Homer's Odyssey: Laestrygonians == Scandinavians?

[lpetrich]

The full text:

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Thence we sailed sadly on till the men were worn out with long and fruitless rowing, for there was no longer any wind to help them. Six days, night and day did we toil, and on the seventh day we reached the rocky stronghold of Lamus- Telepylus, the city of the Laestrygonians, where the shepherd who is driving in his sheep and goats [to be milked] salutes him who is driving out his flock [to feed] and this last answers the salute. In that country a man who could do without sleep might earn double wages, one as a herdsman of cattle, and another as a shepherd, for they work much the same by night as they do by day.

When we reached the harbour we found it land-locked under steep cliffs, with a narrow entrance between two headlands. My captains took all their ships inside, and made them fast close to one another, for there was never so much as a breath of wind inside, but it was always dead calm. I kept my own ship outside, and moored it to a rock at the very end of the point; then I climbed a high rock to reconnoitre, but could see no sign neither of man nor cattle, only some smoke rising from the ground. So I sent two of my company with an attendant to find out what sort of people the inhabitants were.

The men when they got on shore followed a level road by which the people draw their firewood from the mountains into the town, till presently they met a young woman who had come outside to fetch water, and who was daughter to a Laestrygonian named Antiphates. She was going to the fountain Artacia from which the people bring in their water, and when my men had come close up to her, they asked her who the king of that country might be, and over what kind of people he ruled; so she directed them to her father's house, but when they got there they found his wife to be a giantess as huge as a mountain, and they were horrified at the sight of her.

She at once called her husband Antiphates from the place of assembly, and forthwith he set about killing my men. He snatched up one of them, and began to make his dinner off him then and there, whereon the other two ran back to the ships as fast as ever they could. But Antiphates raised a hue and cry after them, and thousands of sturdy Laestrygonians sprang up from every quarter- ogres, not men. They threw vast rocks at us from the cliffs as though they had been mere stones, and I heard the horrid sound of the ships crunching up against one another, and the death cries of my men, as the Laestrygonians speared them like fishes and took them home to eat them. While they were thus killing my men within the harbour I drew my sword, cut the cable of my own ship, and told my men to row with alf their might if they too would not fare like the rest; so they laid out for their lives, and we were thankful enough when we got into open water out of reach of the rocks they hurled at us. As for the others there was not one of them left.

(Odyssey, book 10, tr. by Samuel Butler; online at the Internet Classics Archive)

At first sight, this story is rather difficult to take seriously. Giant cannibals?

Leaving aside that aspect, however, there are some interesting features that suggest that this story is based on some half-remembered voyages.

• The land has 24-hour daylight or at least twilight; animal herders can work 24 hours a day if they wanted to.
• The harbor resembles a Scandinavian fjord, being rocky and stretching inland between steep cliffs.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together suggests the west coast of the Scandinavian peninsula, which is crossed by the Arctic Circle. But why that place?

Amber. Baltic amber. The Mycenaean Greeks are known to have acquired Baltic amber, and if they had traveled to the Baltic Sea to get it, they would have passed by the Scandinavian fjords.

They would likely have traveled during the summer, or at most late spring to early fall, when the weather is the most pleasant. They therefore would have remembered that place as having long daytimes. If they had spent the winter there, however, they would have seen a very short daytime, and if far enough north, only twilight.

They would likely also have seen the Aurora Borealis, a.k.a. the Northern Lights, which look like continually-moving glowing curtains in the sky.

 

[Sarpedon]

Imagination is simpler.

As is to assume the amber came through the same river trade routes that would (eventually) bring the scandanavians to the black sea.

People in Europe received goods from China for more than a millenium before the first recorded European took the trip. Also, you can get amber from other places. Just because the Baltic is currently the biggest source doesn't mean it is the only source.

 

[lpetrich]

Imagination is simpler.

But why imagine one thing and not another? I concede that giant cannibals are figments of storytellers' imaginations, because there aren't any well-documented ones and because they are so dramatic. But the geography and the long days suggest familiarity with fjords and high latitudes.

 

[repoman]

Read the short wiki on the Laestrygonians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laestrygonians

Herodotus is a decent source, usually

According to Thucydides (6.2.1.) and Polybius (1.2.9) the Laestrygones inhabited southeast Sicily. The name is akin to that of the Lestriconi, a branch of the Corsi (Ligurian-Celtic) tribe in the northeast coast of Sardinia, of the present day Gallura.

 

[lpetrich]

It's not just the Laestrygonians that suggest acquaintance with high latitudes.

Later generations of Greek mythmakers described  Hyperborea ("beyond the North Wind") a land far to the north where the Sun shined 24 hours a day and the people there live a very pleasant existence:

Never the Muse is absent
from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.

(Pindar, Tenth Pythian Ode; tr. Richmond Lattimore)

But,

Never on land or by sea will you find
the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea.

