In a Platonic dialogue, Socrates describes Homer as “the best and most divine of the poets.” Not a bad blurb, if taken at face value. Such an exalted position, however, could not remain unchallenged. Homer’s excellence, not to mention his very existence, has been frequently called into question over the millennia.
Paradoxically, it was a humble folk instrument from the Balkans—the gusle—that 80 years ago dealt Homer’s lyre a nearly mortal blow. A hand-carved, one-stringed wooden box covered with animal skin, the gusle is held upright in the lap and played with a bow, like a mutant violin. As Adam Nicolson writes in his imaginative and emotional Why Homer Matters, “Nothing about the sound of the gusle is charming.” But charming or not, this musical instrument has helped reduce Homer, at least for classical scholars, to a mythical being, a mere name imposed on a poetic corpus that evolved organically over time.
In the early 1930s, a Harvard professor named Milman Parry traveled to Yugoslavia to make recordings of the Serbo-Croatian guslars, illiterate singers of traditional ballads who performed at festivals and in coffee houses. According to Nicolson, the guslars “always sang their long epic songs of battle and disaster with a kind of hard energy, loud, at a high pitch, the singer’s whole frame gripped with the effort. This was no smooth crooning but a passionate engagement of mind and body.” Each performance was different because the bard composed as he sang, with the help of a fixed syllabic pattern and word units that fit the meter.
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