This could easily have been a much longer work. Chapter 4 seems off topic, though?

Prof. Nagy's interpretations were essential for my novel version of Euripides' Madness of Herakles https://jasonkassel.substack.com/.

Compares the lower caste of Indian epic singers to ancient Hellenia aiodoi, who would have sung a locally neutral song/poem or fashioned it add praise to the local audience.

I've now read several books by Gregory Nagy, and I find him to be an excellent writer. He expresses his intentions and his arguments very clearly. In Homeric Questions he patiently introduces concepts from (for instance) the study of oral poetry throughout the world, and then applies them to Homer.

The traditional "Homeric question" asks whether there was a single poet who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here Nagy expands the subject to include other related questions, like how were the poems first transmitted and recorded? Nagy gives surprisingly concrete answers to these perplexing questions. To me his reconstruction of the process whereby the poems emerged from traditional oral poetry into the written forms that have come down to us was quite plausible. He draws lessons from Albert Lord, one of his mentors, without verging into Lord's simplistic picture of Homer dictating his epics to a dutiful scribe.

I highly recommend Homeric Questions to anyone interested in this topic. It is interesting and, for a scholarly work, quite accessible.

I've read this book a couple of times and imagine I'll have to read it again at some point. Homeric Questions precedes Nagy's more extreme views on the homeric question and was a decent read.

All in all I recommend it as an informative and enjoyable book.