Sailing Homer's Baltic: "Or Is This All Hallucination?"

Trustees of Boston University

Sailing Homer's Baltic: "Or Is This All Hallucination?"Author(s): William MullenSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 2007), pp. 25-60Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29737326 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.54 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 21:40:16 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tbu

http://www.jstor.org/stable/29737326?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Sailing Homer's Baltic: "Or Is This All Hallucination?"

WILLIAM MULLEN

?To the V-TEAM: Jonas Forssell, Sophia Friedson-Ridenour,

John Hambley, Dane Klinger, Tom Mattos, and Caleb Morfit

I. FACT AND FICTION

Xact and fiction are always morphing into

each other, and that can be both beautiful and dangerous. It

is beautiful that we are free to imagine whatever fictions we

wish. On hearing any archetypal plot, how lovely that we

can make it our own by imagining it in settings familiar to

us. But it is dangerous that we are so good at believing what

we want to believe. On hearing any controversial theory, how suspicious it is that we know instantly whether we

want it to be true. And, particularly in the information age, it is hard indeed not just to go out and muster lots of facts

and claims by lots of experts, for a theory or against it, just to confirm our original gut desire.

For an instance of fiction, take the plot of the Odyssey. Our

first exposure to it might be in the never-never land of a

child's book of myths. Later we learn that it is set in Greece

and Turkey, with some episodes of Odysseus' weirder wan?

derings maybe assignable to Sicily and southern Italy. Still

later we learn that a handful of experts on "Indo-European Studies" can reconstruct proto-plots about resourceful wan?

dering heroes, and the noble wives they are separated from, as far southeast as India and as far southwest as Ireland?all

spread by the same mysterious "Indo-European migrations."

Finally, we read James Joyce's Ulysses and are enormously re?

freshed to realize that, with a cunning enough imagination,

you can relocate the archetypes of the Odyssey's plot wher? ever you like. You can arrange for them to be coming soon to

ARION 15.1 SPRING/SUMMER 2OO7



26 SAILING HOMER'S BALTIC

a neighborhood near you. Whatever the original facts were,

they have now morphed back into unabashed fictions.

For an instance of fact, take global warming. For years now we have been hearing about a dangerous warming of

the earth and, ever-increasingly, about evidence that it is

principally caused by human activity, is "anthropogenic." Heated disagreements you and I might have over whether

the warming is in fact happening, or?even more heated?

whether it is anthropogenic, rarely get aired for long without one of us invoking "scientific consensus" to silence the

other. Alas, this move elides the fact that not even a consen?

sus of scientists demonstrates that something is true, as

shown by all the consensuses defied by Copernicus, Galileo,

Newton, and Darwin. My disagreement with you also will

rarely proceed long without one or the other of us insisting that the data are still vastly too complex for reliable extrap? olation. And which ever side you or I want to believe, both

of us are only a few websites and list-serves away from busy and passionate people amassing vastly complex databanks, culled from peer-reviewed scientific journals, giving evidence

that our position has much to be said for it.

Shortly before his death I talked with the poet James

Merrill, in the course of inquiring after factual prototypes for

the invented great estate in the title of The Changing Light at

Sandover, about this difference between fiction and fact. "Oh,

fact," he said, "sooner or later always changes back into fic?

tion, doesn't it?" I shuddered for a moment?the Holocaust

changed back into fiction? Perhaps better than "fiction" would

have been "archetype." Hitler's Holocaust has unquestionably become an archetype for us, even though Stalin seems to have

been responsible for ten times as many deaths as Hitler, and, for all we know, Mao for more than Stalin.

This past June and July I had the most powerfully beauti?

ful trip in my sixty years so far. I moved around among five

countries bordering the Baltic and the North Sea, part of the

time sailing with five students, part of it alone, part of it in

the company of the Italian author of a perfect example of the



William Mullen 27

kind of controversial theory I have just instanced. Discussion

of Felice Vinci's theory is just heating up now because within

the last year his book, published in Italian in 1995, nas made

its debuts in Russian and English translations. My project,

originated in fact by my students, was to document and pro? mote the theory in a way that would lead to full-scale scien?

tific efforts to confirm or falsify it. In the course of so doing we met an abundance of people who instantly gave signs of

wanting it to be true, from taxi drivers to the Director of the

Hermitage State Museum in St. Petersburg. Vinci's theory is about the northern origin of plots and sites

and routes we now read about in the texts of Homer. His el?

egantly simple Italian title, Omero nel B?ltico, has been ren?

dered in English as The Baltic Origin of Homer's Epic Tales

(Inner Tradition Press, 2006). The theory is in fact nothing more than the combining of a set of assumptions main

streamed long ago. There is a mainstream "consensus" that

proto-IndorEuropean peoples once lived further north and

subsequently, at time frames and on routes and for reasons

about which there is no consensus, migrated south and took

with them their gods, myths, epics, tropes, meters, and social

systems. There is also a long-standing mainstream consensus

among climatologists that 4,500 years ago the planet as a

whole was four degrees Celsius warmer, the so-called Post

Glacial Climatic Optimum, a phenomenon of greater interest

than ever to us as we watch the planet heat up again and

wonder why. Finally, there is much evidence in many cultures

of what Vinci calls "homotopes," place-names from an old

homeland remapped by settlers onto a new one. New York?

ers, for instance, live in a state enriched by cities named Troy, Ithaka, Syracuse, Utica, Carthage, and Rome. Scholars of the

Navajo all agree that only a few hundred years before

Columbus, they swept down from a homeland further north

and remapped their sacred epic onto the present Four Cor?

ners, butte by butte and sacred mountain by sacred moun?

tain, scene after scene from the defining story of how the War

Brothers rid the land of monsters. Scholars of the most an




cient Hindu text, the Rig Veda, agree that there is nothing in

it that fixes its origins specifically to the Indian subcontinent, and that might very well have been imported from further

north and west; conjectures range from Afghanistan to the

Russian Steppes to the Arctic Circle. (Recent movements

among "native Indian" scholars have rejected this consensus;

they clearly would prefer to believe it to be true that their

founding texts were autochthonous.) Vinci puts these consensuses together to solve the puzzle,

about whose existence there is also a long-term consensus

among classicists, that passage after passage in the text of

Homer does not accurately describe the eastern Mediterranean

Greek and Turkish sites that traditions many centuries old as?

cribe to them. He argues, in fine-grained detail, that the Home?

ric epics contain a lot more information than we ever thought about an earlier Indo-European enactment in the Baltic, before

the climatic downturn from 2500 to 1600 bc made some of

the Baltic proto-Greeks move south to a new homeland in the

eastern Mediterranean. Many of the Indo-European migrants ended up far inland and dropped their nautical lore and myths. Those who persisted to the eastern Mediterranean may well

have stopped there because they found it remarkably similar, in landscape and seascape, to their old homeland in the

Baltic?just as many a Swede, Norwegian, or Finn has stopped in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Upper Michigan. Vinci's book

contains over three hundred homotopes, the vowels and con?

sonants of the Homeric place names linguistically close or

identical to present-day place names, of unknown antiquity, all

around the Baltic. And unlike our congeries of city names in

New York State, his three hundred-odd homotopes form a set, each in relation to the other, geographically and topographi?

cally, as spelled out in Homer.

My students and I set out not to prove Vinci's theory defi?

nitely?that we leave to archaeologists and linguists?but to

document it and imagine it. And so for two months there was

no escaping a sustained meditation on these uncanny morph

ing powers both fact and fiction possess. If Vinci's account of



William Mullen 29

Homer's Baltic origins is established as fact, we will all be in?

vited to imagine the Iliad and Odyssey afresh in a new

seascape which, when it was warmer by four degrees Celsius, must have been almost paradisal in its beauty. And I and my students will have been among the first to witness yet another

testimony to the prodigious powers which peoples on the move have of taking their old portable stories with them with

them and remapping them cogently onto new places. If Vinci's

account is falsified?and I told my students this, by way of a

pep talk?then we will have spent our summer in a prodigious exercise of the imagination, right up there with Joyce's Ulysses.

