CAROL L. EDWARDS

EVEN TODAY MANY FOLKLORISTS, classicists, and Anglo-Saxonists, unconvinced
that the oral-formulaic theory is anything more than "a hypothesis," explain
recurring narrative units, whether Homeric epithets, Old English formulas, or
ballad commonplaces, as the result of either borrowing or memorial transmis-
sion.¹ In a profoundly different approach, the Parry-Lord theory focuses on the
compositional process: the way in which the poet generates formulas from his
internalized "grammar of the poetry" ( Lord 1965 :35-36). The crucial distinc-
tion between the oral-formulaic theory and hypotheses about "borrowing" or
epic commonplaces is the theory's emphasis on the compositional process.

The theory is concerned with the structuring or compositional nature of the
materials under study. From this perspective, the texts are seen as a means of
revealing, through a consideration of their underlying structure, the process
that shaped them. Significantly, Parry and Lord eschew literary interpretation;
neither presents an explication de texte. Instead, their concern is with a distinc-
tive type of narrative convention by which ordinary language becomes poetic
discourse. Through a systematic study of Homeric and Serbo-Croatian poetry,
they attempt to specify the conventions responsible for this process and the
role of these conventions in narrative meaning. The Parry-Lord theory is a
structural account of "narrative discourse" ( Culler 1977 :8) from a particular
point of view: that of its formation and its potential for change.

The focus of the oral-formulaic theory on process owes a great deal to
Milman Parry's study of a living traditional poetry. Parry recognized that in
order to relate Homeric formulas to the manner in which the poems were
composed, he had to study a living oral tradition in its cultural context, and
thus to collect oral materials in the field.² Once Parry elected to study Yugosla-
vian guslars, he set up a field hypothesis that proposed differences of form be-
tween "oral poetry" and "written poetry." These structural differences,
Parry hypothesized, derive from the compositional process:

[T]he aim of the study was to fix with exactness the form of oral [narrative] poetry, to see
wherein it differs from the form of written [narrative] poetry. Its method was to observe
singers working in a thriving tradition of unlettered song and see how the form of their song

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