The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth

Felice Vinci traces the Greek epic tales of Homer to an original Baltic setting. Scholars have long troubled over the misfit of geographical information that the Iliad and Odyssey relate. Vinci makes a strong case that the Mycenaeans came from a then much warmer Scandinavia and migrated south to the Aegean, taking their epic stories with them. Correlating place names between those in the epics with those in the Baltic and North Sea regions, he pinpoints the locations of every major city, including Troy. Further strengthening his case, he demonstrates the cultural parallels between these mythic tales and others from Scandinavian culture.

His thesis is not as far fetched as this reviewer intially assumed it would be. We can see many places along the east coast of the United States named in honor of cities and towns in England, as namesakes of the original homes of the newcomers to the New World. If Vinci is right, inhabitants from northern Europe migrated south to the Mediterranean area and renamed numerous places in honor of their former homeland as well. Readers of Homer's stories assumed that they described events in this new homeland rather than their possible real places of origin. Many scholars considered these stories to be myths because they fail to fit the Near East setting, when they in fact fit much better in the far north and may represent real events after all. It would be like someone assuming that stories about the English Wars of the Roses occurred along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, where the interrelationship all the places named would be a jumbled mess, when in reality they took place in England, where all the geography actually fits.

Toward the end, Vinci mars his fine research with extrapolated speculation in an effort to suggest that Sumer, the early Hebrew patriarchs and everyone one else from the Middle East started in Scandinavia. This diminishes the legitimacy of his main theory. Had he left out such claims, his case would be stronger.

Vinci himself allows that his ideas rest upon cultural and geographic evidence and need archaeological research to confirm them. His argument is so strong, though, that it alone should be justification to explore physically the places that he identifies as the actual locations of the events of Homer's tales.

This is one of the most exciting books I have ever owned. It has led me into a myriad of subjects requiring re-thinking. I have had hours of enjoyable discussion with friends because of this book, and I thank Signore Vinci for his decade of effort to this project. I give my highest recommendation!