We sailed through a dreamscape and a mythscape, and just like Joyce we took a Mediterranean Greek story and remapped it, in enormous and cunning detail, onto a northern setting.

2. HOMERIC DESTINATIONS

before we even boarded ship we were treated to the finest of

Swedish hospitality, in the person of Rolf Classon, a publisher who was keen to get Vinci's book translated into Swedish and

Norwegian, possibly also Finnish and Danish. Rolf summed

up, better than anyone other Scandinavian I met, the reason

why Scandinavians are bound to want Vinci's theory to be true: "We Swedes thought we had two thousand years of his?

tory, now we're being told we have four thousand." He rented a van and took us on a long day's drive northwest of Stock?

holm so that we could seek out Bronze Age rock carvings in

obscure locations, crucial to the archaeological component of

Vinci's case. One carving was so obscure that we got lost on a

dirt road and had to ask a farmer to come over from the mid?

dle to his field and help us out. The farmer told the urbane

Rolf, in a country Swedish dialect, that, yes, he lived next to

one of those carvings himself, just had never bothered to fig? ure out what it was all about. The carvings' favorite theme is men in ships, sometimes with heroes on them, sometimes with

the disc of the sun on the ship, as in ancient Egyptian iconog?

raphy. The sun or perhaps some other celestial body.




Our first "Homeric" destination was Nortt?lje, Vinci's

candidate for the Bay of Aulis at which the "thousand ships" of the Greek contingents were assembled, and from which, when the bad weather relented and good winds finally pre?

vailed, they launched themselves east to take Troy. Classicists are well aware that that the Aulis on the Greek Mediter? ranean consists of two small coves much too small to contain the large number of ships assembling for Troy, in fact closer to twelve hundred as reckoned in the Iliad's Catalogue of

Ships. These classicists should come and see Nortt?lje, about ten miles long east to west and quite narrow north to south,

providing mile after mile of sheltered harbors along the east

west axis, like a cathedral nave with a long suite of semi-cir?

cular apses on each side. It was easy to imagine, in each

grassy, forest-fringed apse, a different fleet and camp of the

twenty-nine contingents listed in the Catalogue. (One of the

great tour-de-forces of Omero nel B?ltico is the stark con?

trast Vinci establishes between the way the candidate eastern

Mediterranean Greek cities in the Catalogue are presented, in a sequence that much of the time jumps randomly over the

map, with the way his twenty-nine Baltic homotopes pro?

ceed, in a perfect counter-clockwise sequence, most of them

homotopic with contemporary Scandinavian names in which are nested the same basic sequence of consonants and vowels as in the place-names in the Homeric text.) It was easy to

imagine Agamemnon, king of kings, camping in some prime location, at the entrance or the innermost harbor of the bay,

grand and pompous and harried into desperation by the foul

weather. For Vinci, that foul weather marks the first phase of

the climatic downturn from the Post-Glacial Optimum that

later drove hordes of Baltic proto-Greeks to abandon the

Baltic altogether in search of warmer homelands for them?

selves in the south. What are the Iliad and the Odyssey, in

fact, if not long stories about foul weather?

Our second destination was Lemland, Vinci's candidate for

Lemnos. The initial LEM-, identical in these two homotopic islands, is cognate with "lame" and "limp," a concept which



William Mullen 31

was taking on an escalating poignance for me because, a

week before leaving for our tightly-scheduled trip, I started

having a pain whenever I placed my right heel on the ground in the course of a normal stride. (Three months later it was

diagnosed as a fracture in the heel bone.) This pain sapped my entire two months in Scandinavia, but the beauty of it was that it put my mind into overdrive, on arriving at this LEM- island, pondering its archetypes of lameness. This was

the place where the lame archer-hero Philoktetes was

dumped for nine years (on the counsel of Odysseus) because

his heel wound from the bite of a sacred snake made his

howling and stench "pollute" the Greek expedition. This was

also the place where the lame smith god Hephaistos was

dumped by his mother Hera and her husband, in disgust at

his deformity; in Milton's words he was

thrown by angry Jove Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day, and with the setting sun

Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star, On Lemnos.

Ancient Greek smiths were commonly lame, a defect that

proves an advantage for that profession: to be a smith you don't need to walk, just stand at the forge all day, and the

upper body muscles you develop in compensation are just what you need for the grueling forge work. Evidence exists to suggest that some boys were actually lamed in their child?

hood, by way of predestinating them for the smith profes? sion, as likewise others were blinded, to make them grow up to be blind bards like Demodocus in the Odyssey?on the

well-known analogue practice of blinding song birds to

make them sing more sweetly. All very shocking, until you consider that there were still castrati singing in early twenti?

eth-century Europe.

Nor was the lame smith merely a grunting workman.




Vinci assembles evidence of lameness as a trait of Arctic Eurasian shamans, and combines this with evidence in both north and south?the smith cult of the Finnish Kalevala, the Kabeiroi in Mediterranean Greece?that smiths, like ma?

sons, organized themselves in guilds in which they passed on

esoteric knowledge of the cosmos. This "cosmic" knowledge may well, he argues, have to do with the meteoric origin of

iron. Whatever men were bold enough to first look un?

daunted on a newly fallen meteorite, molten and glowing, and to approach it and "tame" it and learn to reproduce it, in glowing furnaces whose metals were brought by his assis? tants over many days to a divine incandescence?such men,

who thus gave their societies the weapons of war and hence

of triumph, might well have lorded it over other men, and

triumphed themselves, in their lameness and their superior

cunning, over those who depended on them for kettle and

breastpiece, sword and helmet. One thinks of Edmund Wil?

son's essay, "The Wound and the Bow," in which he takes Philoktetes' wound, which pollutes him, and his bow, which wins him glory because in the end it is essential if the Greeks are to triumph over Troy, and makes these two opposites into metaphors for the artist who fashions out of his own

psychic wounds the work by which he will triumph over

time and society. This is Yeats' "Only an aching art / Can

make a changeless work of art." This is Joyce's shy, near?

sighted Stephen Daedalus vowing "to forge upon the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." And here I

was, on Lemnos, limping, lame with the best of them. Who

would not be half in love with lameness in such a place? Or

in any of the places nearby with "smith names," as Vinci

points out: Hammerland, Hammarudda, Lumparland. Our third Homeric destination was Ordnalsklint, the high?

est "mountain" in Aland. Mountain is a relative term. At all of

423 feet high, this mountain still rises high enough to take you almost literally within view of Troy, or at least the "Troad," as

the Achaeans called the geographical and cultural area that surrounded the imperial city. This view Vinci identifies with



William Mullen 33

the view Poseidon commands from the top of Samothrace, name of his sacred island and also his sacred mountain west of

the Troad, from which, after watching with anxiety the Tro?

jans whomping his beloved Achaeans, he moves with three gi? ant strides, from one cult place of his to another, till finally he

can take his place up close near Troy. We climbed Ordnal

sklint, passing a Bronze Age stone fortress on a side-ridge on

the way up, and feasted our eyes on the literally hundreds of

islets stretching toward the Finnish mainland. We pho?

tographed ourselves with Poseidon's view behind us.

Our last destination west of the Finnish mainland was the

most miraculously beautiful of all, Appl?, a name Vinci asso?

ciates with Apollo, in the middle of the stretch of almost

open sea called Delet, which he associates with Delos, central

island of Apollo's cult. Its beauty was all the more moving because we decided, for the sake of our demanding schedule,

just to sail past it, in the mid-afternoon, and not to stop and

explore the by now familiar configurations on it of meadows

radiant with flowers, forests beckoning behind them, head?

lands lambent in the angle of the light. In one sense Apollo's sacred island, if such it was, seemed not so different, element

by element, from all the many others we had seen and been

moved by so far. But something was in the air for me, as I sat

alone on the prow and let my imagination, fortified by the

Vinci hypothesis, spellbind me minute by radiant minute, al?

most siren-like, as we sailed past.

