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First Book Award. James Laughlin Award. As a result, many busts and statues have been carved of Homer with thick curly hair and beard and sightless eyes. But he wasn't the first, nor was he the last. Countless attempts to recreate the life and personality of the author from the content of his epic poems have occupied writers for centuries.
Homer's two epic poems have become archetypal road maps in world mythology. The stories provide an important insight into early human society, and illustrate, in some aspects, how little has changed. Some scholars insist that Homer was personally familiar with the plain of Troy, due to the geographical accuracy in the poem. The Odyssey picks up after the fall of Troy.
Further controversy about authorship springs from the differing styles of the two long narrative poems, indicating they were composed a century apart, while other historians claim only decades —the more formal structure of The Iliad is attributed to a poet at the height of his powers, whereas the more colloquial, novelistic approach in The Odyssey is attributed to an elderly Homer.
Homer enriched his descriptive story with the liberal use of simile and metaphor, which has inspired a long path of writers behind him. His structuring device was to start in the middle— in medias res — and then fill in the missing information via remembrances. Tolkien 's The Fall of Gondolin. Other works have been attributed to Homer over the centuries, most notably the Homeric Hymns , but in the end, only the two epic works remain enduringly his. He was right.
The Iliad and The Odyssey have provided not only seeds but fertilizer for almost all the other arts and sciences in Western culture. For the Greeks, Homer was a godfather of their national culture, chronicling its mythology and collective memory in rich rhythmic tales that have permeated the collective imagination.
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It finds its counterpart in the grand palaces that Mycenaean Greeks built in the Peloponnese in the period between — BC. The precise reasons for why their civilisation collapsed in the 12th century BC are still a matter of scholarly debate. The poems contain descriptions which evoke this glorious lost age. But they also contain details which derive from later times. There is a reference to the building of temples to the gods, for example, but the earliest Greek temples to the gods that we know of were constructed in the eighth century BC.
It is partly accidental that the Homeric epics are such a chronological jumble — they preserve real memories and traces and phrases of the ancient past — and partly intentional. The war is set in the ancient past, so words and objects were chosen to characterise this earlier time.
So where might Homer fit into this? Going on the theory that there was a Homer, perhaps a poet who was born in Smyrna and worked on Chios, was he the original storyteller who came up with the plots of the epics, influenced perhaps by a conflict just north of where he came from, at Troy? Or was Homer at the other end of the process?
After being passed orally from generation to generation, the poems must have been refined when they were written down for the first time. So, should we think of Homer as a sort of editor, who shaped the inherited material into the complete poems?
Everyone is entitled to their own view on this. My own is that it is not inconceivable that there was an original bard who came from the part of the world that we now know formed the setting of the poems. Perhaps he composed the epics in outline, building on stories passed down from his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, which later poets developed and perpetuated orally.
Finally these poems were written down. What is important is that we have the poems at all and continue to recognise their worth. Buy the book accompanying the exhibition here. Map Data. Terms of Use. Report a map error. Exhibitions and events Who was Homer? Historian and writer Daisy Dunn goes in search of the poet of the Trojan War, exploring who Homer was and whether he ever actually existed.
Marble bust of Homer. Roman copy of a Hellenistic original of the 2nd BC. Daisy Dunn, historian and writer 22 January
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