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The Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancient Greek epics credited to Homer, grew out of a tradition of oral poetry. Singers performed tales of the Trojan War from memory for generations, and the poems were written down no earlier than the 8th century BC, after the Greeks had adopted the alphabet.

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In the late 1920s the American scholar Milman Parry showed why the poems are full of repeated phrases such as “rosy-fingered Dawn” and “swift-footed Achilles”. Each is a ready-made formula that fits a particular place in the six-foot line of Greek epic, called dactylic hexameter, so a singer could compose fluently while performing. To test the idea, Parry and his assistant Albert Lord recorded epic singers in Yugoslavia in 1933–35. Many of these singers could not read, yet they performed poems thousands of lines long, never quite the same way twice. One of them, Avdo Međedović, sang an epic of about 13,000 lines over several days, close to the length of the Odyssey. Lord set out the theory in The Singer of Tales (1960). Whether a single poet called Homer ever existed is still debated.

Türkçe oku
Homeros'a atfedilen İlyada ve Odysseia, sözlü şiir geleneğinin içinden doğdu. Ozanlar Truva Savaşı'nın öykülerini kuşaklar boyu ezberden söyledi; destanlar ancak Yunanlar alfabeyi benimsedikten sonra, en erken MÖ 8. yüzyılda yazıya geçirildi.

1920'lerin sonunda Amerikalı araştırmacı Milman Parry, destanlarda “gül parmaklı Şafak” ya da “ayağı çabuk Akhilleus” gibi kalıpların neden sürekli tekrarlandığını açıkladı. Her biri, Yunan destanının altı ölçü birimli dizesinde (daktilik heksametre) belirli bir yere oturan hazır bir kalıptı; ozan bu kalıplar sayesinde şiiri söylerken akıcı biçimde kurabiliyordu. Parry bu fikri sınamak için yardımcısı Albert Lord'la birlikte 1933-1935'te Yugoslavya'da destan söyleyen halk ozanlarını kaydetti. Bu ozanların çoğu okuma yazma bilmiyordu, ama binlerce dizelik destanları her seferinde biraz farklı söylüyordu. İçlerinden Avdo Međedović, yaklaşık 13.000 dizelik bir destanı birkaç günde söyledi; bu, Odysseia'nın uzunluğuna yakındır. Lord kuramı 1960'ta yayımlanan The Singer of Tales adlı kitabında ortaya koydu. Homeros adında tek bir şairin gerçekten yaşayıp yaşamadığı hâlâ tartışılıyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Oral-formulaic composition
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