The Classicist Who Killed Homer

> His most important research, undertaken in the last years of his life, involved travelling to remote areas of Yugoslavia to make recordings of local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier. These recordings revolutionized the understanding of oral literature, but when Parry died no one had yet listened to them; they were just a pile of thirty-five hundred aluminum disks sitting in a Harvard storage room.

This is exactly what I think every time I read about whether Homer was one person or a bunch of anonymous bards. In Serbia and surrounding countries, there is a long tradition of folk epics going back 500-1000 years[0], that is the cornerstone of national identity, which was finally collected and written in early-mid 19th century (mainly) by Vuk Karadzic[1]. This is the area that is being mentioned here (ex Yugoslavia). One of the most well known bards from that time is Filip Visnjic[2], who was blind too. It is difficult to say when these songs were actually composed, but since the milestone of events is 1389, and some songs describe earlier events, it is safe to say that they evolved through centuries until they were finally written down. BTW these bards were singing older songs, but they were also adding heavily their own material...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filip_Vi%C5%A1nji%C4%87

I rather thought the premise of the story was the dominant view among classicists, so I scanned the article thinking there might have been some new development.

Turns out, the purpose of the article is to tease a new biography of Parry (the one who nominally "killed" Homer), written by Robert Kanigel called “Hearing Homer’s Song”.

In case anybody else is curious, YouTube has a bit of footage of Avdo Međedović who is mentioned in the text: https://youtu.be/UhBq_DOEgbM

Rather an acquired taste if you don't speak the language, but the idea of somebody semi-freestyling 13000 verse epics is still impressive.

Another fascinating aspect of this is that Međedović was, as far as I know, a life long illiterate! As great as literacy is, it seems to have had detrimental effects on our memorization skills.