Here indeed was the payoff for entertaining on my travels a theory which, if true, makes each sight astounding in a

new way, and which, if false, nevertheless had the power to

spirit me effortlessly into dreamscape and mythscape. The

solstitial light, that blue mid-afternoon, seemed uncannily

right on the contours of Apollo's island, as we sailed be?

tween it and one after another islet or skerry fitted into the

jigsaw puzzle with it. The white swans in the bays seemed

veritably Apollo's swans. As at Nortt?lje, harborage would

have been there in abundance for hundred and hundreds of

ships bringing folk from all quarters to celebrate the Delian




festival, and the whole site seemed well chosen pragmatically as well as by whatever kind of divination went into the first

shaman's choice of it.

A note on swans. They are Apollo's bird because on the

day of his birth some fifteen of them?perhaps the number of

dancers in a Greek chorus?assembled and yoked themselves to a chariot and bore the wondrous babe straightway to the

land of the Hyperboreans, that paradisally calm and spring? like realm "Beyond the North Wind," where ever after the

god of light and music and dance spends the winter months

being feted by the happy folk there. It is the same kind of

realm, in the Greek poets' descriptions of it, that the preemi?

nently virtuous heroes are privileged to inhabit after death, Achilles among them, the so-called Islands of the Blessed.

Vinci, like others before him, adduces here the common cul?

tural construct by which peoples hold in memory some lost

Golden Age in the past?in Greek the age of Cronus, in Latin

the age of Saturn?and then reserve as reward for the virtu?

ous dead in the future a realm just like that peaceful spring? time realm from the foretime. Vinci's addition is simply to

remind us that for peoples dwelling in the far north during the Post Glacial Climatic Optimum?remember, the planet on average was four degrees Celsius warmer, and you could

have sailed from northernmost Norway to northernmost

Canada with hardly an ice cap to bar your way?there had

indeed been a Golden Age which was subsequently lost. The

paradisal meadow flowers we were gazing at during this summer solstice would have been blossoming for them, per?

haps, in March, as soon as days equaled nights in length

(and for Pindar the Islands of the Blessed are fixed in a per?

petual vernal equinox). What wonder that according to their

descendants the god of light, on the day of his birth, late

born in the harsher new age of Zeus, was whisked by white

swans back north to a place and time, a mythscape, beyond the reach of the chill north wind.

Sailing replete with my Greek swan lore, I couldn't take

my eyes off each swan I saw, from the first one I spied



William Mullen 35

alone our first day of sailing, to the serene pair I spotted our last evening before returning to Stockholm, drifting across the red twilight which was being reflected from one

end to the other of the cove where Jonas had cast anchor.

"Passion or conquest, wander where they will, / Attend

upon them still. / But now they drift on the still waters, /

Mysterious, beautiful." Yeats wrote those lines looking at

the lake in Coole Park in western Ireland, about which he

said to another poet: "I've always thought this is the most

beautiful place in the world." Swans are of course famous in northern lore, and, like geese and cranes, much more in

evidence than in the Mediterranean. The Baltic swan be? came for me the signature, everywhere, that Vinci was

right. Not only because they are so omnipresent and cele?

brated in northern lore, but also because, right next to

Apollo's cult altar on the island of Delos in the Cyclades, is an altar to the two Hyperborean Maidens, who, like

swans, unambiguously associate the origins of at least one

Greek god with the Far North.

Or, maybe not. Sometimes a white swan is just a white swan is just a white swan. Enough to spend a blue June

looking at them, drifting on the nightless waters, "mysteri? ous, beautiful."

3. THE TROAD

as we moved towards the solstice, we moved towards Troy. Vinci's chronology of the original Trojan War, as described

in the Iliad, takes meticulous account of the well-calibrated

fact that the landmass of the countries around the Baltic be?

gan an uplift several thousand years ago and is currently ris?

ing at the rate of sixteen inches per century. The

"hypostatic" geological forces causing this have rendered

into land, mostly fertile fields, what before was bay and in?

let and waterway. Once we were docked at Hang?, about

thirty-five miles south of our ultimate destination of Toija, our "true Troy," we began training our eyes, as we drove




north, to distinguish the flat and fertile fields that had for?

merly been inlets from the steep and stony ridges that would have been looming up over them at the time of the arrival of

the Greek expedition. We thus had a double re-imagining to

do at every point: seeing landscape as seascape, and feeling the whole environment considerably warmer and lusher.

For Vinci, these ridges looking out over inlets and sea pro? vide a crucial point at which already excavated archaeologi? cal sites speak in support of his thesis. We went straight to one of these, Pernio. A short steep climb through dense green forest took us to a ridge-top series of tumuli, barrows of

heaped stone, which archaeologists agree were reserved only for the pre-eminent?great aristocrats, warriors, chiefs?in a

timeframe stretching back from the Viking Age to the early Bronze Age. Northern and southern epic converge in setting forth the symbolism intended by these sitings: just as the

mound on the ridge can be seen by those far off at sea, so the

fame of the hero buried there will be seen by those far off in

future ages. Hector imagines such a mound for any hero

courageous enough to die by man-to-man combat with him.

At the end of the Odyssey the ghost of Agamemnon assures

the ghost of Achilles that the Achaean spearmen had col?

lected together the bones of Patroclus and Achilles himself

and had (in Robert Fitzgerald's translation)

heaped a tomb for these

upon a foreland over Helle 's waters,

to be a mark against the sky for voyagers

in this generation and those to come.

And in his last words Beowulf orders his troops (in Seamus

Heaney's translation)

to construct a barrow

on a headland on the coast, after my pyre has cooled.

It will loom on the horizon at Hronesness

and be a reminder among my people? so that in coming times crews under sail



William Mullen 37

will call it Beowulf's Barrow, as they steer

ships across the wide and shrouded waters.

The destination which truly began to make our heroic

hearts beat was Aijala, equivalent for Vinci to Aigialos, the

Homeric word for beach or coast. Now almost ten miles in?

land, it would then have been the very beach on which the

Greek fleet landed and camped. Vinci had personally laid the basis for some extraordinary

hospitality to greet our "landing" in the ancient Troad. It was

provided by a spirited Finnish woman, Jaana Shelby, a mover

and shaker in local politics around Toija. She had been, quick

already back in 1994, to recognize the importance for her

community of the theory Vinci had just unveiled in a short es?

say in Italian which he called Homericus Nuncius, a learned

Latin title by which he was invoking a supreme predecessor in

the annals of Italian science, the Sidereus Nuncius in which

Galileo first told the world of the strange things he could see

through his telescope. Jaana had bought around twenty

copies at the time, even though she was the only local who

could read Italian. Suffice it to say that the locals were satis?

fied with her oral pr?cis of it, and, familiarly enough, were in?

clined to believe it to be true because they wanted it to be

true?wanted to find themselves living on some of the most

storied real estate in Western history, not to mention forming the epicenter of a someday booming "Homeric Voyages" tourist industry. To this end, they soon orchestrated, in 1994, the first annual "Helen of Troy Beauty Contest," one big boned blonde contesting with another.

Typical of Jaana's astuteness was the fact that she had re?

served three canoes for the six of us, to spend the afternoon

of our Day at Troy using the nine kilometer-long lake be? tween Aijala and Toija as the optimal platform for photo?

graphing the surrounding topography. In order to narrate

our climactic day properly I will have to spell out this the el? ements of this topography in some detail.