That also is likely a memory of long summer daytimes from visits to far northern latitudes, exaggerated into a very wonderful existence.

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Far-north travels may also account for another oddity: the  Symplegades, also known as the Clashing Rocks or the Cyanean (Blue) Rocks. They appear in the Jason and the Argonauts story as two mist-shrouded rocks at the Bosphorus that those adventurers must pass between.

Why blue rocks? That is an atypical color for rocks. However, ice floes and icebergs are sometimes bluish, and they float in the water. The northern seas can also be very foggy, making it hard to see ice floes in one's path.

Though ice floes are a good match for the appearance and some of the behavior of the Symplegades, their location is not; the Black and Mediterranean Seas are not known for having lots of ice floes in them. However, some imaginative storyteller could have decided that it is more dramatically interesting for them to be where Jason and the Argonauts are likely to travel, which is where we find them in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica.

This might also explain the Wandering Rocks described by Circe in Book 12 of the Odyssey, though those can also be  pumice rafts produced by eruptions of nearby volcanoes like Etna and Stromboli in Sicily.

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There are some difficulties with the Laestrygonians == Scandinavians hypothesis, notably the names. Those that can be identified are all Greek. Telepylos means "Far Gate" in Greek, and is the sort of name a Greek storyteller might give to some distant place. Also, Antiphates has a Greek name.

Since the original Laestrygonians lived in areas usually identified as the Germanic homeland or nearby (Denmark and southern Sweden), one might instead expect proto-Germanic names. One can work out some possibilities with historical-linguistic detective work, and none of the names looks recognizably Germanic. There's nothing that looks like "wolf", for instance, though a Greek-speaker would have turned it into something like "hylph" with appropriate endings. Something like the way that Pharaoh Amenhotep's name became Amenophis to Greek speakers.

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The first reasonably-clear first-hand account of the northern regions is from  Pytheas (~380 - ~310 BCE), a merchant and explorer from Massalia, now Marseille, France. Around 325 BCE, he searched for the origins of various trade goods like tin and amber, and apparently circumnavigated Great Britain. He also visited an island 6 days north of Britain,  Thule, which had a night only 2 or 3 hours long. Going a day further northward, he ran into some slushy sea ice, and he could not proceed further. But he found not only tin from Cornwall, Britain, but also Baltic amber.

Pytheas's account has not survived directly, but in quotes and paraphrases by such authors as Polybius, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Diodorus Siculus. But what they describe is enough to work out where he had been and what he had seen.

 

[lpetrich]

As to Sicily, are there any fjord-like features on that island?

But the Laestrygonians' fjord could have been inspired by both Sicily and western Scandinavia. In any case, Sicily would not explain its long days, because Sicily is at southern Greece's range of latitudes.

 

[Sarpedon]

Someone from Greece can't imagine fjords? Nor long days? A greek would have been familiar with the phenomenon of longer days in the summer than winter, as well as cliffs and waterways. Imagining a place where days are especially long and where waterways are completely surrounded by cliffs is not much of a stretch.

If the Odyssey actually includes an account of a voyage from asia minor to scandinavia, and back to greece, where are the accounts of all the places in between?

 

[lpetrich]

It's possible to imagine just about *anything*.

But it must be noted that the  Geography of the Odyssey has been argued about for centuries, even way back in Greco-Roman antiquity.

he geographer Strabo and many others came down squarely on the skeptical side: he reported what the great geographer Eratosthenes had said in the late third century BCE: "You will find the scene of Odysseus's wanderings when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of winds."

That article mentions theories for the location of the Laestrygonians like Sicily and Corsica, though not the Scandinavian theory.

I think that I first learned of the Scandinavian theory in a documentary I watched some decades ago; I don't know for sure. That documentary also mentioned a speculation that Scylla and Charybdis were at the Straits of Messina, that Scylla was an observation tower for fishermen exaggerated into a monster, and that Charybdis was some near-shore currents and underwater rocks that could easily smash up a boat.

I've also seen the speculations that what the Lotus-eaters ate was some sort of narcotic, and that Circe's sorcery was from the effects of certain hallucinogens.

 

[Sarpedon]

It's possible to imagine just about *anything*.

Which is why one should never discount the idea that someone just made something up, especially when its about a million times more likely than the alternative.

 

[lpetrich]

Maybe. But I still think that the fjord and the long daylight are not made up. That's because they are (1) unfamiliar, (2) short of dramatic value, and (3) non-supernatural.

It's like with the Clashing Rocks. They fit ice floes rather well, but their location is all wrong for them. Their location is much more dramatically interesting than far away at the edge of the known Universe.

 

[lpetrich]

Turning from the  Odyssey to the  Iliad, there are some interesting archaisms there also. It mentions lots of bronze armor, but Classical-era soldiers wore iron armor instead.

