Homer’s Canadian Odyssey

Homer’s Canadian Odyssey: Is the great myth really about a trip to Nova Scotia?

The first thing to know about George Fowler is that, strictly speaking, he is not a full-time classics scholar. He’s just a couple of courses short of a degree in that field. The other thing is that Fowler is a retired engineer, late of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia. So he knows a thing or three about currents, tides and trade winds. It’s that curious combination of amateur and professional interests that has fuelled Fowler’s belief that the seafaring Odysseus, hero of Homer’s Odyssey, actually ended up in, well, the Bay of Fundy. www.thestar.com...

I throw this out there for fun...it may be just another crazy theory but it is a home-grown crazy theory so that gives it some traction. I would like to invite ATSers to work out the connections between Homer and Oak Island, perhaps Homer as Glooscap?

Have fun

This is a very interesting story. I tried to search for more info but couldn't find any. Is Fowler writing a book or have a website?

S & F

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


i have a good canuckian glooscap story maybe.

when the loyalist family that got this bit of land saw it for the first time

googlemap

they were reallly bummed because it was all steep hill. they had no choice to stay the first winter but they planned on moving up river further in the spring.

as luck would have it their children discovered that in a beautiful little hidden valley behind that extinct volcano that is covered in trees to the right of their farm [as seen in googlemaps], grew plums and apples and grapes and raspberries and blackberries and assorted nuts in such quantities that decided they should stay.

one day the next fall they noted a rather well dressed micmac gentleman standing in the middle of the orchard. after everyone was done being surprised s***tless he thanked then for tending so well to glooscaps garden and he took a few apples and plums and grapes, left them on a rock by the riverbank and paddled away.

it was not too long before apparently every micmac chief on the saint john river had dropped by to see what they had done with the place. they all took some fruit and put it on the rock and left. this prompted the landowner to ask for a piece of apple, 1 grape and plum pit limit pretty quick.

the person who told me the story said that when she was a little girl they put the railroad through and when they dug along the bank in front of the mountain [the volcano is called currie mountain] they discovered a man buried in a copper kettle [a very large copper cooking pot]. it was described to me as a pig pot which is a very large thick walled cast iron thing.

i have seen this burial method before in eastern northern nova scotia but the copper kettles were thin sheet and the story teller told me that they turned the copper kettle upside down and shattered it with their sledgehammers. that would be challenging with sheet copper.

anyway they put the bones in a hole and everyone took away a piece of copper.

the grapes and apples are still there. always smacked of vinland to me but now i want to see if the grapes are greek.

thank you muchly.

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck
Hiya JC. My family had a 10 volume set of encyclopaedias from the 40s. The best volume had the illustrated legends of Greek mythology. I read them over and over. Trojan horses, Cyclops and Ulysses/ Odysseus. The Ulysses31 cartoon epic also encouraged the interest...great stuff.

It's all legend. For that reason, it'd be churlish to doubt that he could have travelled to Canada. In fact, he probably did.

Interesting. Viking are known to have been in Canada. There are those who believe that Taleisin sailed to Canada as well.

Originally posted by Parta
i have a good canuckian glooscap story maybe.

when the loyalist family that got this bit of land saw it for the first time they were reallly bummed because it was all steep hill. they had no choice to stay the first winter but they planned on moving up river further in the spring.

as luck would have it their children discovered that in a beautiful little hidden valley behind that extinct volcano that is covered in trees to the right of their farm, grew plums and apples and grapes and raspberries and blackberries and assorted nuts in such quantities that decided they should stay.

the grapes and apples are still there. always smacked of vinland to me but now i want to see if the grapes are greek.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
It's all legend. For that reason, it'd be churlish to doubt that he could have travelled to Canada. In fact, he probably did.

Great yarn, Parta, and I'd love to know more. Kandinski, you are right that we can't dismiss anything out of hand. Ya never know.

Truth is, with the ocean currents being what they are, we could have had any number of visitors. Inuit legends apparently recall the coming of the Vikings (and tell a somewhat different tale as to who the aggressor was), but what challenges me is the fact that there was a butternut found on the L'ans aux Meadows site. Ain't no butternuts up there...but there are in the New Brunswick area. So what would Greek legends of being swept off to the North American coast sound like? A lot like the Odyssey, I'll bet.

I'm not buying the concept just yet...but I'm giving it the respect it deserves as a 1'st Class "What if...?"

There might be others who think "what if" also

I am not saying I subscribe to this theory, it is just that others see it a possibility...

I will try and translate the portions of Greek in the image for you.

