The Odyssey, although it may or may not have been orally composed, is generally agreed to derive from a tradition of oral poetry. We know this to be the case because the Odyssey exhibits several traits that are typical of oral poetry. But what are these traits, and what is oral poetry?
Oral poetry is poetry that is both composed and performed without the aid of writing. Within an oral tradition, poems are not composed and then recited; instead, the act of composition takes place during the performance. The poet has to ‘make it up as he goes along.’ Therefore no two performances will ever be precisely the same.
Anyone who has tried to compose a substantial poem using a formal meter knows how difficult it can be, even with the aid of writing. To us, used to painstakingly working out each individual word and phrase, the off-the-cuff oral composition of a poem of many hundreds of lines can seem scarcely credible.
Between 1935 and 1937, the American scholar Milman Parry recorded a series of performances of oral epic poetry by Bosnian singers. He discovered that in order to compose with speed and fluency, the Bosnian singers drew upon a large repertoire of formulaic expressions and stock scenes.
Similar formulaic expressions and stock scenes also appear within both the Odyssey, and the Iliad. This leads us to believe that since the composer of the Odyssey uses the tools of an oral poet, he himself must himself have been trained as an oral poet.
This also suggests, but does not prove, that the Odyssey was itself composed orally. We do know that the Bosnian singers recorded by Parry were capable of composing poems of a comparable length to the Odyssey. Parry’s followers, most notably A.B. Lord, have argued that the formulaic character of Homeric writing excludes the possibility of written composition. However, the eminent German scholar Wolfgang Kullmann has argued that no Serbo-Croatian epic poetry comes close to the literary quality of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that a work of such quality can only be created with the aid of writing.
Further Reading:
Lord, A., The Singer of Tales, Harvard 1960 – The classic statement of the oralist position. Lord was Milman Parry’s research partner in Bosnia.
Parry, A., The Language of Achilles, Oxford 1989 – The title essay is an accessible introduction to Milman Parry’s theory, written by his son.
Kullmann, W., ‘Oral Poetry Theory and Neoanalysis in Homeric research’ GRBS 25 1984 307-23. – A sparky neoanalyst attack on the oralist position, arguing that writing must have been used in the composition of the Odyssey.
