The Nordic Origins of the Iliad and Odyssey: An Up-to-date Survey of the Theory

Abstract

An up-to-date survey of the theory proposed in "The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales" is presented here. The real setting of the Iliad and Odyssey can be identified not as the Mediterranean Sea, where it proves to be undermined by many incongruities, but rather in the north of Europe. The oral sagas that originated the two poems came from the Baltic regions, where the Bronze Age flourished in the 2nd millennium BC and where many Homeric places, such as Troy and Ithaca, can still be identified today. The blond seafarers who founded the Mycenaean civilization in the Aegean in the 16th century BC brought these tales from Scandinavia to Greece after the end of the climatic optimum. These peoples then rebuilt their original worldwhere the Trojan War and many other mythological events had taken placefarther south in Mediterranean waters, transferring significant names from north to south. Through many generations, they preserved the memory of the heroic age and the feats performed by their ancestors in their lost Hyperborean homeland, until the oral tradition was put into written form around the 8th Century BC, when alphabetical writing was introduced in Greece. This new prospect can open new developments as to the European prehistory and the dawn of the Greek civilization.

A Hypothesis on the Pillars of Hercules and their True Location

“…It is striking that these assertions correspond to the geographical reality of the Atlantic, where the American continent surrounds the ocean from the extreme north almost to the extreme south, and those four islands actually lie along the route to North America that the Vikings followed during the Medieval Warm Period [3]. Ogygia is identifiable with Nólsoy [4], an island in the Faroe archipelago, and the other three correspond to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. They are at a high latitude, which tallies with the shortness of the summer nights.…”

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“…10 I opted to include only a selection of recent papers published in one of the different academic journals of the Athens Journal of Education and Research (https://www.athensjournals.gr/. 11 See Duichin (2017) and Vinci (2017) who argued that the events of Odyssey took place in the Nordic Sea. Some others have extended Odysseus trip to the Americas.…”