"‘Listen to me, my comrades, brothers in hardship

"‘Listen to me, my comrades, brothers in hardship,
we can’t tell east from west, the dawn from the dusk,
nor where the sun that lights our lives goes under earth
nor where it rises."

Have any of you considered the theory that Homer's epic tales, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have ancient origins in the far Arctic north?

A few people have written books on this, Felice Vinci has material available online, but other researchers like Jurgen Spanuth have had work out on ancient North Atlantic civilizations for decades now and the more I read, the more it seems very likely that there was at least SOME influence from the far north. Consider the following:

1. Ancient historians including Tacitus and Plutarch have placed parts of Odysseus' world in the far north-- Plutarch claimed Ogygia was a 5 days sail north of Britain and Tacitus reported claims from Germans that Odysseus "sailed the Northern Seas" and "founded cities in Germania".

2. Many climatological and environmental details in Homer's epics correspond not with the clear blue and warmth of the Mediterranean, but instead describe a cold, rainy, misty world with wine-dark seas and mountains jutting straight out of the water (fjords?) Also, the "Ocean River" Okeanos has no real correspondence in the Mediterranean, but it certainly does in the North Atlantic as the Gulf Stream.

3. Solar phenomena described in both Iliad and Odyssey tell of days with no darkness and the "circle dances" of the Sun-- which can only be interpreted realistically as sub-arctic and arctic phenomena.

4. The geographical layout of the lands and islands does not fit the Mediterranean-- historians have never been able to coherently map Odysseus' route in the Med, but it CAN be done in the Baltic/North Atlantic. One glaring example is the Peloponnese is described in both epics as being a great flat plain-- whereas the Mediterranean Peloponnese is mostly hilly and mountainous.

Many other details suggest a non-Mediterranean homeland of Odysseus. What do you guys think?

I would have to read the book('s) to judge the theories, but it seems rather unplausible. Also Spanuth was a Nazi wrighting about an aryan/germanic Atlantis in the Northsea near Helgoland, so I don't think that I'm gonna find his wrightings very trustful. Find me a more conventional scholar wrighting about it and I'm gonna look into it

Seems really intereesting though. Maybe we really WUZ. But i've just recently started getting into history so excuse my beginner question. Do you mean that the tales of homer were inspired by events of scandinavia or something `? I havent read homers tales, for anyone wondering.

That is definitely an interesting theory. Thank you very much, OP, for giving me a topic to research today. If this thread is still up later in the day, I'll try to return with some information regarding this subject.

What exactly is the hypothesis here? That it's an older story that Greeks changed to make about them? Them why would they leave in inaccuracies like that? Doesn't make any sense.

No I haven't because

1)both tacitus and plutarch come more than half a millenium after the Odyssey was written down, and their vire of the world was very different from that of a VIIIth century Greek

2)The names of the tribes in the Odyssey is of Greek and Anatolian peoples, named by the Hittities too such as the Lycians and Carians, not of Germanic tribes

3)It could be that some elements were reminiscent of other tales, maybe even central European ones since they're distantly related to Mycenean Greeks, the story itself isn't of course a historical account but mostly a mythical tale, if a war was fought for Troy/Ilion it surely didn't last 10 years and the city of Troy itself was a relatively small settlement compared to other contemporary cities, though the walls are somehow unique and also fit the descriptions of the walls of Ilion in the Illiad, so yeah it was based both in events that took place between the Acheans and the Western Anatolian peoples, some tales are even reminiscent of the Mycenean presence further East towards the Levant and Egypt, some other elements might have come from other Indoeuropean tales and events but the main story is clearly based on a mythologically altered Mycenean world and events

I have and I've found it a folk-history bullshit.

First at all, there never was a problem of locating most of Homeric geography in the real world around Aegean. Like, it's not a mystery to be solved, we already have an answer, and the ancients themselves had no problem with it. It's like saying "What if Saving Private Ryan has its ancients origins in the medieval China?".
Second, there is no archeological data to support the hypothesis - weapons, towns and all that stuff is quite different from ones described by Homer.
Third, there is no trace of Homeric narratives in the Northern culture itself, unless you're ready to shoehorn every road movie trope into Odyssey.
Fourth, it's written in Greek hexameter, and people in the Northern Europe didn't speak Greek.

