Someday I hope to say something interesting about this book beyond “have read, story intersection at x”. But alas, today is not that day.
However, I found something that I haven’t heard discussed. So I’m putting it online before I dig around and skew my current view. I did check Wikipedia first.
When Odysseus washes up on the shore’s of Nausikaa’s far flung land, she is noted as the fairest of the princess running at the their sports.
“Now the princess threw the ball toward one handmaiden, and missed the girl, and the ball went into the swirling water, and they all cried out aloud, and noble Odysseus wakened and sat up”
He comes out of the water, “he appeared terrifying to them, all crusted with dry spray;”
And introduces himself before they make a plan to go up to the palace. She goes first, he follows, finding them at table, and he casts himself in the ashes of the hearth.
“Alkinoös, this is not the better way, nor is it fitting that the stranger should sit on the ground beside the hearth, in the ashes,. These others are holding back because they await your order. But come, raise the stranger up and seat him on a silver-studded chair, and tell your heralds to mix in more wine for us,”
The king criticizes his daughter,
“My friend, here is one proper thought that my daughter was not aware of, when she failed to bring you, with her attendants, here to our house. It was she to whom you first came as a suppliant.'”
Soon after he is sent home and wakes up on the shores of Ithaca where Athena meets him and enchants him, changing him for a tramp.
Then he meets Eumaios, the swine herd, who is still grieving his Odysseus’s loss, “For here I sit mourning and grieving away for a godlike master…”
Telemachus enters the next book and Eumaios greets him,
“ And as a father, with heart full of love, welcomes his only and grown son, for whose sake he has undergone many hardships when he comes back in the tenth year from a distant country, so now the noble swineherd, clinging fast to godlike Telemachos, kissed him even as if he had escaped dying, and in a burst of weeping he spoke to him in winged words: You have come, Telemachos, sweet light;”
Eventually Odysseus goes to his own house, tricks everyone, and lays a trap conquering the suitors and returning to his bride.
But it is only when she suggests the marriage bed be brought out that the final enchantment falls away and she believes the man in front of her is her husband and not a god trying to entrap her like Helen. Odysseus proves it by describing the bed he made for them.
It is all much like the Frog Prince or Iron Henry. A young princess looses her ball in a well and it is given back by a frog under the condition that she be his companion always. She says yes, but runs pack to the palace alone. The frog follows and her father, at table, insists she keep her word. The frog insists on sharing her dinner and then her bed, but in the Princess’s disgust she throws the frog against the wall breaking an enchantment on a very handsome prince. They marry.
After the wedding they drive away, and hear the snapping of iron three times and each time the driver says it was a bar wrapped round his heart when he thought his master was lost forever.
I never understood the second half of the tale Why was it there? But alongside the Odyssey it makes perfect sense with Eumaios (or even Laertes, and Dolios).
Anyway, connection spotted.
I used the Fagles translation read by Sir Ian McKellan which is a pure delight. You can hear the warmth of the record it was made on.
My hard copy was Lattimore’s translation and it seems more wordy, but that is an opinion, not fact. Fagles flows well.
-Further Up and Further In