The twin centerpieces of Vinci's book are the perfect fit he

establishes between topography surrounding Toija = Troy




and Lyo = Ithaka. Whereas classicists have been pained for

generations at the lack of fit between the Turkish Hisarlik

and Homeric Troy and between the Mediterranean Ithaka

and the Homeric, Vinci's simply walks in and "aces" it in

both cases. As a scientist, he knows that that the more falsi

fiable a theory is the better it has been framed, and accord?

ingly he has proposed, as ultimate tests, that the

archaeologists' spades be turned on to his candidate sites for

the citadel of Troy and the palace of Odysseus. (Some pro? fessors at the University of Pavia are already trying to or?

ganize an international research team to test this theory

archaeologically.) In both cases, significantly, there are al?

ready Bronze Age stone tumuli near both of his candidates

sites. The next day we were able to photograph in the

Helsinki National Museum the impressive Bronze Age swords and other artifacts which Finnish farmers have been

finding for centuries in places like the fields around Toija. Even without another turn of the archaeologist's spade,

however, Vinci has a tight case in the perfect fit between the

natural landscape features around Toija and every single line

of the Iliad describing such features. It is important to begin

by noting that the body of water on which we were to be do?

ing our afternoon's canoeing, Lake Kirrkoharvi, is the result

of periodic freshwater flooding from the two rivers which

converge into it, Kurkelanjoki = Scamander/Xanthos from

the northeast, Mammalanjoki = Simois from the northwest.

Unlike many of the plains we photographed in the last few

days, which would have still been inlets in the Baltic 4000

years ago, and therefore saltwater, this plain is sufficiently

high to have been part of the landmass even back then. And

it would have been then, as it is now, susceptible to flooding,

something Vinci points out could have formed the natural

basis for the climactic battle scene in the Iliad in which

Achilles provokes the wrath of the river Scamander by chok?

ing it with the bodies of Trojans he slays on his berserker

rampage; in response Scamander berates him verbally and

then actual floods the plain. The present lake covers the east



William Mullen 39

ern half of what would have been the broad plain at the foot of the ridge on which Troy's citadel was perched, and the western half of that plain is now a lovely quilt of fields of rye and other crops, soughing in the wind of the blousy blue day we visited it.

Our day proceeded by driving counterclockwise all around the lake. First we photographed the view down over the great

plain from the now forested ridge where the citadel stood? the view Priam and Helen would have shared, when at his re?

quest she looks out over the plain and names for him of the Greek heroes assembled there (most of whom, including her husband Menelaus, are described by Homer as xanthos, blonde or redheaded). We then made our way to the west side of the northern stretch of the lake, where our canoes were

waiting for us. Before getting to the shore we walked to a

grove on the top of a hill from which we could look south for miles over everything, the fields, the lake, the ridge of Troy it? self. The approach to this grove of deciduous trees trembling in the breeze consisted of grasses dotted with the most vividly colored flowers imaginable. We noted that Homer mentions two hills on the plain of troy, Batieia or "Thorn Hill" and Kallikolone or "Beautiful Hill." Thorn Hill awaited us as a

headland we would be canoeing towards, jutting into the north end of the lake. Beautiful Hill had actually several can?

didates; the one where we stood to look down over the plain of Troy certainly seemed beautiful enough. When we got to the top of that hill, time stood still for a

while in mid-afternoon. Each of us was lost in his or her his? torical meditation. That those events might have first hap?

pened here . . . That we were among the first to be looking at these fields through the Vincian telescope . . . That at his time of final glory before dying, during a solstitial "white

night" this far north, Patroclus would fought right through this starless night (Vinci's interpretation of the mysterious

phrase amphiluke nux, literally "night with light on both

side.") That Hector killed Patroclus here, and Achilles Hec? tor . . . That over this great plain at dawn Priam set out for




the beach, Aigialos = Aijala, where he would find Achilles' tent and be shown compassion by the berserker who had

been at last, just before dying, restored to his humanity . . .

Eventually these thoughts had to be stopped by the only sen?

sible way to stop them: a group photo of us with the Beauti?

ful Hill behind it.

4. THE INNER CHAMBERS OF THE HERMITAGE

vinci had been invited a while back, by Professor Kruglov, Curator of Ancient Sculpture at the Hermitage State Mu?

seum in St. Petersburg, to come visit him there. Kruglov had

read Vinci's book in the Russian translation which appeared in 2004 (and so beat the English translation by a year and a

half). He wished Vinci to meet the formidable Professor Pi

otrovsky himself, Director of the Hermitage, a kind of

Philippe de Montebello-plus, not only director of one of the

three or four greatest art museums of the West (for sheer

scale, along with quality, its only rivals are the Metropolitan, the Louvre and the Prado) but also a highly visible culture czar in Russia at large. When he had accepted the invitation, Vinci had decided to time his visit there so as to follow his

welcome of us on our return to Stockholm, and had asked

me to then accompany him and his wife, Pina, from Stock?

holm to St. Petersburg and be part of this high-level meeting. From the point of view of poetic revery, I have no doubt that

my peak moment was on the field of Toija. From the point of view of practical progress in getting Vinci's theory tested, I have no doubt it was our meeting with Piotrovsky.

Kruglov greeted us and ushered us from the entrance hall

to the ante-ante-chamber of the Director. A gentle, polite, and articulate younger man, he conversed with us in muted

tones for a half hour until the great doors were opened. We

were then ushered through a vast antechamber in which

about six secretaries were busy at six desks, and finally into

the Director's yet vaster inner chamber, where a portrait of

Catherine the Great smiled benignly down on us for the half



William Mullen 41

hour of our meeting. As he moved to take his place at the

end of a long conference table, Piotrovsky gestured to us to

sit around it, and by a kind of collective instinct Tatiana, my friend and an esteemed translator of Shaw, Twain, and

Wilde into Russian, sat on on his right and I on his left; Vinci then on my left and Pina on Tatiana's right, husband

and wife facing each other; finally Kruglov at the other end.

We thus immediately secured, through Tatiana's English and

my Italian, a protective linguistic barrier between Pietrovsky, of whose English we had not yet taken the measure, and

Vinci, the first to admit that his English is not what he

would wish it to be. No linguistic nuance would escape us at

this summit of cultural negotiation.

Piotrovsky was sporting his signature ascot, known

throughout Russia via the media, of which he is said to be a

very savvy orchestrator. His English turned out to be impec? cable. He lost no time in showing that he understood how

impressive Vinci's argumentation was for his theory and at

the same time how controversial it was and how extensive

would be the testing necessary to validate it. He also lost no

time in putting the question his position made it incumbent

upon him to ask: "What is there in all this for St. Peters?

burg?" Vinci explained to him that the Greek and Trojan cultural worlds he reconstructs in the Baltic extend right across the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia

(where he locates Achilles' Phthia, a border country) to the

eastern end of the Bay of Finland, hence to the site of St. Pe?

tersburg itself. I added two more reassurances that St. Pe?

tersburg's location would make it a major player. First, Vinci's book establishes about twelve overlaps between de?

tailed elements of narrative in the Homeric epics and in the

Kalevala, the so-called Finnish national epic collected in the

nineteenth century by a proto-anthropologist, Elias L?nnrot, who moved around for years, often on snow-shoes, not only in what is now the territory of Finland but also in Karelian

Russia and Estonia. Second, I pointed out that the route

Vinci posits for the migration south of that subset of the




Bronze Age Baltic peoples who eventually settled in the east? ern Mediterranean was the same route south as later taken

by many northern peoples, most famously the Vikings, and that it involved sailing first to the eastern end of the Gulf of

Finland, i.e., the site on which Peter the Great would later

impose Russia's new capital in the classical style, and thence

up the Neva to Lake Ladoga east of St. Petersburg, from which it is a short overland to the headwaters of the

Dnieper, which will take you right down to the Black Sea

and thence the Mediterranean. The Russians themselves

have a phrase for this famous and repeated migration pat? tern, "the route of three seas," Baltic, Black, and Mediter?

ranean, or, if you go to the headwaters of the Volga rather

than the Dnieper, then Baltic, Caspian, and Indian Gulf. In

order to become the Greeks we all know, these Baltic proto Greeks had to pass through proto-St. Petersburg.

