Who was Homer, author of the ‘Odyssey’?
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Who wrote the Odyssey?
Homer, obviously: that is what we’ve been told since the late 6th century BCE, when ancient Greeks started crediting the Odyssey to a blind bard from the rocky isle of Chios.
But this “Homer” appeared at least a century later than the poem itself. When the Odyssey first began to circulate in ancient Greece, no one knew its author. The song seems to have created the singer, not the other way around.
How can you have a poem without a poet? Two American researchers, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, came across a possible answer.
In the 1930s, Parry and Lord travelled to the Balkans to study still-living traditions of epic poetry. In Yugoslavia and Albania, they found bards who sang of heroes from long ago. These singers did not recite from a book. Most of them couldn’t read or write at all. Instead, they improvised their epics as they sang. They knew the story by heart, but told it in different words with each performance.
Balkan bards achieved this by relying on a stock of formulaic scenes, lines and phrases, which they combined on the spot. The formulae were passed down from teacher to student, so that all singers tended to sound alike.
This telltale style is just what we find in Homeric poetry....