Michael Wood pauses his search for the historical Troy to ask how the Iliad itself could have survived for centuries before anyone wrote it down. This episode, the third in his six-part series, turns to living oral tradition for an answer, bringing in a Gaelic tale-teller and a professional bard to demonstrate the craft firsthand: memorized meter, repeated formulas, and performance techniques that let a storyteller hold an audience and a long narrative in his head at once. Wood uses their demonstrations to argue that Homer was less an author than an inheritor, the last and best voice in a chain of singers who had been reshaping the same stories for generations. The episode treats the poem's origins as a technical problem as much as a literary one, showing how illiterate cultures build memory systems sturdy enough to carry the Trojan War, and possibly real historical events buried inside it, across hundreds of years by voice alone.