What Does It Mean To Say That The Iliad Is An Oral Poem?

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi (November 2010)

Parry and his followers also went on to argue that most, if not all, of the Iliad was the product of formulae, and imbued a solely utilitarian, rather than artistic, purpose to these phrases. Such claims were drawn from research carried out by Parry and his chief disciple Lord on South Slavic epic poetry. Using the first fifteen lines of the Iliad as an example, Lord estimated that some 90 per cent of the Iliad was derived from formulaic phrases, a similar proportion (he claimed) to that found in oral epics from the former Yugoslavia. [17] If this were true, then it would follow that there could be no real literary criticism similar to that which can be found for the works of Shakespeare. Identifying apparent rhetorical devices such as hyperbaton (employing a certain word order for emphasis) and choice of words would be meaningless since the content and order are merely chosen for convenience in improvisation, and not for any real dramatic effect.

References
[1]- M.S. Silk, Homer, the Iliad (1987) 14
[3]- Homer, Iliad I 84
[4]- Ibid. 148
[5]- Ibid. 215
[6]- Ibid. 364
[7]- Ibid. 489
[9]- Homer, Iliad III 370-384- where Paris is rescued by Aphrodite from battle.
[10]- Homer, Iliad, translated by E.V. Rieu (2003)xxviii
[11]- Homer, Iliad V 576
[12]- See [1] 24
[14]- Martin (1989. 35)
[15]- Homer, Iliad VII 375
[16]- Homer, Iliad XXIV 75
[17]- B. Lord, The Singer of tales (1960) 145
[18]- J. Griffin, Homer, Iliad IX (1995) 34-35
[19]- See [2]
[20]- See [3] 4
[21]- Homer, Iliad XVII 698
[22]- See [1] 22
[23]- See [9] Ibid.
[24]- Homer, Iliad V 511-522
[25]- M. Mueller, The Iliad (1984) 13

Bibliography
B. Lord, The Singer of Tales(1960) 141-157
M.S. Silk, Homer, the Iliad(1987) 13-26
M. Mueller, The Iliad(1984) 7-27
‘, Comparative Literature11 (1959) 193-208
J. Griffin, Homer, Iliad IX (1995) 32-35
I. Morris and B. Powell (eds.), A New Companion to Homer (1997) 146-173
R. L. Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (2004) 117-138
Homer, Iliad
Homer, Iliad, translated by E.V. Rieu (2003)
Reading the Laments of Iliad 24 (http://classics.emory.edu/indivFacPages/perkell/files/PerkellReadingLaments2.pdf).

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Oxford University and an intern at the Middle East Forum.

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