Felice Vinci, The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales; The Iliad, They Odyssey, and the Migration of Myth (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2006)

Felice Vinci’s Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales was my first introduction to this body of scholarship which I found to be deeply intriguing and thought provoking. Vinci makes the argument that the Homeric tales show evidence that these well known myths took place in the Nordic regions rather than in the Mediterranean as commonly understood. His evidence is linguistic and geographic. For instance, he walks through key components of the tales illustrating that the geographies of The Faroe Islands, Norway, and Sweden, match the described details of the Ogygia, Scheria, and Ithaca remarkably closely, and certainly more closely than anything near the Mediterranean.