Piotrovsky's question, "What is in this for St. Petersburg?" summed up, with the terseness one expects of a culture czar, the dynamic likely to play itself out as Vinci's book gets

translated, as is now being planned, into Finnish, Swedish,

Norwegian, Danish and German, all countries covered by the geographically proto-Greek territory it reconstructs

(along with Poland and the three Baltic States). Given that

these neighbors have, as neighbors all too often do, a long

history of deadly rivalry and struggle to dominate each

other, it is only natural that some hearty cultural rivalry will

kick in again as scholars and culture czars in each country learn that Vinci's theory is starting to be promoted by some

other country first. In Finland, the savvy journalist who in?

terviewed our team for a major Finnish daily newspaper,

gave me the distinct impression that there is nothing the

Finns would like more than to scoop their condescending

Indo-European neighbors to the west, not to mention their

ancient imperial enemy and overlord to the East, and show

that the speakers of this weird Finno-Ugric language were

actually the first to be sharp enough to see what Vinci was

onto. In Norway, likewise, more than one person to whom I



William Mullen 43

spelled out Vinci's work saw an opportunity to beat the

Swedes to the draw and at last one-up this neighbor to

whom it was always comparing itself and who seemed so in?

furiating uninterested in reciprocating the comparison. Tiny

Denmark, of course, will not have forgotten that it used to

reign over Norway and much of Sweden alike. And as for

Germany?well, suffice it to say that Vinci's encounter with

the formidable tradition of German classical Wissenschaft will be a defining moment for both players.

As we wound down a harmonious half hour, Pietrovsky, urbane and at the same time reserved throughout, graciously asked what the Hermitage could do to help. Vinci said that

his theory had been set up to be falsifiable or verifiable by ex?

cavation in a few key sites, principally Toija = Troy and Ly0 = Ithaka, and that any help the Hermitage's archaeological staff could give would be immensely appreciated. In conse?

quence of this request, Professor Kruglov at the Hermitage and Professor Messiga at the University of Pavia have started

preliminary contacts directed towards reaching an agreement to undertake a research project comparing northern and

southern finds from the Bronze Age and early Iron Age, in?

volving in particular objects found in Russian kurgans (bar? rows heaped over burial chambers, a type of mound well

known to have spread east, south, and west from the Russian

steppes). Indeed, immediately after the meeting, Kruglov and

Vinci and I spent considerable time with vases and jewelry found in the Ukraine whose motifs were both distinctly

Nordic and distinctly Mycenean. Real work began immedi?

ately after the meeting, and is now ongoing. Vinci had the astuteness to seize the last few minutes to

make one more point, in a kind of larger and more ideolog? ical response to Piotrovsky's gracious offer to be of help, and

this is the same point he chose to make in the original final

paragraph of his book. No one aware of the cultural politics of the countries his theory covers can do anything but

breathe a sigh of relief on learning that its author is Italian

and not German?is from a Mediterranean country which




Stands to lose its association with the foundations of Home?

ric epic, not from a Nordic country which stands to gain by the new prestige of such association. And no one thus aware

can refrain from a shudder at the thought of what the neo

Nazi skinheads waiting in the wings will make of this reve?

lation that the original "culture-bearers" of the foundational

Western epics came down from the pale cold north. A Russ?

ian dissident classicist, Vasily Rudich, who had fled the So?

viet Union to Yale in the '70s, spent about two hours

warning me of this inevitable fallout the day before I left for

my trip. He was not talking just about young skinheads, but

about the cadre of intellectuals who trace their lineage back

to Ren? Guenon (the so-called "Hitler without tanks"), all

those anti-Atlanticists, from France to Russia, for whom

American-led globalization is the one and only enemy, to de?

feat whom one should be prepared to make pacts with the

devil himself (i.e., Islamic fundamentalists in Europe). Rudich and I saw eye-to-eye on both aspects of the problem:

first, that there was no way to prevent Vinci's book from

falling into their hands, and second, that we needed to pre?

emptively prepare an answer to them.

Vinci's own answer he places in his last paragraph, and

what he said to Piotrovsky was a paraphrase of it: "Finally, this 'rediscovery' of Homer could foster a new cultural ap?

proach to the idea of European unity and could contribute to

the birth of a new humanism in Western culture." Nordic

peoples began the Homeric tradition, Mediterranean peoples continued and refined it, until the two epics became the liter?

ary masterpieces committed to papyrus in the form we have

received them. Some of these Northern peoples, moving

through Russian territory, had themselves descended to the

Mediterranean and intermarried with the locals; Vinci cites

mainstream archaeologists' frequent commentary on the

presence in the same tomb of a dolicocephalic husband (the

long thin skill typical of northern peoples?think Max von

Sydow) and a round-skulled wife (the brachycephalic skull). One should further add that these vigorous hybrid Greeks



William Mullen 45

then proceeded to intermingle with all the Levantine cultures

from Assyria to Egypt. The famous Gilgamesh epic is well

known for having fine-grained parallels to moments in both

the Iliad and the Odyssey, and it exists in versions in the

Indo-European language Hittite as well as the Semitic Akka?

dian and the mysterious sui generis Sumerian. A generous cultural reading of the dynamic Greek miracle would say that

it came from an area whose "promiscuous concourse of

breeders" (Jefferson's phrase, against eugenics) ended up be?

ing every bit as mongrel as the dynamic United States of

America today. Skinheads and Guenonites take note.

5. THE WORLD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL VOYAGE

from ST. Petersburg I flew to Oslo and thence made my

way, across glacier and down fjord, to Bergen, starting point of "The World's Most Beautiful Voyage." This is the Nor?

wegian Coastal Cruise, or Hurtigrute at it is known in Nor?

way, meaning Quick Route, since when the line was

established in 1891 it was far quicker to traverse the coast

by boat than to go by craggy land. Its fleet of twelve luxury cruisers ply their way every day of the year along the treach? erous and fantastical Norwegian coast, all the way up to

Nordkapp, or North Cape, and around to Kirkenes, abut?

ting Russia and Finnish Lapland. I had said goodbye first to my students in Stockholm, af?

ter three weeks of intimate sailing, and to Vinci and his wife

in St. Petersburg, after a week we all considered a triumph

(about five other major Russian classicists, linguists, archae?

ologists, and experts on Indo-European epic met with us

that same week, entertained generously the possibility that

Vinci may be onto something, called for a conference in St.

Petersburg last year, clearly wanted Russian scholarship to

be in the lead on this matter). And now, according to my

projected itinerary, I was still only halfway through the two

months I had planned. The first half was the Iliad half; we

had sailed from where the Greek ships had gathered at Aulis




and had made our way all the way to the citadel and field of

battle at Troy. Now, alone, and on a ten-day luxury cruise

and tour of Lapland I had booked, I would be retracing the

fabulous routes of Odysseus' wanderings in books 5-12 of

the Odyssey. If energy still remained, I would head finally to

Copenhagen?site, Vinci argues, of ancient Mycenae itself?

and thence to the tiny island in the archipelago southwest of

it, Lyo. There, like Odysseus, my travels would end and I

could go back to my own home, New York.

I had taken leave of my students with an old affection for

them deepened beyond what I had thought possible. When I

took my leave of the Vincis it was like saying goodbye to

people who had once been acquaintances and now, through the test of traveling together, were good and solid friends.

The solitude ahead of me was, in fact, appealing as a com?

plement to all this conviviality. Moreover, I fancy myself a

poet and a thinker, and as result I have never owned a cam?

era in my life, so that not a single moment of my meditation

in the next three weeks would be arrested and turned into a

photo-op. Others would have to return after me to complete the task of documentation my students had begun. I was

glad to be free to look and think and feel.

A scholar in Stockholm had pointed out to me that my own first name, William, was cognate with the Ul- of

Ulysses, most easily seen in the German version, Wilhelm.

