this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Bards aren't just the run of the mill musicians. They are so much more than that.
And most of that "so much more" requires extensive training. Which requires some form of reading.
Bards are historians and have some magic of their own.
Homer was a blind bard well before the invention of Braille.
Homer may not even have existed, let alone been blind. And if he did exist, may not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey. And if he did write them, very well may not have written them from scratch (but was instead just the person responsible for writing down what became the definitive version of a more widespread oral tradition). So he's perhaps not the best example to use. (The notion that he's blind is based on the assumption that a certain bardic character in his writing was a self-insert.)
And we know the works of Homer because they were written down.
... by other people, yeah. The point is that the bard himself didn't write. He went around and recited his epic poems from memory.
Reciting from memory is a bardic skill, but those "other people" were his dedicated assistants.
Well, possibly. We don't know when Homer went blind, or if he was ever actually blind.
All we really know is that the two biographies written about him were written at least 400 years after his death. Both are highly questionable, but both still say that Homer was literate, or at least well educated, before losing his sight.
All we actually know is that Homer wrote the Iliad (or parts of it) and the Odyssey.
Centuries later