--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "squilluncus" <grvs@...> wrote:
> Has anybody bothered to read this?
>
> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omero_nel_Baltico
>
> It seems he has got some support from a classical scholar.
In Italy this book -- whose author, Felice Vinci, is a nuclear engineer and an amateur historian -- was a best-seller (it had four editions!), and got wide coverage in the media.
The thesis presented in the book -- not a new one -- is that the original Greek world reflected in the Homeric poems was located in the subarctic regions of Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea. From this original nordic 'cradle' the ethnic and cultural ancestors of the Greeks would have migrated to the Mediterranean coasts around the mid-second millennium BCE following an abrupt climatic change.
Vinci, who of course is not a linguist nor a philologist, relies less on toponomastics and etymology than on paleoclimatology and geographical and material-culture descriptions provided by Homer (from the high frequency of fog, the "windy" city of Troy, the "cold" palace of Menelaus in Sparta to the woolen clothes worn by the Greeks and so forth).
In my view, this is outright crackpottery at its finest. If you want read what Vinci himself has to say about his "method", check out his article in English at
http://www.estovest.net/letture/homerbaltic.html
Regards,
Francesco Brighenti