"Η μεγαλυτέρα παλίρροια και άμπωτις στον κόλπο του Φούντυ"
"World's largest tides in the bay of Fundy"

"Εδώ συναντώνται το ψυχρό ρεύμα του Λαμπραντόρ και το ζεστό του Γκόλφ Στρήμ και δημιουργούν μία τρομερή δίνη"

"Here the cold current of Labrador meets with the warm current of Gulf Stream and create a terrible vortex"

It assumes that the area off the coast of Nova Scotia was the Skyla-Charybdis area )most people think that this was between Sicily and Italy and Phaeacians lived in Corfu (makes some sense, the latter, as the Phaeacians knew about Ithaca and how to navigate to there).
Also, the map shown in the link above states that Newfoundland was the Island of the Sun (the one with all the cattle )

who knows? There are parts of the Odyssey that are undecipherable as they describe terrible storms and ships or rafts or plain swimmers drifting in the sea for days - without a clue as to where they were driven to.

Well, if people are bringing more and more locations for troy, i would be happy to put my 2 cents and say...

Hey ...Iman Wilkens could also be right with the Gog Magog Hills near Cambridge in England is the actual location of troy.



[edit on 2/6/10 by coredrill]

After reviewing the evidence for Troy in England I'm sold.
Shliemann himself on his deathbed admitted he had doug below the time line when he found the artifacts he had atributed to Troy.

When the professor who figured that the Indians were mining copper on Manitoulin Island published that he figured the indians were digging there for over 100,000 years he was fired as was the head of the department that hired him...

If the facts don't fit the status quo we won't even hear of it

Why hear it if you have facts saying otherwise?

Would you hear someone claiming you can walk on your ceiling? Like a fly?

reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


lost guy in a copper kettle [is that what the story says? think so...] from crete?



this place is interesting [googlemaps]

its very BIG and now dated to extactly Troyish BCE.

very close to greece and the biggest thing there was. vary strange indeed.

Hello my friend. So you sort of pick and choose your ancient seafaring myths based on Canadian Content and dismiss such suggestion when they point to areas outside of the Back Bacon and Flapjacks homeland.

I saw nothing offered to suggest this was "unique" and frankly is the way "others" visited the Americas in those B.C. times.

Of course, it IS an interesting premise about the Odyssey though.

Ciao

Shane

Originally posted by Shane
Canadian Content and dismiss such suggestion when they point to areas outside of the Back Bacon and Flapjacks homeland.

flapjacks??? aren't those the things americans use to soak up ever last delicious drop of canadian maple syrop?

Of course, it's always possible that Homer had an imagination and made up some of the places and events he described

Or do people think Circe really did turn his crew into pigs?


Still, fun trying to guess which genuine places of which Homer may have been aware he used as basis for the fictional islands and other places in his story. Doubt he ever travelled to Canada though.

Flapjacks?
thats an AMERICAN term.
ala paul bunyon and his blue ox.

We call 'em pancakes because they are small cakes made in a pan.
eh?

dogs were split from wolves
"according to mitochondrial DNA, domestication could be dated as far back as 100,000 to 104,000 years ago, and another suggests 90,000 years ago" (Manansala). "
from:
cstl-csm.semo.edu...

there is a "flywalker on the ceiling"

The Ojibwa say say a giant gave them the dog,
kitchewanna the manitou of the Ojibwa
kitchewana is also called en men anna on some of the anti deluvian sumerian king lists "writen in stone"

there is a man wlking like a fly on the ceiling




[edit on 3-6-2010 by Danbones]

Originally posted by Shane
Hello my friend. So you sort of pick and choose your ancient seafaring myths based on Canadian Content and dismiss such suggestion when they point to areas outside of the Back Bacon and Flapjacks homeland.

...and you'll noticed that I keep coming up with the word fun. I figure that even a Royal Canadian pain in the arse like me can throw one out there for giggles now and again.

Thing is, I need facts to support a theory, and one could place the Odyssey in a pile of regions, including the Mediterranean, which still seems the best candidate. Assuming, of course that there is any truth to the yarn in the first place.

If you want a pretty well-reasoned discussion of pre-Colombian visitors, I suggest 'The Farfarers: Before the Norse' by Farley Mowat. en.wikipedia.org...:_Before_the_Norse

There is little I dismiss out of hand, but I require proof to buy into it 100%

I think that if Fowler had been Russian, he'd have made an argument for Odysseus having had contact with Russians. If he'd been born in China, we'd have seen a theory that Odysseus' voyage closely matches a voyage to China. If he'd been born in Louisiana, we'd find him promoting the idea that Odysseus made it to the Gulf Coast.

Check out the Wikipedia pages on Troy. The archaeological city is really a match for Homer's Odyssey, including evidences of warfare and warrior technology.

]reply to post by JohnnyCanuck


Yes, at times all should have fun when discussing topics.

I did enjoy the "micmac" tale, and do wonder if there is a connection, but that review will need to occur sometime when I find signal to surf again.

Using a crackberry and must say, the little piece of screen is "neat" in a novelty manner, but a goof laptop beats it anyway. It does make me wonder about the Ipad.

Ciao

Shane