Who wrote the Odyssey?

Homer, and whether Homer was a person is a question that has occupied classicists for two centuries. The Homeric Question asks whether one poet composed both epics, whether they were assembled from older oral material, and whether the name attaches to an author or to a tradition.

The strongest evidence came from fieldwork rather than from the texts. In the 1930s Milman Parry went to Yugoslavia and recorded illiterate singers performing enormously long heroic poems, and found they were not memorising but composing in performance, assembling lines from a stock of set phrases that fitted the metre. The Homeric poems are full of exactly that - swift-footed Achilles, the wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn - and those epithets vary by what fits the line rather than by what is being described. Which is why a character can be swift-footed while sitting down.

So the poems are probably the written record of a long oral tradition, fixed in text at some point around the eighth century BC. That leaves the Odyssey odd in its own right: it is a poem about coming home in which the hero spends ten years failing to, told out of order, with a long middle section narrated by the least reliable person in it - and its most sympathetic character may be the wife who waits, outmanoeuvring a house full of suitors for two decades by unpicking her weaving every night.