Recent Russian Publications On Indian Epic

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

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THE ADYAR LIBRARY BULLETIN
M reflected a dualistic organization of the society in which it originated. In recent years Wikander and Dumézil have tried to point out the structural unity of M by applying the theory of the tripartite ideology which Dumézil has developed in a long series of publications which culminate in the three volumes mentioned above (note 2, p. 2).
In the field of Homeric scholarship the publication of two books by a young American scholar Milman Parry (1902-35) marked a new epoch. Both books were published in 1971 in an English translation in The Making of Homeric Verse. The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford University Press, 1971). In The Traditional Epithet in Homer, Parry examined the numerous epithets or adjectival phrases which together with the names of the chief characters of the epic form fixed formulas. According to Parry's definition a formula is a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical condition to express a given essential idea'.2 Parry stressed the fact that the traditional character of the formulas lies in the fact that they constitute a system distinguished at once by a great extension and by great simplicity (op. cit., p. 16). Replacing the terms 'extension' and
simplicity' by length and thrift Parry describes this system as follows: 'The length of a system consists very obviously in the number of formulas which make it
1 L'Épithète traditionnelle dans Homère, Paris, 1928; Les formules et la mètrique d'Homère, Paris, 1928.
2 The Making of Homeric Verse, p. 272.