The Iliad and the Odyssey grew out of a centuries-old tradition in which singers inherited familiar phrases, diction, scenes, and plots and reshaped them in performance, thus composing the heroic poetry orally. Research by scholars such as Milman Parry was fundamental to establishing this oral background. Scholars have differing views, however, about how the surviving epics took their final form. Many think that writing—through dictation, transcription, revision, or later editorial shaping—helped transform fluid oral performances into the extensive and comparatively stable texts known today. The poems are therefore best understood as products of interaction between oral tradition and writing.
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