Author Says a Whole Culture -- Not a Single 'Homer' -- Wrote 'Iliad,' 'Odyssey'

National Geographic ^ | January 4, 2015 | Simon Worrall

[SunkenCiv]

In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed.

Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways...

About ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way. I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years.

We had a rough time. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth -- like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus.

Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. I suddenly thought, This is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before.

[Verginius Rufus]

Milman Parry (1902-1935), an American scholar, developed the theory that the Homeric poems are oral poetry, and learned Serbo-Croatian in order to study living oral poets and understand how they learned and practiced their craft. Albert Lord was his assistant. Parry died at the age of 33 from an accidental gunshot and Lord continued his work. Parry's son Adam Parry later published a collection of his father's writings on Homeric poetry.

Adam Parry also died young (motorcycle accident).

I heard Lord lecture when I was a student. Besides The Singer of Tales and other writings on oral poetry, he also wrote Beginning Serbo-Croatian. I think he also learned Albanian to study the oral poetry in that language too.

[Dr. Sivana]

This guy reads Homer in TRANSLATION and ascribes authorship?! The Romans tried a repeat with Virgil and the Aeneid and was largely successful, providing Virgil in comfort on the most important commissioned work (commissioned by man, anyway) in the last couple of millennia.

If you read the Greek, and can scan, you would find this is not the work of WikiGreekia, but of one man who can write poetry. The hubris of book hustling authors...

[Kenny Bunk]

Revisionist theories of attribution of famous works are like haemorrhoids. Sooner or later every anusmundi will have one.

Allow me to commend you on your analysis:

If you read the Greek, and can scan, you would find this is not the work of WikiGreekia, but of one man who can write poetry. The hubris of book hustling authors!

I hope this charlatan Nicolson's work: "Why Homer Matters," is nothing more than this seasick nincompoop's Doctoral Dissertation at The Tule County College of Driver's Ed and Chicano Studies.

[Redcitizen]

Everyone knows that the Iliad, like the collected works of Shakespeare, is best read in the original Klingon.

[heye2monn]

All along I thought Homer was written by Jethro.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

He can say that if he wants to. Doesn’t make it true ... no, not even if it’s in a book.

Thank you.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

You are partly right but mostly wrong.

The Library of Alexandria was actually partly burned several times. Usually by accident. However it was rebuilt and refurnished with books until the last time when it was burned by the Caliph of Baghdad.

[Tax-chick]

Which makes it much much more interesting than the bland way you’re trying to make it certain.

I'm not trying to make it certain. I'm saying that asserting either position - no matter how vociferously - doesn't make either position true.

[Tax-chick]

Professor J. Rufus Fears and Professor Elizabeth Vandiver - recordings of whose lectures I own - both believe an individual “Homer” is by far the most probable author. (Prof. Fears flatly asserts it, because he’s like that.) Iirc, the translator Robert Fagles also came to this conclusion. Of course, their belief does not establish the truth, either.

My family read the Book of Judges recently, and I noticed some repeated passages that reminded me of some of Homer’s stock sections. I wouldn’t be surprised if Judges was originally an oral composition, recited for the instruction of a religious assembly, perhaps. Charlton Heston would say so: he strongly emphasized the oral tradition aspect of what became “Scripture.”

[Boogieman]

Well, they may have rebuilt a library in Alexandria by the time the muslims got there, but it wasn’t “The Library of Alexandria”, containing the ancient books like those of Homer, since that was already destroyed centuries before.

[Fresh Wind]

How many authors contributed to the mythological story of Barack Obama’s nativity?

[SunkenCiv]

‘WikiGreekia’, definitely plan to quote that in the future. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

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.

[BroJoeK]

from the article: "...historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition..."

Uh, I don't understand, why is this even debatable, when the answer is readily at hand -- why not just ask him?

I mean, we're talking about Homer, right, who posts long stories about a great war, involving unbelievable violence, and brutal slaughter, battles, ship wrecks and long travels home?

So, I'm asking, tell us Homer -- are your for real, are you two people, are you a tradition of the whole community, and is your material original, or do you take it from other sources?
Inquiring minds want to know... but don't give away any secrets, after all, "loose lips sink ships", doncha know.

;-)

[SunkenCiv]

[Tax-chick]

Well, isn’t Homer J. sort of a reverse situation to that posited in the original article? That’s a proposal that many people, together, produced a literary work under the name “Homer,” while we have Homer presenting his epic using many names, such as Hanson Baldwin, Drew Middleton, and Ernie Pyle.

[discostu]

Well we know there was a group, the Homeridae (Children of Homer), the question is did they descend from Homer in some way, or did they make him up.

[discostu]

But without people periodically making assertions the debate dies. It’s a fun debate that’s been going on over 2000 years, it would be a shame to see it end.

[discostu]

If you think that’s fun look up Sun-Tzu, also a hotly debated existence.

[Tax-chick]

without people periodically making assertions the debate dies

That's a good point.