We all know that the Greeks sacked Troy (repeatedly, apparently), but I’ve never read anyone saying how much of The Odyssey might be true as well. Certainly, there was no Cyclopse to blind, but did a king actually take 20 years to return from Troy? (I realize that the sacking of Troy took place in preliterate times, but its still possible that someone might have found something besides the ruins of Troy to back up what much of The Odyssey details so far as the amount of time it took Odysseus to get home.)
Also, it seems to me that the authors of the final versions (or at least the versions we have) of The Odyssey and The Illiad were, in fact, different people. Homer may have originated the tales, but it seems to me that the versions we have today are written by different authors. Have any PhD’s come to that conclusion as well?
On the first question: There is precious little historical evidence though there are a number of projects that attempt to compare homer’s Odyssey to archeological sites (The Odyssey Project on Ithaka is one such being conducted by Professor Sarantis Symeonoglou of the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis). Don’t forget that the story was first written down hundreds of years after the time of the supposed events.
I do remember reading once that the Cyclops might have referred to a tribe of people who wore helmets with one central round eyehole.
IMHO anyone who takes 20 years to sail from Asia Minor to Greece should throw his navigator overboard.
On the second question: F. A. Wolf, “Prolegomena ad Homerum” published in 1795 first raised the question of whether the various works attributed to Homer were all written by one person. The debate is still raging. However, even many of those who ascribe to the view that one person wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey suspect that the Odyssey originally ended at book XXIII, around line 269 and that the rest was added later.
The original Iliad and Odyssey were not written stories, they were poems handed down orally for hundreds of years. They would have suffered inevitable distortions, mistakes, additions etc. Despite that they are remarkably internally consistent in terms of style but very different in terms of style, skill, nature etc between each other
Most people agree that the Iliad is the better of the two works and many argue that the Odyssey may have been an attempt by another/others to copy the style of the Iliad.
The nature of the two stories is certainly very different: the Iliad being grand tragedy and the Odyssey in large part allegory and moral fable.
Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever know the answer and wonder if the debate isn’t just a bit fruitless. Why argue over the origins - just enjoy the story.
There is a vast body of literature on these questions, which you might find intereesting. I’ve got a “Guide to the Odyssey”, and there’s a multi-volume “Guide to the Ilad” out there. Exactly how much of this is true and how much is inspired by other sources is a very, very big and deep question.
Just to take your example of the Cyclopes – One interpretation has it that the Cyclops is Mt. Etna (pretty timely, considering the current eruption). Etna has one big eye and throws stones like Polyphemous. Another interpretation is that the image of the Cyclops was inspired by skulls of elephants – the central “nasal hole” looks like a huge eye socket. Some German guy proposed this quite a while back, and I’ve seen it repeated in the essays of science wqrtiter Willy Ley, in my daughter’s “Zoobooks” on elephants, and in Adrienne Mayor’s recent book “The First Fossil Hunters”. Yet another interpretation is that it was inspired by the bow-and-drill firemaker(rubbing wood together to make fire). Mythologist extraordinaire A.B. Cook wrote about this in his multi-volume “Zeus: A study in Ancient Religion”. Doubtless there are other interpretations (I have never heard of the one-eyed mask theory before.)