@NaraMoore
Thank you. I studied folklore and mythology at university and the story came up a lot. I did have to look up the details.

The Odyssey is an example of epic poetry that could be chunked down so that the facts of the story, the plot, and the characters could be memorized such that a bard could use formulas to generate the poetry for the retelling the story to an audience, maybe with musical accompaniment. It was a living. If you ask then wasn't the story different at each retelling? Yes. The poetry was. The Odyssey we consider canon now is essentially a snapshot taken of a living oral tradition that existed solely in the minds of generations of live storytellers. Like a bear mounted in a natural history museum, the Odyssey in print is now equally as dead and immutable as that bear.

#fantasy #writers should take heed and provide that level of verisimilitude when depicting a night at the inn.

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