Wow, thanks all!
Behind the Name: Meaning, Origin and History of the Name Homer
http://www.behindthename.com/name/homer
> From the Greek name... (Homeros), derived from... (homeros) meaning “hostage, pledge”. Homer was the Greek epic poet who wrote the ‘Iliad’, about the Trojan War, and the ‘Odyssey’, about Odysseus’s journey home after the war. There is some debate about when he lived, or if he was even a real person, though most scholars place him in the 8th century BC. In the modern era, Homer has been used as a given name in the English-speaking world (chiefly in America) since the 18th century. This name is borne by the cartoon father on the television series ‘The Simpsons’.
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/hostage.html
> We have traditionally assumed that our Homer was a redactor or perhaps a compiler of episodes, working with talented editing and additions on cycles of Epic poetry, operating somewhere in the unclear historical penumbra of the 9th or 8th c. BC. But this Homer has information from the Trojan Wars of some three centuries earlier, and although his data is incomplete and in some cases corrupted, he must have been tuned to an oral tradition which handed, or rather chanted down stories from the past. If our Homer was of the 8th c., then there must he been various pre-Homers of the 12th c, and behind them the cloudy figure of a “proto-Homer”.
Homeric Question
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic by Barbara Graziosi
https://books.google.com/books?id=vCHsh9QWzLYC&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=homer+the+hostage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer
> Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds in Egypt. (up to 1963, the age of the source of that citation)
Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation
https://books.google.com/books?id=dtAYexpy5L0C&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=Pseudo-Herodotus
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_97-01/fid_012_sjk_homer.html
> Homer’s Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Sky Decoded, by Florence and Kenneth Wood. Written by the daughter and son-in-law of Edna Johnston Leigh (1916-91), this book presents and develops Leigh’s hypothesis, that the Homeric epics fall within the oral tradition of other ancient epics which, through their sung recitation, transmitted to each succeeding generation profound scientific ideas concerning man’s relationship to his universe. Such a concept of man and civilization, which could transmit science, through art, since no later than the end of the last Ice Age, flies directly in the face of modern archaeology, which has been dominated by the British establishment for two centuries.
If you think that’s fun look up Sun-Tzu, also a hotly debated existence.