But Mycenaean Greek soldiers often wore bronze armor. Iron was not commonly used in the eastern Mediterranean until 1200 BCE or thereabouts ( History of ferrous metallurgy, etc.).

The Iliad also mentions a curious sort of helmet:

Meriones found a bow and quiver for Ulysses, and on his head he set a leathern helmet that was lined with a strong plaiting of leathern thongs, while on the outside it was thickly studded with boar's teeth, well and skilfully set into it; next the head there was an inner lining of felt.

(Iliad, book 10, tr. by Samuel Butler, online at the Internet Classics Archive)

There are lots of depictions of Mycenaean Greek soldiers wearing boar's-tusk helmets, something that was out of style in Classical times.

There are some oddities in the Iliad that suggest that its authors were unfamiliar with some of what they described. That epic mentions its heroes riding into battle in chariots, throwing their spears, and then dismounting to fight hand-to-hand. The problem here is that other accounts -- and pictures -- of chariot warfare describe chariot troops charging their enemy lines with archers shooting arrows from them. Some chariots even had scythes attached to their axles, for extra effect when charging an enemy ( Chariot,  Scythed chariot).

Judging from their bookkeepers' detailed records, the Mycenaeans had had plenty of chariots. But if the post-Mycenaean "Dark Age" Greeks had been too poor to support chariot armies, then such unfamiliarity with chariot warfare would be understandable.

 

[lpetrich]

There is an even weirder oddity in the Iliad. The full text:

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If, then, you would learn my descent, it is one that is well known to many. There is a city in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, called Ephyra, where Sisyphus lived, who was the craftiest of all mankind. He was the son of Aeolus, and had a son named Glaucus, who was father to Bellerophon, whom heaven endowed with the most surpassing comeliness and beauty. But Proetus devised his ruin, and being stronger than he, drove him from the land of the Argives, over which Jove had made him ruler. For Antea, wife of Proetus, lusted after him, and would have had him lie with her in secret; but Bellerophon was an honourable man and would not, so she told lies about him to Proteus. 'Proetus,' said she, 'kill Bellerophon or die, for he would have had converse with me against my will.' The king was angered, but shrank from killing Bellerophon, so he sent him to Lycia with lying letters of introduction, written on a folded tablet, and containing much ill against the bearer. He bade Bellerophon show these letters to his father-in-law, to the end that he might thus perish; Bellerophon therefore went to Lycia, and the gods convoyed him safely.

When he reached the river Xanthus, which is in Lycia, the king received him with all goodwill, feasted him nine days, and killed nine heifers in his honour, but when rosy-fingered morning appeared upon the tenth day, he questioned him and desired to see the letter from his son-in-law Proetus. When he had received the wicked letter he first commanded Bellerophon to kill that savage monster, the Chimaera, who was not a human being, but a goddess, for she had the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, while her body was that of a goat, and she breathed forth flames of fire; but Bellerophon slew her, for he was guided by signs from heaven. He next fought the far-famed Solymi, and this, he said, was the hardest of all his battles. Thirdly, he killed the Amazons, women who were the peers of men, and as he was returning thence the king devised yet another plan for his destruction; he picked the bravest warriors in all Lycia, and placed them in ambuscade, but not a man ever came back, for Bellerophon killed every one of them. Then the king knew that he must be the valiant offspring of a god, so he kept him in Lycia, gave him his daughter in marriage, and made him of equal honour in the kingdom with himself; and the Lycians gave him a piece of land, the best in all the country, fair with vineyards and tilled fields, to have and to hold.

(Iliad, book 6)

This looks like a description of writing. The only other reference to writing in Greek mythology that I know of is  Cadmus's bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece.

But it fits in well with another oddity. The Greek world was illiterate between Mycenaean and Classical times, during its Dark Age.

The Mycenaeans had a limited sort of literacy, writing Greek in the Linear B script that they borrowed from the Minoans. They did lots and lots of bookkeeping with it, with no sign of any other writing. No poems, no hymns, no epics, no royal proclamations, no law codes, no doodlings on walls or vases, nothing. The Minoans had used Linear A for bookkeeping, and also for dedications on religious objects, but the Mycenaeans never used Linear B for the latter purpose. Also, Linear B was used only in Mycenaean palace society, and not by the rest of the population. So when that society was destroyed around 1200 BCE, its writing went with it.

Greece acquired writing again around 750 BCE, using the Phoenician alphabet, and Greeks have used it ever since. After a few centuries, Greeks were using it much more widely than their Myaenaean or Minoan predecessors ever did, writing a lot in vase paintings and the like.

In between was a 450-year literacy gap, and the rarity of references to writing in Greek mythology suggests a lack of familiarity with it.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It's possible to imagine just about *anything*.

Which is why one should never discount the idea that someone just made something up, especially when its about a million times more likely than the alternative.

Or that someone wrote something down from a something they heard. By this method the Greeks didn't have to go to Scandinavia and the Scandinavians didn't have to come to Greece.