it’s not just Homer’s epics that originated as music. The same is true of lyric poetry, philosophy, even the legal code—they were all originally sung.
And here’s where I (finally) give some credit to Harvard. We have a good idea of how these epics were sung because, almost a hundred years ago, two Harvard scholars tried to track down the last living epic bards.
These scholars were Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry did most of the initial work but, because he died young, much of the credit went to Lord—whose book The Singer of Tales is still the best starting point for learning about the real Homeric tradition. Those two academics deserve the same esteem accorded to Ong, McLuhan, Frye, Derrida, Searle, and other celebrated theorists of narrative and communication.
— Read on www.honest-broker.com/p/what-you-wont-learn-about-the-odyssey
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