I hope the post follows subreddit rules.
Until recently I was actually convinced by the conspiracy outlined in the title, but I later realized that what is claimed is quite extraordinary, bizzarre and almost crazy, it basically destroys everything I know about early Greek history, and it sounds overall absurd. What follows are the arguments I myself presented in order to support the hypothesis. Is there any inaccuracy or nail in the coffin that puts to sleep this theory? My friends were kind of convinced by me, so they are using my own version of the arguments against me and I found little to no counter-arguments. Before beginning I have to say that the source of everything was Felice Vinci, an Italian engineer who wrote the book The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales.
Now "enjoy" "my" arguments
It was known since antiquity that Homer's geography doesn't match the Mediterranean, and this is often summarized with the saying 'Homer is a poet, not a geographer'. If we place the epic in the Baltic and Norwegian seas though everything lines up.
Eratosthenes, famous for his incredibly accurate estimate about the Earth’s circumference in the 2nd century BC, takes a cynical view, regarding Homer as an entertainer, not an educator: "You will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds." But maybe nobody was looking in the right place.
In the Moralia the 1st century Greek author Plutacrh wrote: 'Ogygia [Calypso's island], lies far out at sea, a run of five days off from Britain as you sail westward'. This claim is supported by the Roman historian Tacitus, who says that Ulysses reached the Germanic sea.
From here, through a deep analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, we can find many oddities, that appear so only if we think that the stories took place in Southern Europe and the Middle East:
· The Danaoi, which are substantially Homer’s Greeks, could just be the Danes.
· The weather in the Odyssey is stormy, misty, cold and rainy. The excuse that is given is that the reason for this is Poseidon's anger with Odysseus, but if we think about it the weather is much more similar to the Northern European one, rather than the Mediterranean climate.
· Homer's Greeks never eat figs or olives (as all Greeks of that epoch would have done), but their diet is made up of mostly pork and beef, food more fitting to inhabitants of Northern Europe.
· The heroes have woolen cloaks and are overall very far from our idea of the nude Greek hero that fights in the sun. Everyone is heavily clothed, plus when Ulysses arrives in Ithaca a bed is prepared for him, a bed with layers (4 if I recall correctly) of sheep fur, which has no place in a Greek island, even in the winter.
· Charybdis could the Norwegian maelstrom (Which Edgar Allan Poe himself describes as very Charybdis-like), and "Sicily" is a small three pointed island in the Norwegian sea. In the gulf of Messina nothing like Charybdis can be found.
· The Peloponnese is, according to Homer, a flat island, while the actual region of Greece is quite mountainous and throughout all of its history, up to the 19th century, it was a peninsula due to the existence of the isthmus of Corinth. Furthermore Telemachus reaches the city of Pylos after one day of sailing (which is weird if we think that Ithaca and Pylos are more than 100 nautical miles apart), and Nestor, king of the city, advises Telemachus to reach Sparta by land, which doesn’t make sense considering the more than 1km high mountains between the two cities (any sane Greek would have used a boat). If the Danish island of Sjaelland (flat, closer to Lyo than Ithaca is to Pylos, and actually an island) is replaced to the Hellenic peninsula everything makes sense. In addition Sjaelland evokes the idea of Arcadia that was passed down the millennia better than the harsher Greek Arcadia.
· Homer describes Ithaca as the westernmost island in its archipelago (while the Ionian Ithaca doesn’t fit this description). The only archipelago in the world that perfectly corresponds is situated in Denmark, plus the Crow's stone of the Odyssey is just a Norse dolmen, found on the island of Lyo. Further analyzing the Danish archipelago it’s clear that the areas of the three main islands are in perfect proportion with the number of men sent to Penelope after years of Odysseus not returning (20,24 and 52 men). The long island of the archipelago described by the Greek poet always baffled readers, none of the three major islands in the Ionian archipelago could be reasonably described as long, the Danish island of Langeland on the other hand has a name that actually means long island (and is part of the group of islands to which Lyo belongs).
· Faroese folklore has legends of elderly women selling winds within bags to sailors, thus linking the islands with the Greek Aeolus, who gives the protagonist of the epic a goatskin full of wind
· There is a very weird correspondence of names in the Baltic Sea, Troy is Toija (Finland), which has close to it we can find Tanttala(Tantalus was Zeus's son), plus close to the city we can find a hill with a name close to Sypilos, a mountain closely linked to Tantalus. Other suspicious names are the islands of Pharos and Lemnos, which would actually be Faro and Lemland in the Baltic sea (their location even makes more sense to the story, in fact, if located in the places that tradition attributes to them, they would cause major illogical detours)
· Aegaeon, Greek god of the sea, sounds a lot like Aegir, Norse jotunn of the oceans.
· Bertrand Russell, one of the main philosophers of the 20th century, writes in his History of Western philosophy that it is obvious that the Greeks are descendant of a northern people with light skin, light eyes and light hair (Ulysses, Achilles and many Others are described as blond). This is also clear by the fact that Mycenean architecture is completely different from the more Mediterranean one, as can be observed in Crete. It’s in fact rather close to Bronze age Northern European standards.
· the Hyperion sun that famously constitutes a dilemma would simply be the midnight sun, in fact hyper is Greek for above, therefore with “Hyperion sun” Homer is talking about the odd path the sun makes when you get closer to the Arctic circle.
· Circe is described as polypharmakos (of many potions), and she calls herself daughter of the Sun. The Sami people of northern Scandinavia also call themselves children of the Sun, and their shamans were typically females and used many potions of sort.
