The opening pages of the classic and now rare 1951 volume by Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Albert B. Lord (1912–91), Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, contain a hagiographic description of Milman Parry (1902–35), whose work on oral poetry became a pillar of literary analysis in the West. Citing and slightly amplifying that official account, Parry was a
Homeric scholar at Harvard University, [who] had the inspired thought that if we wanted to form a picture of the great Homeric chants and how they were performed, we should observe the life of folksong where it has best survived to the present day, in the Balkan peninsula. The heroic epic songs of Yugoslavia, the so-called ‘men’s songs,’ come nearest in that region to the type of tradition which was probably the foundation of the Homeric epics.
The “Parry legend” thus begins with falsities. Most of the Balkan texts that attracted his “Homeric” attention are probably no older than five or six centuries, while Spanish ballads and lyrics at least a century anterior to the Balkan corpus survive in Latin America, and various Asiatic epics are attested even earlier. But more important, no such texts have a demonstrable relationship with classical Greek literature.
Nevertheless, the accepted narrative in the Bartók-Lord book continues, “So Professor Parry made in the [1930s] prolonged collecting trips to Yugoslavia and with the assistance of Dr. Albert B. Lord gathered a vast collection of songs, especially in the jagged mountains of Bosnia, Hercegovina, Montenegro, and
