I studied folklore and "oral literature" (ok, it's an oxymoron) in college. At the time, I was interested in closely parsing texts, in understanding the relationship between denotation and connotation in language, in how we might explore the subtext of these classical compositions to get greater insight into stories.
But I was a callow youth, so I didn't understand the larger issues. At a time when there was no written language, or when written language was technically impossible, especially for larger stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey, oral literature was a repository, the ONLY repository, for cultural memory, for history. Surely they weren't a factual history, but they were a place where a set of cultural values could be recorded and passed on from generation to generation. And so they were.
I have faith in a kind of cultural Darwinism: the stories that survived were the stories that mattered, whether because they were great stories or because they were useful vessels of cultural values. Anyone who listened to the Odyssey would have learned to be kind to guests and strangers and to value their home, their ancestors, their hosts.
