Who was Homer? The question will almost certainly never be answered, and might in fact be unanswerable. It's hard to imagine any documents or remains turning up that will even provide a list of candidates. From our perspective Iron Age Greece was a long time ago. Long, long, loooooong time. If things weren't properly recorded there's not much we can do about it now.
Which in a way makes it even more incredible that the Iliad and Odyssey have survived all this time and inspired so many. Whoever he, she, or they (as in multiple people) were, the author could scarcely have dreamed that their work would survive multiple collapses and rebuildings of civilization.
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Who was the author of the Iliad and Odyssey is an interesting subject and one that's been discussed by historians and scholars of Greek history pretty often. It seems to me very like the arguments that arise when intellectuals disagree that Shakespeare could have written all the plays and sonnets that have been attributed to him.. and that was only 500 years ago.
What seems to me a logical argument in regard to Homer's epic poems is that there was in antiquity a group who were bards. I think we talked about the Hindu Vedas and how they were memorized and passed down for a very long time before they were written and established in permanent form. It's reasonable that elements of the Iliad and Odyssey were stories passed along by bards.
The whole of the Iliad covers one small period of one cycle of stories. It’s the work of a literate poet, Homer, steeped in the bardic traditions of the illiterate past. People do like to deny that there were some extremely intelligent people who lived long ago..
A neat article from the British Museum:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/who-was-homer
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