georg Danek .

Fonts

  • The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry , Oxford University Press, 1987
  • John F. García: "Milman Parry and AL Kroeber: Americanist Anthropology and the Oral Homer". Oral Tradition 16/1, 2001, pp. 58-84.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Milman Parry: American academic and philologist (1902-1935). In: PeoplePill. PeoplePill, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Gene Anderson: Milman Parry. In: Oakland Wiki. LocalWiki, March 7, 2015, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b c Erich Segal: The Making Of Homeric Verse . In: The New York Times . August 15, 1971, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed April 18, 2020]).
  4. ↑ Joachim Latacz , in: ders. (Ed.): Homer. Poetry and its Interpretation (Ways of Research 634), Darmstadt 1991, p. 3.
  5. ↑ Latacz (Ed.): Homer .
  6. ^ A b c d Charles R. Beye: PARRY, Milman. In: Database of Classical Scholars. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  7. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Steve Reece: The Myth of Milman Parry. In: Oral Tradition. December 29, 2019, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. In: Harvard Digital Collections. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College, 2018, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  9. ^ A b Information about "1935-death.png" on Milman Parry. In: Oakland Wiki. LocalWiki, accessed April 18, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom . New York: The Free Press 1998
personal data
SURNAME Parry, Milman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American classical philologist and Homer researcher
DATE OF BIRTH 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Oakland, California, USA
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1935
Place of death los Angeles