Chapman's Homer

About once a year I read the Iliad and/or the Odyssey, and today I bought a Wordsworth edition of the Chapman translations of both works. George Chapman was a contemporary of Shakespeare and his is the first rendition into English of these seminal epics. It took a brave man to be the first to undertake this task, but England was full of brave men at the time. Like the Homeric Greeks Englishmen roamed the world, founding colonies and trading stations wherever they went. Brave, full of energy, indominatable, the flaws of Englishman and Greek alike became their strengths. Clear, direct, no mincing of words for these fellows, no sanctimonious twisting of meaning. They said what they thought.
We know who Shakespeare was. (Though his history is sufficiently nebulous to provide opportunities for all sorts of wild conjectures- all of which seem motivated by a kind of bigotry: how could this country bumpkin possibly be posessed of such genius?) But the identity of Homer is lost in the mists of time. Was he one person? Were his works the product of a guild of poets, possibly refined and put into final form by the blind Homer? I haven't the expertise to offer opinions here, except to say that oral tradition has over and over proved to be more accurate than modern scholars can credit. The Bible spoke about the Hittites long before their remains were rediscovered by archaeologists. The stories Herodotus told seemed so unbelievable he was called the father of lies, but almost every year some new corroboration of his reporting surfaces. Troy itself was considered a fabulous place that couldn't possibly have existed until Heinrich Schliemann made fools of all the skeptics. His discoveries led to the uncovering of a previously unknown phase of Greek civilization. The academic establishment has hated him ever since. Not only was there a Troy, there was an Argos, a Mycenae, an Agamemnon, and it even turns out that these protoGreeks were the scourge of the Mediterranean at the time. These are the Phillistines so well known from the Bible. They also invaded Egypt.
What puzzles me most is what happened to the Trojans. Modern scholars seem singularly uninterested in the Trojans, but not so the Ancients. Trojans are feature actors in the founding myth of the Romans. In the Middle Ages interest in the Trojans persisted. A number of British- not English- legends say that Trojans founded their country, too, and that Britain is named after Brutus, another refugee from the Trojan War. Naturally, these stories are believed by thescholars to be entirely fictitious. However, these same legends give an account of a British army attacking Rome and Delphi and it is historically verifiable fact that these places were attacked by Celtic invaders. The leader of the British raiding party was said to be Bran, a name that means crow. His head is supposed to be buried beneath the Tower of London, which has had a colony of crows roosting there since before there was a tower. Personally, I love these stories, and I like to think one of my ancestors came back with some loot from one or more of those expeditions. If only I knew where it was buried!