---
title: "The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry"
author: "Milman Parry (edited by Adam Parry)"
year: 1971
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Milman+Parry+Making+of+Homeric+Verse"
in_stock: false
related: ["lord-singer-of-tales", "nagy-best-of-achaeans", "snell-discovery-of-the-mind", "onians-origins-european-thought", "padel-out-mind-greek"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Parry’s collected papers, posthumously assembled by his son Adam Parry in 1971, supply the foundational theoretical work of oral-formulaic theory in its original form: the doctoral theses *L'épithète traditionnelle dans Homère* (1928) and *Les formules et la métrique d'Homère* (1928), the South Slavic field papers, and the unfinished essay on Homeric style together constitute the corpus from which the entire subsequent literature on oral tradition descends."
  - "Parry’s technical achievement was the philological proof, conducted at the level of the Homeric line itself, that the system of fixed epithet-and-noun formulas in the Iliad and Odyssey is too economical and too extended to be the work of a single literate poet exercising lexical preference; the formulas are the working medium of an oral tradition whose internal logic—thrift in repeated forms, extension across metrical positions—Parry was the first to demonstrate philologically."
  - "Adam Parry’s long editorial introduction to the *Collected Papers* supplies the indispensable critical context in which Milman Parry’s work should be read—both the intellectual biography that situates the work within early-twentieth-century classical scholarship, and the early reception that culminated in Albert Lord’s field-based defence of oral-formulaic theory in *The Singer of Tales*."
references:
  - "Parry, M. (1971). *The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry*. Edited by Adam Parry. Oxford University Press."
  - "Lord, A. B. (1960). *The Singer of Tales*. Harvard University Press."
  - "Nagy, G. (1979). *The Best of the Achaeans*. Johns Hopkins University Press."
  - "Foley, J. M. (1988). *The Theory of Oral Composition*. Indiana University Press."
  - "Russo, J. (2011). The Formula. In *A Companion to Ancient Epic*. Wiley-Blackwell."
glossary_terms:
  - "homer"
  - "epic"
  - "formula"
  - "oral-tradition"
  - "thumos"
scholar_prompts:
  - "How does Parry’s thesis on the economy of the Homeric noun-epithet system bear on the longer philological tradition that has analysed the semantic specificity of Homeric inner-life vocabulary (Snell on the discovery of the mind, Onians on the origins of European thought, Padel on archaic Greek psychology)—are the inner-life terms (*thumos*, *phrenes*, *psychē*) themselves traditional formulas in Parry’s technical sense, and if so what does this imply for their philosophical interpretation?"
  - "Parry’s argument for oral composition rests on the philological proof that the Homeric formulaic system is too economical and too extended to be the work of a single literate poet; how does this argument relate to the longer Homeric Question (the dispute between unitarians and analysts about whether the texts had a single author), and where does Parry’s work transform rather than extend the older debate?"
  - "Adam Parry’s editorial introduction frames his father’s work in a particular reception history that includes Lord’s extension into South Slavic field-research; how should the contemporary reader engage with Parry’s technical philology directly rather than only through the Lord–Nagy reception, and what is preserved in Parry’s original formulations that the subsequent literature has flattened?"
seo_title: "The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry — Foundations of Oral-Formulaic Theory | Seba.Health"
seo_description: "Parry’s collected papers supply the foundational philology of oral-formulaic theory — proof that the Homeric noun-epithet system is oral-traditional."
---

**The Foundational Corpus of Oral-Formulaic Theory**

The 1971 *Collected Papers*, edited by Adam Parry from his father Milman’s scattered publications, lecture notes, and South Slavic field reports, supplies the foundational corpus of oral-formulaic theory in its original form. The volume’s contents include Parry’s 1928 Sorbonne doctoral theses *L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère* and *Les formules et la métrique d’Homère* (translated for this edition by Adam Parry into English), the substantial 1930 *Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making* (the work in which the technical apparatus of formulaic analysis is most fully developed), the 1933–35 South Slavic field reports, and the unfinished long essay on Homeric style on which Parry was working at the time of his sudden death in 1935. The collection is organised by Adam Parry’s long editorial introduction, which supplies the intellectual biography, the contemporary scholarly context, and the early reception history through which Parry’s work entered the wider field. The book is therefore both a primary text — the original philological work in its uncompromising technical detail — and a critical apparatus by which the contemporary reader can engage Parry’s thinking on its own terms rather than only through the subsequent reception developed by Albert Lord, Gregory Nagy, John Miles Foley, and the wider oral-traditional literature.

