Did Homer write the Iliad and the Odyssey?

[Húrin Thalion]

I just wanted to hear your oopinions on this.

Mine is pretty clear, the Iliad must have been created by one man (or woman) for such a masterpiece cannot grow in the minds of many and still keep the overall shape. I do not think that the Odyssey was created by the same for it is so entirely different in style and language.

By the way, am I the only one who thinks the Iliad is better that the Odyssey?

Húrin Thalion

[Aerin]

Odd, because I'm taking a course on this very subject.. hehe

Unfortunately, I have not done enough research or learned enough about Homer or his works (I have read the Iliad, and am starting the Odyssey) to have an educated opinion.

However, evidence points to multiple authors - not only in creating the story, but because when the Iliad and Odyssey were created, they did not have either the materials, or the men learned enough, to write them down. Instead, the oral story tradition was in place: stories handed down through generations of what amounts to the "bards" of the era. Each time it was recited, it was changed slightly, according to the teller's background and memory.

When it was finally written down, yes, it was continuous, because all the pieces of the story had come together and had been smoothed over into the recognizeable shape we have today.

[Húrin Thalion]

Oh well maybe it is only my more romantic part that want'd it to be one writer. But I would think that such a work then was greatly changed when written for there is a rythm in it that does not stop and all the events are extremely well balanced with the preceding. So it is either ine or more masters. Maybe I can quote some posts from Sture Linnér, he's got a few interesting points.

Húrin Thalion

[Rangerdave]

This will sound really corny, but the more I read of Greek lyric epics, the more I am convinced that "Homer" is not a name, but a title.

In my theory, when the senior poet/bard/storyteller whathaveyou, dies the mantle of "Homer" is passed on to his successor. In this way, there is always a Homer to tell the tales.

This would work in a very similar way to the Cymri bards who were the Taliessin.
Another example would be the Dred Pirate Roberts.

I know it sounds stupid on the outset, but give it some thought and the idea will grow on you.

RD

[Húrin Thalion]

Or it could be a gathering name for all the poets of ancient time. It is easier to see 1 person as writer than so many. If those who wrote it down (I think it was in Athens, 5 century) didn't know they would probably do this. One man that says that both the Iliad and the Odyssey
were written by one man explained their different "mood" and style like this: "Maybe the Iliad was written by him when young and eager to get out in the world and when old he returned with his high hopes of life if not shattered but diminished and wrote the darker Odyssey.

Húrin Thalion

[BadMojo]

Hi all

We had the Odysee and Iliad as compulsory subjects in high school here (13-14yrs old) in fact we studied the Odysee first and then the Iliad as the Iliad dealt with a more "mature" subject.
As I can remember the first writen editions of both epics were made in Athens much after the originals were supposedly writen and choice passages were recited at the Panathinaia festival (a festival to honour Athena). The disimilarity in style between the books was attributed to the author becoming more mature in his style and ideas: As a younger man he was fascinated by the idea of war and winning glory in battle--later in life he saw that family life and stability were also values worth fighting for.

If you want my own opinion I believe that scholars in Athens in the 5th century collected oral histories from the mycenean times and embelished them with some ideals of the time and some dramatisation. Also I'd like to believe that a Homer did in fact exist (born either on the island of Samos or in Asia Minor in the second half of the 8th century) but that no single text of the Iliad and Odysee survived and so had to be reconstructed in the 6th century.

As for the idea that Homer is a title I am unsure of this. Perhaps it was in the early greek language but I would think that it would have survived into (more modern!!) ancient greek or even into modern greek and I haven't come across it in my studies of the language in school.

By the way, I enjoyed the Iliad more than the Odysee too :)

[Húrin Thalion]

But there is one more thing to consider, the dialect. The language is very different in the two books because the Iliad is in Eolic greek dialect while the odyssey is written with much words and endings from the attic (Athens) Dialect. This could in my mind mean that the Odyssey was not complete when it was written down and the "author" had to add some parts. Or that they were from two different traditions of singers and partly merged at their meeting.

Húrin Thalion

[Niniel]

Actually the Odyssey is not written in a purely Attic dialect; it uses several dialects, Ionian and Aeolian as well. This is one of the main reasons that has led scholars to believe that the Odyssey (and probably also the Iliad) were not written at a single moment, but that they were redactions of oral traditions. There was a huge amount of different versions of the stories that had been used since several centuries. The singers who performed these stories remembered them because of the great amount of formulae in the stories. There are formulae (or rather 'themes' (topoi in Greek)) that consist of a global storyline for a particular scene in the story, and of course the formulae that consist of a group of words that are used to fill up the verse. If the singer needed a certain number of syllables for the metre he could choose a longer or shorter formula depending on how much space he had to fill (that's why almost all characters have more than one epitheton, of different lengths).
So what Homer did was to take different versions and putting them al together to form a single story. Whether or not Homer was one man or a group of people is not clear, and I doubt if it makes much of a difference anyway. I am inclined to say he was one man, since the whole structure is so much of a whole that it must have been someone who knew all the parts equally well. There are little things (just word sometimes) that refer back to things hat have been said somewhere completely else in the book, so if more than one person worked on it this could hardly have happened.

[jallan]

Niniel posted: I am inclined to say he was one man, since the whole structure is so much of a whole that it must have been someone who knew all the parts equally well. There are little things (just word sometimes) that refer back to things that have been said somewhere completely else in the book, so if more than one person worked on it this could hardly have happened.Actually this raises no difficulty. Some think that the Iliad contains an earlier simpler poem later expanded. (Short texts expanded by later writers or included as part of a later larger compilation are common enough.)

A subtle cross-reference can either date back to the earlier smaller poem, or be a reference by a later redactor as part of an addition.

Also, we know that both the Iliad and the Odyssey we have received are offical editions, created by the Greeks, from various manuscripts. We have no idea how much these mansucripts varied from one another and how much smoothing the editors may have done.

Imagine, for example, an expanded Lord of the Rings with extra "fan fiction" adventures between Weathertop and the Last Ford, further "fan fiction" adventures inserted between Rivendell and Hollin, and so forth.

If these additions were well done and very much in Tolkien's own style, later readers would never be able to prove from the text itself that these additions were not part of the original work.

We also don't know how much the Iliad was at one time original, that is newly invented incidents placed into known Trojan war tales, and how much the material was already traditional when worked into the shape we have it.

But scholars argue about it.

[Walter]

A few historians think that there has been a rather long timespan between the Illiad and the Odyssey (e.g. Beloch: 750-550BC) too long for a single author to have written them both...

And - being a sailor - somehow I liked the Odyssey better, Odysseus' navigational skills are just awesome... ;)