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One of the greatest Homerists of our time, Frederick M. Combellack, argues that when it is assumed The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral poems, the postulated single redactor called Homer cannot be either credited with or denied originality in choice of phrasing.

Any example of grand or exquisite diction may have been created by the poet who compiled numerous lays into the two works we possess or may be due to one of his completely unknown fellow-craftsmen.

The quest of the historical Homer is likely never to have further success ; ;

no individual word in The Iliad or The Odyssey can be credited to any one man ; ;

no strikingly effective element of speech in the extant poems can with assurance be said not to have been a commonplace in the vaster epic corpus that may have existed at the beginning of the first millennium before Christ.

This observation is of interest not only to students of Homeric poetry but to students of Anglo-Saxon poetry as well.

To the extent that a tale is twice told, its final author must be suspect, although plagiarism in an oral tradition is less a misdemeanor than the standard modus dicendi.