by Felice Vinci
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Product Description
Compelling evidence that the events of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey took place in the Baltic and not the Mediterranean
• Reveals how a climate change forced the migration of a people and their myth to ancient Greece
• Identifies the true geographic sites of Troy and Ithaca in the Baltic Sea and Calypso's Isle in the North Atlantic Ocean
For years scholars have debated the incongruities in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, given that his descriptions are at odds with the geography of the areas he purportedly describes. Inspired by Plutarch's remark that Calypso's Isle was only five days sailing from Britain, Felice Vinci convincingly argues that Homer's epic tales originated not in the Mediterranean, but in the northern Baltic Sea.
Using meticulous geographical analysis, Vinci shows that many Homeric places, such as Troy and Ithaca, can still be identified in the geographic landscape of the Baltic. He explains how the dense, foggy weather described by Ulysses befits northern not Mediterranean climes, and how battles lasting through the night would easily have been possible in the long days of the Baltic summer. Vinci's meteorological analysis reveals how a decline of the "climatic optimum" caused the blond seafarers to migrate south to warmer climates, where they rebuilt their original world in the Mediterranean. Through many generations the memory of the heroic age and the feats performed by their ancestors in their lost homeland was preserved and handed down to the following ages, only later to be codified by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Felice Vinci offers a key to open many doors that allow us to consider the age-old question of the Indo-European diaspora and the origin of the Greek civilization from a new perspective.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
A new way to read two old favorites, 2008-05-28
Felice Vinci wrote this fascinating book in Italian in 1995 (he is a nuclear engineer and classics buff), and the book was translated into English and into Russian in 2006. The translations have led to growing interest in Vinci's work.
Vinci's main thesis is that The Illiad and the Odyssey of Homer took place in the Baltic, not the Mediterranean. Reading his book, and an excellent commentary by William Mullen of Bard College in the current issue of "Culture + Travel", makes re-reading these two old favorites a mind blowing experience.
Suspend your disbelief for a few paragraphs. Archeologists agree that invaders from the north founded the Greek Mycenaean kingdoms in the 16th century B.C.E. Linguists believe that languages from Greek to Sanskrit belong to an ancestral group called the Proto-Indo-Europeans that migrated throughout Europe before the second millennium B.C.E. Climatologists believe that 4500 years ago the planet as a whole was 4 degrees Celsius warmer, the so-called Post-Glacial Climatic Optimum.
What is not agreed is Vinci's claims that these groups "re-mapped" their new homes in the Mediterranean using the place names of the Baltic in their new homes, much as the Dutch and then the English named a certain island "New Amsterdam" and then "New York." By Mullen's count, "out of 390 place names in the Homeric epics, Vinci finds 321 northern counterparts in the text, individually and in relation to each other."
Homer often mentions snow and fog, his characters wore heavy clothes, the main battle in the "Iliad" takes place between two noons, separated by a starless "white night". Climate changes over the centuries, but were there white nights in Turkey many centuries ago?
In Vinci's approach, Troy is Toija in Finland, a town whose topography matches Homer's description precisely, including a long ridge that overlooks the plain "like an eyebrow". The Turkish name for the standard tourist destination is called "Hissarlik" -- not much like "Troy" -- and is not located on a "boundless sea" as Homer described it.
A puzzling part of the "Odyssey" is Homer's description of Atlas holding up "the great pillars that sustain Earth and Heaven." Neither the Rock of Gibraltar nor the Atlas Mountains in Africa look much like pillars. But two of the Faroe Islands, Kunoy and Kalsoy, are parallel slabs of stone, with only a narrow sea lane between them.
Home for Odysseus was Ithaca, which Homer describes as a low, flat island and the westernmost of four islands. In Greece, Ithaca is hilly and the westernmost of three islands, not four. West of Copenhagen, however, there is a low lying, rainy island, the fourth and westernmost of a small chain, fitting Athena's description: "Here is grain surpassing even a god's telling ... All kinds of woods, and watering places, the year round."
So, what's the truth? Well, we know that Homer was probably not one person but actually a series of story tellers, singing and re-telling their great tales over many centuries and in many different places. We probably will never know for sure if the tales could have taken place in the Baltic, but Vinci's theories add a wonderful gloss to both stories. Is it impossible that the invaders from the north carried both their singers and their tales south to the Mediterranean?
Read Vinci's book and then re-read Homer's two great classics with a new appreciation.
