Geography of The Odyssey - Geography of Odysseus's Narrative

Geography of Odysseus's Narrative

The geography of the Apologoi (the tale that Odysseus told to the Phaeacians, forming books 9-12 of the Odyssey), and the location of the Phaeacians' own island of Scheria, pose quite different problems from those encountered in identifying Troy, Mycenae, Pylos and Ithaca.

• The names of the places and peoples that Odysseus visits or claims to have visited are not recorded, either as historical or contemporary information, in any ancient source independent of the Odyssey.
• What happens to Odysseus in these places, according to his narrative, belongs to the realm of the supernatural or fantastic (to an extent that is not true of the remainder of the Odyssey).
• It can be doubted whether Odysseus's story is intended, within the general narrative of the Odyssey, to be taken as true.
• We cannot know whether the poet envisaged the places on Odysseus' itinerary, and the route from each place to the next, as real.
• Even if the places were envisaged as real, the effects of coastal erosion, silting and other geological changes over thousands of years can alter the landscape and seascape to the point where identification may be extremely difficult.

For these reasons, the opinions of later students and scholars about the geography of Odysseus's travels vary enormously. It has repeatedly been argued that each successive landfall, and the routes joining them, are real and can be mapped; it has been argued with equal conviction that they do not exist in the real world and never can be mapped.