There the helm (cf. helmet) can be dropped, and the basic

root will- is cognate not only with Ulysses but with the cun?

ning Norse archer hero Uli. Over these densely packed two

months I was certainly, like Homer's hero, "seeing the cities

and knowing the minds of many men." I decided that, like

the cunning and curious god Odin (Vinci makes him cognate with the Od- of Odysseus), or indeed like any good Viking, I would from now on travel alone, keep my own counsel,

keep my wits about me, and not trust or talk to anyone too

much for the rest of the trip. Just keep my eyes open. The "World's Most Beautiful Voyage" most assuredly de?

serves its name. If you have the means, you should not die



William Mullen 47

without taking it. And fjords are among those fabled phe? nomena that do not disappoint when seen, in fact strike most

people as even more stupendous than expected. Vinci is not

the first to propose that when Odysseus describes the land of

the Laestrygonians his combination of two details?daybreak

following immediately on dusk, and a bay reaching far in?

land with high rock faces?makes the setting sound uncan?

nily like a Norwegian fjord. In my first few weeks at

Harvard, Fall 1964, I was privileged to take Robert Fitzger? ald's "Narrative Verse," which we began by his reading his own recently completed masterpiece, his translation of the

Odyssey. I took copious verbatim notes, among which are his

remarks that Phoenician merchants in the long summer sail?

ing days might have made their way all the way up to the

North Sea and brought back reports of fjords?reports which

Odyssey bards then readily fashioned into one fantastical

episode among many for their sailing hero. Even the grave Wace and Stubbings, in their fat 1963 Companion to Homer,

acknowledge that "We cannot dismiss the Laestrygones with? out wondering whether Achaean mariners may not have

heard of real cannibals in their wanderings ... in some land

far north of the Mediterranean, where 'the paths of day and

night are near to one another.'" In this matter of Odyssean

fjords, at least, the venerable classics establishment gives you

permission to indulge your fancy in the North Sea.

I did not get further enough south on the Norwegian coast

to see where the mountains end and the coastal plain begins to feature tidal estuaries and beaches, which led Vinci to lo? cate the sybaritic Phaeacians there. These might be called the

southern Californians of the Post-Glacial Climatic Opti? mum, not particularly warlike or into contact sports, but (to continue using the translation of my beloved teacher Fitzger?

ald) "all our days we set great store by feasting, / harpers, and the grace of dancing choirs, / changes of dress, warm

baths, and downy beds." Perhaps in the Post-Glacial Opti? mum surfing would have been added to the list. This was the

first of many a site in Odysseus' wanderings I noted down as




Not Seen This Summer, Come Back Next. From the funicu?

lar above Bergen, though, I could gaze out at a port seascape at least as complex and heart-winning as San Francisco. I

went into a very dark northern forest on the top of the

mountain, a gloomy cathedral with shafts of light and large bare areas of pine needles between the soaring trunks. I sat

down there and started reading the Odyssey in Greek.

The next afternoon my cruiser Vesteralen started to ply its

week north. At this point in his misadventures Odysseus,

heading for home south of Fyn in Denmark and attempting to

round the cape near the Swedish city of Malm? at the south?

ernmost point of Sweden (for Vinci, MALm? is the Greek

Cape MALea), is blown by the wrath of Poseidon inexorably further and further north, along the Norwegian coast and

even to distant outlier islands such as the Shetland and the

Faroe. If you take the full-scale two week Hurtigrute you will see by day, on the second week coming back, all the sights you

missed when you sailed past them at night, on the first week

heading for North Cape. You will also, as it happens, go a

long ways towards recapitulating the narrative structure of

the Odyssey books 9-12, where Odysseus tells the story of his

wanderings in an order which places the most terrifyingly re?

mote point of them, the House of Hades, at the midpoint of

an elaborate and precise symmetrical structure, book 11.

Since the Hurtigrute was not designed to reenact the wander?

ings of Odysseus, I only chanced to see a few of the sights di?

rectly; the rest I noted when we passed them, as being, on the

map, this island over beyond that ridge, or these rocks out in

the ocean beyond that island. Thus my Baltic re-imagining of

the most fairy-tale part of Homer was sometimes anchored in

what was before my eyes but more often was still drifting just over the horizon. All the more reason to come back next sum?

mer and do it all with a tailor-made vessel, crew, skipper ex?

pert in local waters, and documentary film group. The first of the sights I actually eyeballed was a great hole

in the mountain of Torghatten, near Tosenfjorden, a fjord Vinci sees as named after Thoosa, the mother of the one



William Mullen 49

eyed Cyclops, whose father Poseidon spends much of the

Odyssey venting his anger on Odysseus for having blinded

his son. The Cyclops, which can mean either "Round Face" or "Round Eye," is not only the kind of ill-mannered giant Norse myths are full of; he is also described by Odysseus as

"a brute / so huge, he seemed no man at all of those / who eat good wheaten bread; but he seemed rather / a shaggy mountain reared in solitude." You feel safe and modern

when your luxury cruiser sails serenely past this hole in the

mountain, which stares at you with its one round eye. You

quickly see it as an eye if you've already developed, as

tourists are soon taught to do, the Norse habit of finding

physiognomy everywhere in the mountains' shapes, in the same way that you have already been trained to see many a

troll's nose. For Vinci's northern Greeks, as for Norse myth, culture recapitulates topography: the peoples dwelling near

the gentle plains and beaches of the south are civilized, the creatures inhabiting the alps and fjords of the north are bar?

barous. You also feel safe because, though global warming may be underway, you are not, like Odysseus, experiencing violent storms associated with an ongoing climatic down? turn experienced as the vengeful wrath of the sea-god?a

wrath directed personally at you for having saved yourself from being eaten by his damned cannibal lout of a boy. On the fourth day of the cruise, July 14,1 crossed into the

Arctic Circle. At this latitude, the "Midnight Sun" does not

set for a two-month period roughly May 19-July 19. July 19 was in fact the day I had booked a flight south from

Kirkenes. My timing thus was such that my five days with? out sunset were the last five days without sunset in the arc?

tic summer at that latitude. Every night I stayed up till

midnight, but for the first three nights all I saw was dim mist or fine precipitation.

This gray washout was not without its own power over the

imagination. The second set of sights I saw with my own

eyes, to the west in the endless evening, was the whirlpool of

Charybdis, the cave of Scylla opposite it, and south of both




of them Thrinakia, the "Trident" island of the Cattle of the

Sun. Vinci identifies Charybdis with nothing other than the

Maelstrom, in Norwegian Moskenesstraumen, which can

still terrify us in Poe's or Jules Vernes' account of it. (There is

nothing remotely as powerful in the Mediterranean.) To the

right, or north, I saw the precipitous descent of the rocky southernmost point of the island of Lofotodden, southern?

most in the whole Lofoten Island complex, the cave of Scylla. To the left, or south, I saw the three peaks of Thrinakia. Be?

tween them was the sucking of Charybdis. The gray mist

made the whole seascape more nightmarish. Again, I was

happy to be sitting snug on my luxury cruiser. And again, I

dreamed the not impossible dream, of returning next summer

with a small craft whose local skipper would know exactly what he was doing in these supremely treacherous waters.

Vinci has asked me to accompany him in accepting the invi?

tation he received form the Director of the Lofoten Islands

Museum, something we hope to do around the vernal equi? nox, when everything is still snow-covered but the days are at

last equal to the nights. The Hurtigrute will be plying those

same waters then too, dependably. A good time to look into

booking a boat and skipper for next summer.

Late the next evening I stared west into mist again, but

only towards something Vinci's map put just beyond the

Hurtigrute's horizon, the island of H?ja, or in Greek Aiaia?

island of Circe, daughter of the Sun and granddaughter of

"the River Okeanos," a phrase Vinci equates very specifi?

cally with the current of the Gulf Stream. Even had the sun

been shining, I could only imagine the disorientation of

Bronze Age sailors finding themselves in a realm, and at a

time of year, when there was no point on the horizon at

which the sun set and no starry sky at night by which to tell

north. Odysseus says as much to his shipmates as they ap?

proach the island "where the Dawn has its circle dances":

O my dear friends, where Dawn lies, and the West, and where the great Sun, light of men, may go



William Mullen 51

under the earth by night, and where he rises?

of these things we know nothing.