Robert C. Ross 2008
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Homer where he always was., 2008-03-21
Felice Vinci
The Baltic Origins of Homer's
Epic Tales:
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and
The Migration of Myth
(Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT) 2006
xiii+370 pages
ISBN 1-59477-052-2 (pb)
Critiqued by Frederic Jueneman
As perhaps an interesting preliminary aside, Roman author Felice Vinci's original 1995 book in Italian, Omero nel Baltico ("Homer in the Baltic"), was highlighted several years ago with a précis of his study of Homer's epic Iliad and Odyssey. Originally it was met with some skepticism; but hopefully since, it has captured the notice of some attentive classical scholars, who had no preconceived notions of their own, to further the study of Homeric lore. Now, finally, the full-scale English language version is widely available for critical analysis. (A contemporaneous Russian edition has also been recently published.) And, it might be amusingly mentioned that Vinci's popularity has since risen in Scandinavia, as these peoples were given a revitalized legacy, but his esteem has proportionately declined in Greece, since he has uncharitably taken away the cherished and hoary heritage of Homer from Aegean waters and moved it en masse into the Baltic. Notwithstanding, Vinci has done his homework remarkably well, as his extensive knowledge of Homeric Greek, as well as of ancient history and literature, comes through clearly.
The Foreword to this edition is by Joscelyn Godwin of Colgate University, a scholar who might be termed a student of esotericology (study of the occult), but who wouldn't be among my first choices as a preface author. Yet, his extensive knowledge of obscure esoteric practices and cabalistic lore from around the world puts him in a somewhat unique position. Such antiquated if otherwise unorthodox lore places almost all significant mythic events near the Pole, a premise that highlights the basic hypothesis of Vinci's repositioning of Homer's epic in the north.
This reviewer's only problem--albeit a minor one--is that Vinci has opted for literal, historic names and faces on what may otherwise be universal symbolisms, if not generic mythic themes. in Homer's epics, despite the fact that extensive Achaean and Trojan genealogies are sprinkled throughout these poems. Moreover, having been involved during an early editing process, this reviewer may also seem to have a conflict of interest in writing this critique; however, to be sure, there aren't many so intimately acquainted with Vinci's effort.
It should be said about both the Iliad and Odyssey, despite their heroic premise--if the discerning student of Homer hadn't otherwise noticed it--they are essentially Travelogues par excellence. But, even more than this, the Iliad is a compendium of peoples and cultures from various ports-of-call around the Baltic world, as outlined in exquisite detail in Book 2, "Catalogue of Ships," while the Odyssey itself more fancifully outlines economic trade routes taken by these intrepid Nordic seafarers, under the rubric of Ulysses' adventures, along with the constant dangers and other vicissitudes of wind, weather, and shoals that can trouble courageous mariners.
Homer seems to have efficiently used the Trojan War as the pivotal epic theme to highlight Baltic civilization, culture, and concomitant malignant unrest during the Sub-Boreal climatic plunge in the early second millennium BC, with the resulting armed conflicts for more habitable and sustainable territories, coupled with the ongoing quest for less frigid environments. These hostilities, coupled with the encroaching freeze, inexorably contributed to the eventual disintegration of Nordic society that finally impelled both their southward and their southeastward migrations to more temperate seaport climes. And this, in turn, was perhaps exacerbated by the eruption of Thera in the Mediterranean circa 1627 BC, as determined by dendrochronology (tree-ring dating). However, apparently not everyone did leave this increasingly Frigid Zone, as hardier peoples did remain in the northern climes to eke out an existence and evoke further Nordic legends and tales. Homer's epic is perhaps the only surviving classic from that epoch, as others may well have been lost. And even here, there seems to be the ghost of two Homers, as the Iliad and Odyssey are each stylistically distinct and dissimilar, as if they were orally relayed and later penned by different authors.
The literary artifact of the quest for the affections of Helen of Troy emphasizes one aspect of their regional cultural and moral values, but on this Vinci is silent except to comment that the heroine Sita is similarly abducted from her betrothed Rama in the Hindu Ramayana.
Further, these so-called "trade routes' in the Odyssey, are both a mnemonic of those sea passages and a verbal itinerary of what would otherwise have been forgotten and hence lost by these migrants. The superlative detail in Homer's epic lyrics are therefore not merely poetic hyperbole, but arrows-in-time of Mediterranean and Anatolian, if not, according to Vinci, Aryan, heritage, as well as tangible, albeit arcane literary directions to their former locales. That they were indeed lost and forgotten, it is our present task to remember and find them once again.
