"It's useful to have an idea of Homer to attribute those works to, but "he" didn't write them any more than the guy poorly interjecting Christian themes wrote Beowulf."
That's where we disagree though, ghug--
I don't think the author of "Beowulf" is a fair analogue...one reason being that, as far as we know, that author didn't write more than one thing (we'll just go ahead and say "write," understanding the implicit problem with losing that term for the Beowulf author and Homer, though I would argue it's a bit less of a problem for Homer, for the reason I'm about to touch on.)
With "Homer," we have a body of work...and while you can argue there are differences among his works, they're still stylistically consistent enough, I think, to ascribe them to a "person"/single family of texts.
To take my dear beleaguered buddy Shakespeare...you KNOW when you're reading Shakespeare. He changes massively over the course of his career, 1587 or so (give or take a year) to about 1611 with "The Tempest" (yes, "Henry VIII" and "The Two Noble Kinsmen" came later, but for most purposes, "The Tempest" is really his curtain call) but you can still tell Shakespeare from any other author in the world.
He's distinct that way...you can tell him apart from Marlowe, Jonson, Kyd, Dekker, and the rest of his contemporaries. Most who can't tell him apart aren't able to do so just because they're so used to associating Elizabethan/Jacobean literature with Shakespeare.
To make a long story short--it's like Mozart and Beethoven...anyone who listens to them in any great capacity can hear both the influences and massive differences between the two, BUT if you don't listen to Classical/Romantic music at all, you might just mistake them for one another, BUT that's due to your inexperience. Shakespeare/Marlowe and the Other Elizabethan Playwrights is the same.
So, Homer here is like Shakespeare--he has a distinct style and, unless you have no experience with other ancient writers, there's no way you could mistake him for Vergil or Sophocles or any other writer.
And I would argue that's the result of either 1. A single writer or 2. At the very least, a "final" writer, that is, other people shaped the tales, but Homer ironed them out and gave them their distinctive style, not unlike the way Sir Thomas Mallory took a lot of conflicting Arthurian narratives to give arguably the most cohesive, coherent and definitive narrative of most of the Arthurian Legend, from start to finish.
By contrast, "Beowulf" is a one-off, as far as we can tell...there's other Anglo-Saxon literature, but it doesn't match up stylistically with "Beowulf."
As a one-off narrative, we can't really say much about "Beowulf" in terms of the authorship question.
But because there are numerous works ascribed to Homer and they all fit within a cohesive, shared style, I'd argue that shared style points to a single writer at some point along the process. Again, he almost certainly didn't come up with the stories himself, but stylistically, in terms of just the way they're presented, and set down? I think that's plausible enough to give "him" (or "a him" anyway...I guess if we really wanted to play devil's advocate we could say or "her," but I doubt anyone's really going to champion that as likely given the time period) credit for that work in a Mallory fashion.
"The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Homeric Hymns and whatever else you want to attribute to Homer were the result of the combined efforts of countless people over countless years. It's simply unfair to compare any one author to that."
I agree and disagree...it's unfair to credit Homer with all those stories, yes...
But the style and the way they're presented? That's a bit more fair in terms of ascribing credit...to go back to Shakespeare again, countless people told a "Romeo and Juliet"-style story before him, and he blatantly ripped off "Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke.
But we credit Shakespeare the play because 1. His style, the way he structures the characters and frames the story, and especially his choice of words are all outstanding, and 2. Arthur Brooke's poem is bad...like, BAD. ;) Brooke and others may have come up with that kind of story over many years, but it's Shakespeare that introduces ambiguity into the story on who's to blame (Brooke's very authoritarian, blames the lovers, and has all the subtlety of, well, krellin chastising, well, everyone not in line with krellin) and it's Shakespeare that gives us all that great poetry.
Homer didn't come up with The Odyssey, but he gives us a story structure with flashbacks and the kind of literary structure that doesn't come with oral tradition until it's finally written down.
Maybe Homer was just that lucky guy who either told it so well someone wrote down his version, and that over time got reworked over and over until it was polished, or else wrote things down himself, and then, again, over time that got polished.
But with no one else and no one better to credit for those stories...I'm fine giving him credit for that, at least.
Finally, unrelated:
"So, Dickens has my vote, even though I don't like him that much."
Why?
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Tesla Opens Their Patents
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