Fascinating.
From Wiki (yeah I know): "The Homeric Question—concerning by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed—continues to be debated. Broadly speaking, modern scholarly opinion falls into two groups. One holds that most of the Iliad and (according to some) the Odyssey are the works of a single poet of genius. The other considers the Homeric poems to be the result of a process of working and re-working by many contributors, and that "Homer" is best seen as a label for an entire tradition."
The second hypothesis seems more likely to me. Oral poems retold and embellished for generations until finally written down in the 7th-8th centuries BC.