Vinci's reconstruction used the Greek biographer and moralist Plutarch (46-120 AD) as his initial guide for the identification of the Homeric Isle of Calypso, Ogygia (Stóra Dímun), off the coast of Norway in the Faeroe Islands. And, that these sea route mnemonics had also been forgotten and lost is noted in the writings of the geographer Strabo (63 BC-24 AD) and earlier historian Thucydides (471-400 BC), who thought Homer was a good storyteller but a rather poor geographer, where many Homeric islands are either missing or misplaced in the Mediterranean. Vinci attempts to amend these ancient erroneous impressions, as well as those of contemporary scholarship, with what might be termed geographical, morphological, and literary archeology. The actual physical digging and future confirmation of his arguments he would leave to the field archeologists. But, he has also left a pile of detritus for the philologists and historians, as there are still many linguistic and chronological problems.
One never knows what one might find while unearthing literary relics. Fossils are where you find them, as every paleontologist will acknowledge. Some plots of ground are more fertile than others, but the trick is in finding them. Hellenic authors and their present-day progeny have looked in vain in the Aegean for the likes of Homer's "long isle" Dulichium, "sandy" Pylos, Achilles' home of Phthia, and "white-cliffed" Cranae. They never had really existed in Mediterranean waters. But, they all have place in the Scandinavian world, which is where Vinci has discovered such vestiges of literary fossils, not only in Homer but also Saxo Grammaticus and the Icelandic Eddas, and parts of the Finnish epic Kalevala, among others.
The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (1150-1220) recorded parallel legends in his Gesta Danorum (Danish History), which dovetail Nordic legends in many respects with the Homeric epics, where occasionally even the names look familiar. In like manner, both the poetic Elder Edda (12th century) and the Younger Edda, penned by Snorri Sturluson in the following 13th century, have such corresponding themes where Nordic gods play the analogous roles of the Homeric heroes. One wonders if Saxo and Snorri previously had read Homer, or if these were from independently homomorphic tales. In the Kalevala, Väinämöinen has a leg scar comparable to Ulysses' childhood injury; and similarly, one might compare the godlike smithys from the far north, notably Ilmarinen and Hephaestus, who fashioned armor for their respective Finnish and Achaean heroes. Moreover, such oblique references appear throughout Indo-European mythic literature, much further afield than either the Mediterranean or the Baltic.
Where Saxo outlines the history of the Danes in lower Scandinavia, principally Denmark, Homer--by way of Vinci--describes the rest of the Baltic world, although Saxo does look eastward and places the Hellespont in the Gulf of Finland, far from the Dardanelles in northwestern Turkey, which is most unlike the sea that Homer called "wide" and "boundless."
Vinci's repeated excursions into etymological concordances are fascinating, but not fully convincing at least until further evidence is forthcoming, despite his caveat that "considerations based on geography and climate are far more reliable than similarities in place-names." Nevertheless, the poetic clustering of Homeric homonyms in names and places from both the Mediterranean and the Baltic worlds frames a persuasive argument.
His occasional references to the loss of the linguistic element "v"--the digamma--from ancient pre-Homeric Greek could well be such an etymological fossil and a potential linguistic springboard for additional appraisal. (The digamma had fallen into disuse except for an Aeolian dialect.) For example, Livy records the flight of Antenor with his Eneti allies after the fall of Troy, which might account for the Etrurian founding of a Veneti seaport colony later known to us as Venice, although the recorded history of this city just dates from our own 5th century. Similarly, the missing digammate prefix in the word "Achaean" would make "Vachaean" sound like "Viking." It's unfortunate that Vinci's protracted discussion of the linguistic significance of the digamma was edited out of this edition. However, there's lots more room for further philological study, to add to what has already been done long before Vinci came on the scene.
It has also come to the attention of this reviewer that Etruscan tombs in northern Italy frequently commemorate themes from both the "Trojan War" and the "Seven Against Thebes," an otherwise unaccountable provenance unless both ancient Troy and Thebes were originally located in the north. Interestingly, to confound this puzzle further, Vinci adds, "Thebes was not an Achaean city and did not take part in the Trojan War." This makes one wonder why the Etruscans venerated such funereal encomiums if their forebears did not participate in the Achaean-Trojan conflict. Even so, Etrurian origins are thought by received wisdom to be formerly from northern regions. In addition, Vinci does identify today's quaint Finnish village of Toija near the coast in southwestern Finland as being the putative site of the mythical Ilium of Homer, far from the Anatolian site at Hissarlik on the shores of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean that was uncovered by Heinrich Schliemann circa 1873.
