Samuel Butler, the 19th-century satirist, wrote an entire book trying to prove he was actually a she. Seven locations have been given as Homer's birthplace. I suddenly thought, This is talking to me in a way I would never have guessed before. Odysseus is the great metaphor for all of our lives: struggling with storms, coming across incredibly seductive nymphs, finding himself trapped between impossible choices. Lying in my bunk tied up next to a quay in southwest Ireland, I opened this book and found myself confronted with what felt like the truth-like somebody was telling me what it was like to be alive on Earth, in the figure of Odysseus. Our instruments broke, and it had been a big hike from Cornwall. I had thrown into my luggage a copy of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, having never really looked at Homer for about 25 years. We wanted a big adventure, so we decided to sail up the west coast of the British Isles, the exposed Atlantic coast, visiting various remote islands along the way. Speaking from his home in England, Nicolson describes how being caught in a storm at sea inspired his passion for Homer, how the oral bards of the Scottish Hebrides may hold the key to understanding Homer's works, and why smartphones are connecting us to ancient oral traditions in new and surprising ways.Ībout ten years ago, I set off sailing with a friend of mine. In Why Homer Matters, historian and award-winning author Adam Nicolson suggests that Homer be thought of not as a person but as a tradition and that the works attributed to him go back a thousand years earlier than generally believed. But almost nothing is known about their author and the date and manner of their creation. The Iliad and The Odyssey are two of the key works of Western civilization.
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