I've glanced through one study (to be honest, I did not bother to read it) that argues that the events described in Homer didn't occur in the Mediterranean world at all, but in the Baltic Sea and its shores. According to this view, the Trojan War and Odysseus' travels are oral histories of early Bronze Age civilizations in Northern Europe that were transported south during the Greek Dark Ages when the land was overrun by nomads from Northern Europe. Could this be true? I suppose it's possible, the book made a compelling case and pointed out numerous items of evidence; historical, ethnological, and geographical, to support this thesis. But alas, totally contradictory analyses often sound just as convincing. Incomplete evidence can never be interpreted unambiguously, no matter how conscientious the scholar that collects it.

I am not familiar with the chronologies you mention, so I can't comment on them. All I can say is that certain parts of the past will forever remain at least partiallly obscured from us. It is the impact of these ancient tales and their survival into our own times that is really remarkable, and it only makes us wonder how much has been lost, perhaps just by accident. Old stories like this are old family albums filled with faded images of long-dead people in our past. Who are they, how many have a direct connection to us and how many only appear there incidentally? Most of all, how much has been lost forever?

I reread the Odyssey every year or so, and have read the Iliad several times. Like the Bible, they are glimpses into the distant past, our collective past. They are the crumbling family albums of the culture, damaged, incomplete, perhaps misleading, but they are all we have. But even more than what little information to that past they may preserve, much more important is that they have survived and played a role in the education of our all ancestors since, it is what we share with them and I try to think of them in those terms. They are indeed part of our heritage, to use a tediously overworked, misunderstood and abused word.

Some of these vignettes; David, Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite, Odysseus lashed to the mast to hear the sirens sweetly singing, Abraham ready to sacrifice his son to his God, are archetypal scenes that illuminate us today: these are things we've known about ourselves since the beginning. They are affirmations, and someimes, condemnations of our humanity.

There is a scene in the Iliad where Hector stands on the city walls and prepares to go fight his last battle, certain, pointless death at the hands of the invincible Achilles. His wife Andromache tries to dissuade him, begging him not to go, and shows him his infant son in a last attempt to stop him. The child cries, terrified by his father's helmet, and Hector removes it so he can say goodbye to little Astyanax for the last time. What better comment on familial devotion and love of country could we possibly want?

These voices come to us out of the distant past, and they reveal our ancestor's, their differences and similarities to us. The details of the production of the script and even it's authorship seem almost irrelevant.