In the Odyssey Homer describes an immense "flowing away" (ápsoros) current plowing silently through the ocean as Potamós Okeanós (literally "Blue River") that has all the earmarks of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, of which we presumably attribute its discovery to Benjamin Franklin circa 1770. The 8th century BC poet Hesiod had also remarked on it, which leads one to think that much of Homer has been swept aside by scholarly oversight when their attention is more-or-less rigidly confined to the Mediterranean. It also augurs for an Atlantic voyage of Ulysses to more distant and exotic ports-of-call, which may well have been as far west as Iceland, Greenland, or--heavens forfend!--the eastern seaboard of the Americas.
The vast plains of Homer's world do not reside in the rocky crags and spires of the Aegean; the terrain of the Iliad speaks of rolling hills and secluded seaports, specifically the harborage of Homeric Sparta, which otherwise is located far inland in the Mediterranean Peloponnese. Nor, for that matter, the non-Greek Homeric sources of tin, copper, iron, and particularly amber, although scattered artifacts have been found at Mycenae and other Mediterranean sites, despite similarly scattered ore sites in Anatolia, in and around the Black Sea. In the northland there are ancient copper mines in the Shetlands and tin ore in Cornwall, with immense iron deposits found in northern Sweden on the Gulf of Bothnia, and of course amber in areas rich in conifers. Magnetite from Sweden may have been the origin of ancient but crude compasses, which guided these daring ancient mariners through foggy seas across the ocean to Iceland, Greenland, and even the Americas for exploration and additional resources. Until the collapse of the warm Atlantic climatic phase prior to the second millennium, such seafaring across an oceanic expanse would certainly be possible, if not probable, during more temperate meteorological conditions.
So too, found in the far north, are prized gold and silver, which adorned the breastplates and shields fashioned by the gods for the Achaeans, perhaps along with Plato's celebrated orichalcum. Some of the world's finest gold, as well as silver, are found in Lapland in the northern extreme of Finland. Curiously, the precious orichalcum of Plato's fabulous Atlantis may turn out to be the platinum mined in the Urals. But, these minerals are less easily accessed today as they might have been during a pre-glacial Boreal phase--relatively ice free--several thousand years ago.
The climate of the northland underlies the Odyssey portrayals of "close-fitting" garments and long tunics, wrapped around "like the peel on a dry onion." And, in the Iliad, we similarly read of "thick furs" and "thick cloaks and blankets." All such descriptions are of Bronze Age clothing as found in Scandinavian burial tumuli, even as to the golden shoulder buckle worn by Ulysses to fasten his cloak.
Wind, fog, and rain also afflicted the combatants during the remarkably short season of the Achaean-Trojan skirmishes, where often one warrior could not see another. It should be said that the Iliad itself actually describes just a month-long finale of the ten-year hostilities over what appears to be an ongoing turf war, disregarding the overlay of Homer's plot theme in the quest for the satisfaction of honor and Helen's return to the court of Agamemnon. The constant references to inclement weather, and even the occasional allusions to ice and snow, all seem to denote unrelenting characteristic atmospheric conditions in the northlands. It also appears to this reviewer that the Achaeans wanted to once-and-for-all bring the economic dominance of Troy to its knees. In fact, the artifice of the "Trojan Horse," described only in the more imaginative Odyssey, may be an early description of a siege engine to breech the timbered walls of Troy.
The long winter nights of the polar climes north of the Arctic Circle do not rule out anything significant in the underlying themes of myth, where, for example, Persephone spends her half-year in the gloomy company of her husband Hades, brother of Zeus. Or, where Ulysses drifts northward with the Potamós Okeanós from the Isle of Circe to the Cimmerian land of Styx to consult with the ghost of Tiresias, the erstwhile king of Thebes. During Arctic winters we have both the light of the Moon during its periodic phases to illuminate the tundra, and the sometimes-spectacular aurora borealis as the porphyréen îrin (colored arch) spread across the heavens by Zeus for the aesthetic benefit of mortals. Nightfall in the Arctic does not mean it precludes activity, mythological or actual.
But, when the Sun's light finally begins to gradually reappear through the recurring twilights of spring, Homer speaks of "revolving dawns" that can only be observed in the far north, not in continental Europe nor the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the curious hapax legomenon of Homer--amphilyke nyx--is a linguistic fossil referring to the "dimly-lit night" during which Achaeans and Trojans fought during the day and throughout the Arctic dusk and into the following day, a phenomenon only experienced during early or late summer months in far northern climes. In another instance, King Nestor of Pylos recommended that campfires should surround each Achaean encampment; but, without any further clarification by Homer, most scholars assume that this advice was for discouraging potential Trojan infiltrators or from a surprise attack. However, according to classicist Alberto DiPippo of Univ. of Santa Clara, since there's no dark nighttime per se in far northern summers, such well-placed campfires would more realistically discourage the abominable insect infestation that usually plague such humid polar regions during the summertime.
