Homer Life and Works: There is very little known about Homer. Different scholars represent different ideas about him. Here we have some points to write about him. This note is solved for the BA English students. The students who belong to BBMKU and VBU Unversity can use it for the examination preparation. It is one of the most important questions for BA first semester students.
Homer Life and Works
The Iliad and the Odyssey are still two of the most popular and widely-read stories in the world. However, little is known about their author. He was a highly skilled Greek bard and lived probably in the eighth or early seventh centuries B.C.E. The authorship of the works is usually attributed to Homer, a blind poet. In the third and second centuries, B.C.E. Greeks had begun to question the existence of Homer and whether the epics were written by one person.
Modern scholars agree that even though a single author wrote the epics of their story, he owes a great debt to a long history of oral poetry and unwritten poetry. Before the Odyssey and Iliad were created, stories of a magnificent expedition to the East and its leaders’ fateful return journey home circulated in Greece for hundreds of years. These stories were passed down from generation to generation by casual storytellers or semi-professional minstrels. Each artist developed and polished the story as he told. This theory suggests that a poet, several poets, or a series of poets who passed down their work in succession, eventually turned these stories into written works. Each poet added his own twist and adjusted the narrative to suit his tastes.
The epics are written in Mycenaean Greece during the Bronze Age, despite archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence suggesting that they were written between 750 B.C.E. and 650 B.C.E. The Greeks believed that this earlier period was more glorious and sublime. It was when gods still visited the earth and heroes, godlike mortals with extraordinary attributes populated Greece. The two epics attempt to recreate this idyllic age. They are written in high style and depict life in the Bronze Age. “Achaeans” is the name of a large Greek tribe that occupied Greece in the Bronze Age.
Homer’s reconstruction of the eighth- and seventh century B.C.E. often fails to reflect reality. Greece. The Odyssey‘s background shows a feudal social structure that is more similar to Homer’s Greece and Odysseus. Homer also substitutes the pantheon with deities from his day for the Mycenaean Greek gods. Other minor, but not obvious anachronisms such as the references to iron tools or to tribes that hadn’t yet migrated from Greece to the Bronze Age betray the poem’s Iron Age origins.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were primarily written in the Ionic dialect, an ancient Greek language spoken on the Aegean Islands and along the coasts of Asia Minor (now modern Turkey). Scholars have concluded that the poet was from the eastern Greek world. It is more likely that the poet chose the Ionic dialect due to its greater style and wider scope. The Greek literature is slightly later and suggests that poets might have used different dialects to write their poems depending on the theme they were dealing with. Homer’s epics are Panhellenic in spirit (covering all of Greece), and use forms from many other dialects. This suggests that Homer did not simply use his native language but tailored his poems to the dialect which would best compliment his ideas.