The word for "West," zophos, also means "mist" or

"gloom," what you see more often than not when you look out from the European coast to the Atlantic, and very much

what I had been seeing for three evenings. Over the crests of

H?jafjord Circe was singing to me from her island of H?ja. "Come back with your crew next summer,

" she sang. "In a

smaller boat?less safe."

The effulgence of the midnight sun reserved itself for my last "night" on the Vester?len. There were still some strips of

cloud in the sky, so it was touch and go all night whether I

would in fact see the sun pass the northernmost point on the

horizon without dipping under it. I decided to spend my vigil on the upper deck, wrapped against the relentless wind in sweater and gortex and blanket, reading book n of the

Odyssey, the central and longest episode in his symmetrical tale, the hero's voyage along the Ocean Stream to the House

of Hades. This god's name means "Invisible." Or, if you like,

wrapped in perpetual fog and gloom. With some relief I real? ized that Vinci's Hades too was a sight I would have to post?

pone till next summer, since he locates it way east on a

western port of the White Sea, into which flows, as he

demonstrates, each river mentioned in the Homeric topogra?

phy?Styx, Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, Acheron?all with

modern homotopes, and all configured according to every

specification in the text. Hades was beyond Norway, beyond Finland, beyond Lapland, in Karelian Russia. All I knew is

that after passing North Cape we had been sailing inexorably east and south, the Gulf Stream on our left and the coast on

our right, and that many days more of this would take us to

Hell itself. No wonder that, when Circe tells Odysseus that

"home you may not go / unless you take a strange way round

and come / to the cold homes of Death," his comment, to his

soft Phaeacian audience, is that "At this I felt a weight like stone within me, / and, moaning, pressed my length against the bed, / with no desire to see the daylight more." In due




time he and his men set sail for the land of gloom, as in?

structed, "in tears, with bitter and sore dread upon us."

All night I was in a combined state of exhaustion and ex?

hilaration the likes of which I've never quite felt. For days my whole body had been saying, "RIGHT!" whenever I read

those oft-repeated word about Odysseus' kamatos, weari?

ness, and algea, pains. At which my mind would always com?

ment, "Well, haven't you always been proud to define a hero to your students as someone who just keeps on going when

ordinary people would give up?" Tonight was the test.

And the sun and I together passed the test. I read the whole

of book ii in Greek, just lifting my eyes from time to time

towards the northern horizon. "Now the souls gathered, stir?

ring out of Erebos." All the ghosts the hero encountered clus?

tered around me, given blood to speak by the Greek words.

"By night / our ship ran onward toward the Ocean's bourne, / the realm and region of the Men of Winter, / hidden in mist

and cloud." Odysseus leaves no doubt in his narration that

they were sailing towards a place on the surface of the earth

where for part of the year the sun never rose: "Never the

flaming / eye of Helios lights on those men / at morning, when he climbs the sky of stars, nor in descending earthward out of heaven; / ruinous night being rove over those

wretches." When Odysseus' meets the ghost he loves most, that of his own mother who died of "only my loneliness for

you," she cries out sadly to him: "Child, / how could you cross alive into this gloom / at the world's end??No sight for

living eyes; / great currents run between, desolate waters."

And when Odysseus tries three times in vain to embrace her

shade?as before him Achilles tries to embrace Patroclus'

shade, and Gilgamesh Enkidu's, and as after him Aeneas tries to embrace his father's shade, and Dante the poet Statius'?

he finally asks, "Or is this all hallucination?" My exhaustion

and exhilaration was making me wonder the same thing about the midnight sun. But there it was, cloudless for hours

along the northern sky, rounding downwards and then turn?

ing upwards, in triumph, without ever disappearing.



William Mullen 53

At some point well into the wee hours of the morning the

sun's heroic blazing as it rose converged utterly with my ac?

companiment of Odysseus back out of the land of invisibil?

ity, "out of the Ocean Stream, / riding a long swell on the

open sea / for the Island of Aiaia. Summering Dawn / has

dancing places there, and the Sun his rising."

6. LOOP AROUND LAPLAND

i then spent a three day loop among the Lapps, in a private car with guide. My driver on the third day was a young Ger?

man whose main trade was taking tourists over the wastes of snow on sleds drawn by huskies. Not even Lapland was far

enough north for him; he had spent a whole season in Sval

bard, the set of islands to the north of Norway, which is

slowly now opening up for tourism, complete with internet

access and ice hotels. "As far as I'm concerned," he admit?

ted, "summer here is no good at all, it would be better if it

snowed tomorrow." By this time, I knew what he felt like. I

had seen two I-MAX-like films at museums within the arctic

circle which took me on planes that swooped over the gla? ciers and riverbeds of Svalbard, a kind of absolute trans-hu? man space, with only Vinci to remind me that in the past it

might have been warm enough for people to live here. I had

grown obsessed with the extreme north.

My young German was fascinated by Vinci's hypothesis, which reminded him of a documentary he'd seen last year of a team who sailed on a reconstructed Viking ship on exactly the same "route of three seas" Vinci has his proto-Viking Achaeans sail, down the Dnieper to the Black Sea. They were

following the route of the Swedish saga of Vidar the Vittfar (a name which by Indo-European roots ought to mean He Who

Sees and Knows, and Who Fares Far and Wide?perfect for

Odysseus). I made a mental note to get in touch with those

guys?perfect pool from which to recruit a team for '08.

The Lapps were a sunny people, welcoming and cheery. A

third of them still live the traditional life of reindeer herding:




clothes, tent, diet, all come from reindeer, like the camel for

the traditional Arab. And yes, Vinci weighs in even on rein?

deer. Pindar tell us how Hercules' journey to the Hyperbore? ans Beyond the North Wind in order to capture the

Cerynean hind with "golden horns," and Vinci points out

that the only European doe that has horns is the female rein?

deer. The hinds are yoked to Artemis' wagon, and only rein?

deer are strong enough to pull a wagon. The place name

"Cerynean" is cognate with hreinn, the old Norse word for

reindeer, and hence with the rein- of "rein-deer" itself.

My last day I took a tranquil cruise on the lake whose

southern tip was the epicenter of today's Lapp culture, Inari, to a sacred island on it, tiny and in a weird rock shape.

There, traditional Lapps performed blood sacrifice in times

of stress to the god of thunder and lightning. What kind of

blood sacrifice depends on how far back you go. Before the

altar of Artemis in Sparta boys were scourged, and the great Pindaric commentator Gildersleeve argues that "both doe

and scourging indicate a substitution for human sacrifice." I

climbed to the top and looked out over the lake, sixty kilo?

meters long from northeast to southwest, and again found

myself looking at literally hundreds of islets and skerries.

My northern obsession seemed spent for the season. The

next day I flew over two thousand kilometers south to

Copenhagen, almost exactly the distance from New York

City to easternmost Newfoundlound or southernmost main?

land Florida.