This brief critique is but a small part of what Vinci has laid out for the reader, since we haven't even touched on what these ancients ate or drank, or did for their amusement, or even as to the ultimate migration of the Achaeans as ancestors of the Mycenaeans and later Hellenes, and who may even have been the personification of the fabled Peoples of the Sea.
And finally, to indulge in a reminiscence: While editing the first draft of this book some years ago, it was then presciently written "...this is a Homeric world that was once almost irretrievably lost, but at long last has now been found where it has always been."
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
He has my full vote of confidence., 2006-10-14
It is a curious fact that the geographical descriptions furnished in Homer's Iliad (the story of the siege of Troy) and Odyssey (the story of Odysseus's journey home after Troy's fall) do not easily match the assumed Mediterranean topography. Various prehistorians, historians, archeologists, and linguists have expressed their consternation about Homer's geographical details. It was Plutarch (46-120 A.D.), who in his essay "The face that appears in the lunar orb," unequivocally states that Goddess Calypso's island of Ogygia mentioned in the Odyssey was situated "five days' sail from Britain, toward the west."
Vinci, a nuclear engineer by profession and a passionate classicist by vocation, took Plutarch's statement as a serious clue to search for the geography of the Homeric epics in the North Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean. He has amassed a mountain of evidence in favor of the Baltic origins of both Greek epics. Similarities between the mythologies of the North and the Mediterranean have often been pointed out. Vinci argues that a deterioration in climate around 2000 B.C. caused some of the Scandinavian peoples to migrate south. As time went by, the epics were claimed by the Greeks for their own Mediterranean culture and environment.
What about Schliemann's Troy? Although this intrepid explorer undoubtedly discovered the Mycenean civilization, his claim to have unearthed the city of Troy has never been universally accepted. Already Strabo ( ) denied that the "ancient Ilium ( Troy)" was to be found in Anatolia. A better candidate for the Homeric Troy than the Anatolian town of Hisarlik, excavated by Schliemann, is possibly the Finnish town of Toija, as suggested by Vinci.
Vinci's audacious rewriting of Homeric culture and mythology is a creative proposition, which deserves to be further investigated. He has my full vote of confidence.
[...]
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Fascinating solution to the Homeric enigmas., 2006-06-28
For those who have actually read and pondered the Homeric sagas, many difficulties present themselves in trying to visualize the battles, the geography and the scenery when compared to the eastern areas of the Mediterranean Sea. In this book, Felice Vinci proposes and very well defends the seemingly outrageous idea that the events described in the epics actually transpired in the Baltic Sea. He contends that these events took place at the end of a particularly warm period, and with the dropping temperatures, the actors of the Homeric dramas fled south and occupied the warmer Mediterranean. Transposing the names of their former cities to their new homes, once things settled down, the epics were put to writing.
This is a bold and exciting assertion. This book explains and defends the premise very well. I strongly encourage people to read and ponder. It is a rare thing when something this bold and of this scope can be conceived and propounded with such dignity and vigor.
Put down whatever you are reading today and get this book!
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
intriguing study of connections between Homer's poems and Baltic area, 2006-05-02
Making comparisons of climate and geography, including place names, between Homer's ancient Greek classics and the Baltic Sea coastal areas, Vinci engages in intriguing, fascinating, but also well-substantiated speculation on the bases of Homer's works. Eons ago when the epics originated, climate was warmer in the Baltic region. Though it was not as warm as it commonly is in the eastern Mediterranean lands including Greece, Vinci finds references to this one-time warmer Northern European climate in the Odyssey, for example, with its frequent mention of cooler, damper weather often forming mist. Ulysses, the main character of the Odyssey, is more like a Viking seafarer than a typical Greek sailor. Vinci even finds many references in the Baltic region to the Trojan War poetically recorded in Homer's "Iliad." The link between the Baltic region and ancient Greece is strengthened, though not confirmed, by the migrations of Northern peoples to areas of Asia Minor. As Vinci recognizes, "further archaeological corroboration" by experts in different fields would be necessary to confirm his theory. But in pursuing it, this work covers many little-known but interesting and colorful aspects of the ancient European world and also enhances appreciation of the literary style and the cultural material and sources of the works.
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