Now to your points:
>Plutarch claimed Ogygia was a 5 days sail north of Britain
He lived like 700 years after Odyssey had been written down, and he just wanted to say "really war away".
>Tacitus reported claims from Germans that Odysseus "sailed the Northern Seas" and "founded cities in Germania"
Half of the world claimed some relation to Homeric heroes at the time, Romans and some later Germanic peoples claimed to be descendants of Trojans. It's like claiming descend from Biblical heroes in the middle ages.
>climatological and environmental details
That's just bullshit.
> Solar phenomena described in both Iliad and Odyssey tell of days with no darkness and the "circle dances" of the Sun-- which can only be interpreted realistically as sub-arctic and arctic phenomena.
Or a metaphor for a very long and busy day.

I mean, Homer wrote fiction, not a trustworthy eyewitness account, ffs.

>after the Odyssey was written down

doesn't this suggest the story could be much much older than we could know?

>it's written in Greek hexameter

you know the Illiad and the Odyssey were oral traditions first, right?

I do, and it being a hexameter is the main reason people were able to transmit it orally. In other words, the language and its use is so important for Homeric poetry it's unlikely it's a translation.

>it's unlikely it's a translation

what are the chances that the Dorians were just displaced ancient Scandinavians/Northern Euros?

>First at all, there never was a problem of locating most of Homeric geography in the real world around Aegean

"Professor John Chadwick has recently summed up his conclusions on this subject: "I believe the Homeric evidence to be almost worthless... One reason is precisely the attempts which have been made to reconcile them... are unconvincing." And University of Genoa Italy's Greek literature professor Franco Montanari said, "regarding the correspondence between Homeric geography and the Mycenaean one... people stress divergences now."

One example is that Ithaca is supposed to be an island in an archepelago with three others, and it is supposed to be furthest to the west. However, in the Mediterranean, Ithaca is not the furthest west in its archepelago, and the chain is missing a major island: Dulichium. Dulichium is nowhere to be found in the Mediterranean.

>I mean, Homer wrote fiction, not a trustworthy eyewitness account, ffs.

Homer didn't just "write fiction" the way authors do today, he was trained in a cult-like organization devoted to poetry where he learned these as part of a long-standing tradition which goes back long before him. Homer was just the first to write them down.

The Doric invasion came from the North, as well as the Minoans and Mycenaeans before them (who came from the sea, but were an already developed seafaring civilization unheard of in the Mediterranean prior to their arrival... where else could they have come from?)

well this is the idea, that they brought language and mythology with them.

>trained in a cult-like organization devoted to poetry where he learned these as part of a long-standing tradition which goes back long before him

The Indo-European peoples who settled the north of the Indian subcontinent had a similar oral tradition.

is there any archeological evidence for major seafaring in the baltic/north sea prior to the assumend time of the Ilias?

Zero.
>a blind poet had no detailed map of Mediterranean before his eyes when he composed his epic
Who would have thought?
>he was trained in a cult-like organization devoted to poetry
Bullshit, he was just a wandering poet, every pre-modern culture had ones.
>where he learned these as part of a long-standing tradition which goes back long before him
True.
>Homer was just the first to write them down.
That's factually incorrect, Homeric epic was written down centuries after he composed it.

>Homer literally being blind
That's just a symbol for wisdom and prophecy

So you know where the Dorians came from?

VE

VVAZ

VASSILIAS

Somewhere from Epirus or Thessalia. Then again, there is no archeologic evidence for "invasion", just sudden collapse of palace economy, depopulation of the region for a century or two and then slow migration from the north Doric speakers yet with cultural continuity.

LIKE ODIN

WE WUZ GAYREEKS

>no archeologic evidence

means next to nothing desu

Means everything

I think we don't have many immatierial sources after over 2500 years.
Do we have written sources on that topic?
If not archeologie is all we have and isn't just asumptions

the theory is that greeks migrated from around the baltic sea and brought their stories with them

this guy gets it