7. ITHAKA, LY0, HOME

i arrived at Copenhagen in a state of complete exhaustion,

knowing only that I had nine days before my flight back to

New York. In the National Museum I sat and stared up at

the supreme masterpiece of the Northern Bronze Age, the

golden Sun Chariot, a work of such elegance, refinement, and symbolic potency that it leaves you in no doubt that the

northern Bronze Age at its best could rival its southern



William Mullen 55

cousins. In the Roman-style museum built to house the clas?

sicizing works of the Danish national sculptor, Bertel Thor

valdsen, I sat and stared up at perfect Nordic versions of

Achilles, Apollo, the three Graces. (How happy I was that

Nielsen was Danish, not German!) In the State Museum's new Hall of Sculpture, I sat and stared, in the state of semi

sexual arousal no doubt intended by the sculptor, at a post Nietzschean celebrations of eros as the essence of artistic

passion, in the form of nude Danes in vigorous embraces. I knew that for Vinci Copenhagen sat square on top of an?

cient Mycenae, domain of Agamemnon, King of Kings, and

that ancient Lacedaemon for him was an hour south on the

island of Zealand, ancient Pylos an hour west. I knew full

well that just a few hours travel southwest was Vinci's candi?

date for Ithaka, the tiny island of Ly0 in the South Fyn archi?

pelago. I knew all this, and yet honestly felt I would rather

postpone all those sights, along with so many others, to next summer. So near and yet so far. And yet, I also knew that for

years I had been telling my students that heroes were people who keep going when normal people would be too exhausted to. And I also knew that I had entered precisely the state of

deep kamatos, and algos, and longing for nostos (homecom?

ing, hence our word nost-algia) in which Odysseus kept go?

ing till he got back to wife and son and killed his enemies

there. After a few days of esthetic R&R, the logic of the mat? ter clarified itself. Precisely because I was deeply exhausted, I

should keep going, like Odysseus, to Lyo. Lest I make myself sound too heroic, I should add that

what confirmed my decision was "the kindness of strangers." In advance of my arrival at Copenhagen, Vinci had emailed

me about a couple, Niels and Mona Damkjaer, who lived

three hours west in Jutland, had been his guests in Rome, and were sympathetic to his work. On contacting them, I found, as with Rolf Classon in Sweden, the treasures of urbane Dan?

ish hospitality being lavished on me. On learning of my foot

condition and my doubts about venturing outside of Copen?

hagen, Niels gallantly offered to drive with Mona an hour




east and meet me at the main train station in Fyn, two hours

west of Copenhagen, whereupon the three of us would drive an hour south and take the ferry to Lyo. We would spend a

summer's day there, armed with his digital camera. Niels is a

playwright and director in his mid-sixties, was a young Turk

in the golden days of Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, and

over four decades has directed over two hundred plays of his

own and of others. He and Mona together make masks and

give mask-making workshops. She also teaches Danish to

foreigners and is kindness personified. Niels had sharp eyes of immense intelligence and wit. The three of us clicked per?

fectly, and were fast friends by the end of our day in Ithaka.

The approach to Lyo on the half-hour ferry ride was a per? fect way to check out with my own eyes all of Vinci's fits be?

tween the South Fyn archipelago and the four islands of

which Ithaka is said, repeatedly in Homeric verse, to be the

westernmost, the other three being Doulikhion, Samos, and

Zakynthos. For a very long time classicists have been vexed

and embarrassed that the Mediterranean Ithaka is one of only three islands?there is no Doulikhion to be found?and that

of these three it is by no stretch of the imagination the west?

ernmost. (They have also quarreled at length over every site

on Ithaka mentioned in the text, for the simple reason that the

Mediterranean Ithaka does not readily present these sites to

the visitor, nor has archaeology settled the matter.) Dou?

likhion in fact means in ancient Greek "long and thin," hence

our word dolicocephalic for the distinctive Nordic long and

thing skulled type sported by the handsome likes of Max von

Sydow and, as mentioned earlier, found frequently in the hus?

bands, but not the wives, in Mycenean graves. One of the jew? els of Vinci's thesis is that Lyo is precisely the westernmost of

four continuously inhabited islands, the easternmost of which

is the long and thin island of Langeland, "Long Land."

And he finds on Lyo every topographical feature and mon?

ument mentioned in the Homeric text. The island is only four kilometers wide, and with a car you can see in about

four hours every feature mentioned in the Odyssey, as we



William Mullen S7

did, efficiently, between about noon and four before taking the ferry back. (For a satellite photo of Lyo in color go to

http://www.krak.dk/Kort.aspxPMapState.) The ferry arrives at the main harbor at the center of the north coast, just where Vinci has proposed to test his work by archaeological excavation of Odysseus' palace, making the assumption

that, as commonly, the name of the island was identical with

the name of its principal town, which would be where the

best harbor was. Should extensive Bronze Age artifacts and

evidence of buildings be found under just two places, the area east of Toija where Vinci claims the citadel of Troy stood and the area around this main harbor and town in

Lyo, his hypothesis might well be vindicated definitively. We began with a picnic packed by Mona and Niels, on the

beach to the east of the island, in a spot where grass and

bushes made us unable to see anyone else, just three summer

picnickers for all the world like figures in a nineteenth cen?

tury Danish or Luminist plein air painting. There we figured out that, in an process opposite from that at Aijala and

Toija, here the hypostatic geological forces operating along an axis from northwest to southeast Denmark would have

actually put below sea level the port and cave of Phorcys, the

old man of the sea: "two points / of high rock, breaking

sharply, hunch around it, / making a haven from the plung?

ing surf." These were now sunk in the sea beneath us, where we went wading, along with the Naiades' "cave of dusk

light" where "there are looms of stone, great looms, whereon

/ the weaving nymphs make tissues, richly dyed / as the deep sea is." It was enough to keep our eyes trained on the web of

light shifting on the water's surface to feel that the nymphs were still in evidence there, weaving their rich loom. Or was

this just hallucination?

Stuffed like Homeric feasters with excellent Danish cheese

and Italian sausage, we set out, after our spellbound min? utes of wading, driving to the other principal sites. Unlike

the Mediterranean Ithaka, Lyo is low and mostly flat

(chthamale), just as Homer says. To the southeast, we saw




the hill of Neritos, "the wooded mountain." As at Ordnal sklint (= Samothrace), the rise was slight but enough to

command a view of most of the rest of the island, hence

worthy of the name "Mount." A small hill just south of the

port and the town was "Hermes' Hill." We saw a commu?

nity of aging hippies (like us, we laughed) camped on the beach at the southernmost point, Kong Lauses H0J, "the hill (or tumulus) of King Lauses" (Laertes, Odysseus' fa?

ther?). As the grand culmination, we visited at the far west

of the island a Neolithic dolmen, the Klokkesten in Danish, which means "bell stone," referring to the resonant noise that issues from it when hit at certain spots with a rock.

(They leave small rocks out for you and indicate where on

the big rock to hit, so you can be sure of hearing the

"chime"). Being Neolithic, it was already ancient in the Bronze Age, and is Vinci's candidate for the Korakos Petra, or Crow's Rock, mentioned by Athena to Odysseus as being close to where he will find the pigs of his swineherd Eu

maeus grazing. He argues that, given the well-known sub

stitutability of "1" for "r" (as in Chinese English, "velly velly good"), the Homeric and the modern Danish names

have the same onomatopoetic consonantal root, K-R-K or

K-L-K, whether the onomatopoeia is interpreting the rock's resonant sound as a crow's cry or a clock striking. As ex?

plained in the archaeologists' sign at the site, these massive rocks were made to lean against each other in such a way as to leave enough space beneath them for a chief or hero to be buried and for his survivors and descendants to gather for

anniversary funereal meals. The rocks would have been covered over, and the whole structure, on a rise sloping down to the west coast, would have been yet another tumu?

lus, or burial barrow, symbolizing to those who saw it from the sea the far-shining fame of the great man buried there. As in the case of his other principal candidate site for ar?

chaeological testing and verification or falsification of his

theory, the citadel at Toija with the extant burial mounds on

the ridges of Pernio not far, so here too: not far from the



William Mullen 59

palace of Odysseus is an extant burial mound old enough for proto-Odyssey bards, such as Phemios himself at the

court of Ithaka, to mention it as a monument that everyone who had actually seen the island would know well.

It was over. We had a beer in the hour before catching the

ferry. Ly0 felt like nothing so much as the mild meadows and

small village streets of many an English village where I had

tasted the sweets of Henry James' candidate for the most

beautiful phrase in the English language, "summer after?

noon." My ancestry is half English, and, I reflected, what are

the English if not mongrels whose ancestors were in good

part Danish. I myself am dolicocephalic. Maybe I had really come home after all. The amiable company of Mona and

Niels certainly made me feel so.



G



Documents

Sailing Homer's Baltic: "Or Is This All Hallucination?"