**The Economy of the Noun-Epithet System: A Philological Proof**

Parry’s technical achievement, demonstrated in the doctoral theses, is the philological proof that the system of fixed epithet-and-noun formulas in the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* is too economical and too extended to be the work of a single literate poet exercising lexical preference. The argument is conducted at the level of the Homeric line itself. For each major proper noun (Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Zeus) and for each major recurring noun (ship, sea, dawn, hand), there is a system of epithets each of which occupies a specific metrical position, and the system as a whole exhibits two properties — *thrift* (only one formula per metrical slot for each conceptual unit) and *extension* (formulas available for nearly every conceivable metrical position) — that together render any literate-authorial explanation implausible. A single poet making lexical choices for aesthetic effect would not produce a system of this kind; only a tradition operating across many singers and many generations could refine the formulaic stock to the precise economy and extension Parry’s tabulations demonstrated. The proof is unaffected by literary judgement; it operates at the level of philological cataloguing, and it survives the variations in literary taste that would later affect the reception of oral-formulaic theory.

**The Argument for Oral Composition**

The technical philology supports a substantive thesis about the conditions under which the Homeric texts came to have the form they have. Parry’s argument is direct, and the formulation has organised the field since:

> “There is no memory of words save by the voice and the ear.” — Parry, *The Making of Homeric Verse*

The formulaic system is the working medium by which a non-literate tradition stabilises the long compositions oral performance requires. The argument carries forward into the unfinished *Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making*, where Parry develops the technical apparatus for analysing formulaic systems and begins the comparative work that Lord would extend into the South Slavic *guslari* tradition. The methodological contribution is the formula itself — defined, in the canonical version that has shaped the field since, as a group of words regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea. The definition is technical and the technical specification is what allows the formula to operate as a unit of analysis rather than as a casual descriptive label. The depth-psychological reader interested in the Greek vocabulary of inner life will recognise in this technical apparatus the philological substrate any rigorous reading of *thumos*, *phrenes*, or *psychē* in Homer must honour.

**The South Slavic Field-Research and the Adam Parry Apparatus**

The 1933–35 South Slavic field reports document the comparative-empirical work that Parry undertook to test the oral-formulaic hypothesis against a living oral tradition. The *guslari* of the South Slavic heroic-song tradition, accompanied by the single-stringed *gusle*, were, by the early 1930s, the closest accessible analogue to the Homeric singers, and Parry’s field-work — recording thousands of hours of song, often the same song performed multiple times by the same singer — supplied the empirical evidence by which his philological inferences about Homer could be defended as descriptions of a real practice rather than as abstract reconstructions. Adam Parry’s editorial introduction supplies the context in which the field reports should be read: the practical difficulties of the field-work, the early death that left the testing of the comparative hypothesis to Albert Lord, and the long arc of reception by which oral-formulaic theory became the dominant framework in Homeric philology by the 1970s. Lord’s *The Singer of Tales* (1960) is the canonical extension of Parry’s work, and the two books should be read together; Parry supplies the technical philology and the original theoretical formulation, Lord supplies the field-based confirmation and the comparative-empirical demonstration.

For any practitioner whose work draws on Homeric philology, *The Making of Homeric Verse* is the indispensable primary corpus on which the entire oral-tradition tradition rests. After Parry, the Homeric Question — the long dispute between unitarians and analysts about whether the texts had a single author — is recast: the question is not whether Homer was one or many but whether the texts were composed in a literate or oral medium, and the philological evidence Parry assembled left the answer no longer in serious doubt. The book is also the natural pair to Lord’s *Singer of Tales* and to the philological tradition on Greek inner-life vocabulary developed by Snell, Onians, and Padel; reading them together discloses how twentieth-century classical philology arrived at a working understanding of Homeric composition that supplies the substrate any contemporary depth-psychological engagement with the Homeric vocabulary of *thumos*, *phrenes*, and *psychē* requires.