Odysseus at Sandringham
Eric Christiansen
WHERE TROY ONCE STOOD: THE MYSTERY OF HOMER'S ILIAD AND ODYSSEY REVEALED by Iman Wilkens
Rider, f16.95, pp. 365
Don't on't touch it', said the classical scholar. It's appalling.' But surely it's a joke?"No, dead serious. And the more that hear about it, the more will believe it. Don't touch it.'
Yes, it is appalling. Mr Wilkens is a Dutchman in his fifties, who has collected those passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey which do not seem to fit in with what we think we know about the Mediterranean in ancient times. For instance, Homer never calls the sea 'blue'. Wilkens concludes that these supposed inconsistencies appear be- cause the Trojan war was not fought in what is now western Turkey, but in the vicinity of Cambridge, England.
In support of this conclusion he has relocated the whole of Homer's geography to countries along the Channel and the North Sea. This is done on the basis either of similarities in the place names (Samothrace and Sandringham is my favourite) or of general geographical con- gruity (Lesbos — The Isle of Wight, Crete — Scandinavia and so on). His theory is that the Homeric poems describe events that actually happened among the Proto- Celts and were brought south and east by migrating tribes and translated into Greek. Then they were used as a source-book for the naming of the anonymous features of Greece and Asia Minor.
In deference to the classical scholar, it must be said that this is not a work of scholarship. And for the sake of my own sanity, I must believe that it is a joke. No serious enthusiast would make so many obvious mistakes, and take so little trouble to forestall the obvious objections. At one point, while he is explaining that the Hellespont was in fact the North Sea, he claims that the city of Hull derives its name from the word Hell, and that this etymolo- gy appears in The Oxford Dictionary of Place Names. It doesn't. A man who believes what he says presumably tries to convince others by reason, rather than by easily disproved assertions.
However, it is not a very good joke; it'is not even original, since there was a French- man called Cailleux who had much the same idea more than a century ago. If it amuses Mr Wilkens, it clearly means more than that to his publishers: the firm of Rider just wants to make a lot of money out of entertaining the public with a book that is got up to look respectable. The number of people who read Homer or classical scholarship is infinitesimal barely enough to keep Colin Haycraft in hot dinners. This pastiche is too clumsy to entertain them. The number of half- believers in Atlantis, the Grail, Earth Mothers, Alternative Worlds and Pseudo- history is immense, and will make Century Hutchinson (for which Rider is a front) even richer than it is.
And why not? If Wilkens can get away with it and keep his readers happy, who loses? Does not all scholarship develop through the publication of outrageous theories? And in any case, is it not general- ly accepted that the sort of world Homer described was not very different from what prevailed among the early Celts? And is there not a long tradition of myth and legend connecting Britain and Troy within which Mr Wilkens has a perfect right to make hay?
Freddie Ayer used to claim that it is wrong to believe what is not true, even if it is not harmful. I would not go as far as that, but these three last questions can be answered less sweepingly.
Scholarship cannot develop through the publishing of theories like this one, be- cause it is too weakly argued to present a challenge to existing views. When in 1795 Wolf published his notion that Homer was not the author of the received texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some were out- raged; but Wolf's arguments were not laughable. He did not claim that Samothrace was Sandringham. With Mr Wilkens, the status quo is completely safe; to refute him would be to unmask a hollow pumpkin. As for the general similarity of Celtic and early Greek society, that is only a notion he has picked up from archaeolog- ists and injected into the fabric of his dream; he has nothing to say about it of any interest. If he would compare the Greek epics with the Tain Bo Cualnge or Cath Maige Tured he would be treading a well-worn but not unrewarding path; but he doesn't. And the connection between Britain and Troy is old and honourable, like the link with Joseph of Arimathea, but that is a different story; there is no story here, only a dismal veil of pseudo- scholarship insolently draped over two great poems. It is abominably sad to think of this bizarre misuse of two inestimable trea- sures; the poems themselves, and the power to read them in the Greek, which Mr Wilkens acquired as a schoolboy. But after all, what harm does it do?
Some years ago I had a letter from a man living near Wales who claimed that he had an Armenian city at the bottom of his garden. He said that it had been founded by Armenian colonists in Roman times, and had survived as the capital of a powerful kingdom for some time after- wards. It had something to do with King Arthur, and the ruins had been noticed by a Welsh poet in the 12th century. Did I agree that Bede had been wrong to ignore this city, or did I subscribe to the false history usually taught at Oxford?
One of these letters usually arrives every six months or so; Armenians in Shropshire is very much the sort of thing they contain. There is the man who thinks that Queen Elizabeth I had a baby which is buried in someone else's tomb in Salisbury Cathed- ral. There is the man who thinks that all Scots are Germans. Funny how many of these correspondents live in the West of England; the Armenian gentleman was no exception. I suggested that he persuade an archaeologist to dig up his garden and verify his theory. It was not a hopeful suggestion, because no one seems to know what an Armenian city of the second century AD would have looked like even in Armenia, let alone Shropshire.
There was more correspondence, but not much more, for reasons which are now too well known. Yes, this Mr Dale was that Mr Dale: the victim of a terrible crime which has not yet been explained, the man who would not sell his house, because he thought he had the site of Camelot in the garden, the innocent bystander in the Stempel case.
I mention him simply because it is sometimes easy to get hot under the collar about Arthurian and pseudo-historical crackpots, that great army of unlicensed mind-benders whose uniform .Mr Wilkens has assumed. It is the expression 'danger- ous nonsense' which is the danger signal. If you are ever tempted to use it, remember Mr Dale. What he believed in was non- sense; but consider the beliefs and actions of those sane, clear-headed people who estimated Camelot at the market price, and then ask where the danger lies.
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