Milman Parry

Milman Parry (June 20, 1902 – December 3, 1935) was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.

He was born in 1902 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) and at the Sorbonne (Ph.D.). A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies. In his dissertations, which were published in French in 1928, he demonstrated that the Homeric style is characterized by the extensive use of fixed expressions, or 'formulas', adapted for expressing a given idea under the same metrical conditions. Meillet introduced him to Matija Murko, who had worked on oral epic traditions in Bosnia and had made phonograph recordings of some performances.

Between 1933 and 1935 Parry, at the time Associate Professor at Harvard University, made two trips to Yugoslavia, where he studied and recorded oral traditional poetry in Serbo-Croat with the help of his assistant Albert Lord and Nikola Vujnović, a local Herzegovinian Croat. They worked in Bosnia where literacy was lowest and the oral tradition was, in the term used by Parry and Lord, "purest". The two are now famous for their work in orality/literacy, which has come to be known as the Parry/Lord thesis.