> The final version of the Iliad and much but not
> all of the text was almost certainly the work of a single individual,
> who we call Homer. Whether or not the same individual composed the
> Odyssey is still a matter of debate.
It seems pretty clear that there must have been an oral-formulaic "Troy cycle" of stories sung and partly improvised by bards (for lack of a better word) for quite some time before the Iliad was written down.
The text we have, though, is so consistent in style that if it's a redaction of more heterogeneous pre-existing material, the redactor is as near as dammit to an author.
Some bits do seem to have been preserved without quite so much redactorial smoothing. Lexicostatistical analysis and the inventory of prosodic features are said to reveal some chunks of less-digested earlier material. If memory serves, the Shield of Achilles section is particularly quirky.
Perhaps these were like set-pieces that everybody knew and so the redactor just couldn't mess with them as much -- like the way the old Latin translations of the Psalms, based on the Septuagint and not very accurate, continued to be used for liturgical purposes even after that fine Hebraist Jerome had produced far more scholarly versions from the original language.
The Odyssey is a whole 'nother can of worms, of course, but there the argument for unitary authorship seems even stronger than it is for the Iliad. Quite likely there was an oral "Odysseus cycle" too, but if so, in the Odyssey the redactor/author has taken matters even more firmly in hand than he or his colleague was able or inclined to do in the case of the Iliad.
Beowulf offers a rather similar picture -- oral-formulaic material of considerable antiquity recast by some single hand into a very consistent and quite literary written-down poem.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com