Parry Took Aluminum Disks to Bosnia to Record Guslari Performing Epic Songs
The idea that long, involved poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey might have been recited by pre-literate peoples before being committed to writing once struck scholars as too fantastical to take seriously.
Parry used textual analysis, anthropology and field work to show that pre-literate or semi-literate peoples could, in fact, recite long poems. Inspired by the Slavicist Matija Murko, who attended his thesis defense at the Sorbonne, Parry headed to the hills of what is now called Bosnia in the early 1930s. There he used aluminum disks to record pre-literate bards, guslari, performing epske pjesme, epic oral songs — not reconstructing the feat from theory but capturing it as it was done.
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The aluminum disks are the satisfying part. Parry had textual analysis and anthropology to draw on, but the field work left actual recordings of guslari performing epic songs — the argument arrives with sound on it.
What those recordings establish is that pre-literate people could recite long poems. Whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were in fact carried that way before being written down stays a possibility — the fantastical notion made plausible, not a documented history of those two poems.