· Homer gives an accurate description of Achilles’ shield. It bears the Moon, the Sun and the stars. The Nebra sky disk, a Bronze age shield found in Germany, is the only object ever found in archeological history that seems to accurately fit the verses.
· Homer’s “boundless Hellespont” seems to be a really unfit definition of the rather narrow Dardanelles. The gulf of Finland is a much more plausible candidate.
· The Phaiakes are a population that lives in Scheria, a land, described by Homer as of misty mountains (where in the Mediterranean are there these Tolkienesque peaks?) with a coast that raises from the waters straight as a shield that. It wasnever precisely located because of these weird features. It’s clear that the given description fits the Scandinavian fjords in a way better way than even the harshest Mediterranean coasts. In addition the Old Norse world “sker” means rock, and the author tells us that Scheria (which has a suspiciously close pronunciation to sker) presents little to no ports because of its rocky nature. Remaining in Scheria, Homer tells us that the river navigated by Odysseus to enter the land of the Phaiakes inverted its flow, quite a rare phenomenon in the Mediterranean sea, that could simply be a description of the tides that make so that the sea fills the fjords in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Phaiakes are portrayed as, almost obsessively, afraid of their city being covered by Poseidon with a mountain. In fact on the shores of southern Norway archeologists found what was called a “mini Pompei”, a human settlement that was completely covered by a dune of sand in a presumably short amount of time (maybe even one single storm), thus making the legendary population’s fears quite tangible.
This does not seem correct. First things first. The story probably came together in the eighth century. The Greeks had very little knowledge of northern Europe. Additionally, I think you're taking the geography a little too literally. Plenty of "myths" have an imagined geography that doesn't necessarily match up to reality, even when the authors had a better idea of the world. Take the Arthurian legends, for example. The best anyone can say is that it was some general "continental kingdom" with very little to identify it as any real geography. To make an analogy that is at elast a little closer to the Greek dark ages, the Old Testament describes the kingdom of Israel as much larger than it actually was. Exodus 23 seems to indicate that the promised kingdom of Israel includes much of the Arabian peninsula. 2 Samuel 24 describes a kingdom of Israel that includes cities that Israel never occupied according to other texts and the archaeological remains.
Also, Mediterranean ships had problems traveling in outside of the the Mediterranean. Yes, the Phoenicians may have sailed around the western coast of Africa, but Caesar describes his own vessels encountering trouble fighting the navies of the coastal tribes at first.
In the Moralia the 1st century Greek author Plutacrh wrote: 'Ogygia [Calypso's island], lies far out at sea, a run of five days off from Britain as you sail westward'. This claim is supported by the Roman historian Tacitus, who says that Ulysses reached the Germanic sea.
Tacitus and other Romans saw Britain as the edge of the Earth. This is very much in step with his rhetorical argument of describing the "fall" of Roman virtue and his championing of Agricola, his father-in-law who served as the governor at the ends of the earth. While it is my reading of his writings, I think his fascination with Boudica and the Iceni has to do with him eliding them with the Amazons. In essence, he is making the mythic world of the past alive on the fringes of empire where new heroes, like agricola, behave like the heroes of old.
Turning to the Odyssey itself, a great deal of work has gone into the location of this island. Working off of the actual constellations referenced in the text:
Professor Philip Fox, director of Dearborn Observatory, has very kindly figured with laborious accuracy the exact position of these stars from 900 to 700 BC. His figures are for the latitude of 39 N. This is the lattitude of Smyrna, the assumed home of Homer, and the approximate latitude of Corcyra, the conjectural home of the Phaeacians. Since Odysseus sailed keeping these stars to his right, that is, in an easterly direction, we may presume that this latitude would not be amiss for the home of Calypso, as well as that of Homer, Alcinous, and Odysseus. (John A Scott, Assumed COntradicitions in the SEasons of the Odyssey, Classical Philology 11, No. 2 [April, 1916): 148–155).
The Danaoi, which are substantially Homer’s Greeks, could just be the Danes.
Do you have any evidence that the term "Dane" is older than late antiquity/the early Middle Ages? You're positing that, because two words sound alike, they must be referring to the same thing. The Greeks themselves believed that they are the tribe of Danaus, who came from mythical "Libya."
The weather in the Odyssey is stormy, misty, cold and rainy. The excuse that is given is that the reason for this is Poseidon's anger with Odysseus, but if we think about it the weather is much more similar to the Northern European one, rather than the Mediterranean climate.
Or it was just Autumn, as the article cited above surmises.
Obviously most of this is hardly a question and rather an attempt to correspond a work of fiction to places that are well outside of the cultural, historical context where the work originated. I'm going to just gloss over all the points and boil this down to the supposed question. Can we, generally, falsify such an interpretation, even in spite of the fact that it is, at face value, totally implausible? No. But that's nothing to celebrate, really. Because the theory is unfalsifiable, it is unscientific. Perhaps all the references and place names were a Hellenized, alternative version of a myth from elsewhere. So what? I cannot disprove this interpretation, just as I cannot disprove that the Greek Gods in fact existed and lived on a dwelling on top of Mount Olympus. When we are speaking about mythologies such as these, their cultural meaning is the appropriate question. So, why would anyone generate this highly tenuous, implausible interpretation that recenters a canonical 'great work' from the Mediterranean into Northern Europe? It is all too obviously a mythology of Northern European supremacy.