homeric ithaca?

here's a provocative news piece from bbc.co.uk:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4293786.stm

this is actually a brief notice about a new book, ODYSSEUS UNBOUND, by robert bittlestone, just published by cambridge university press. bittlestone's theory is that what is now a peninsula of the island of kephallenia/cephalonia was once actually a separate islet. [note that kephallenia is in any case right near what is now called 'ithaca,' off the west coast of greece.] bittlestone has put up a website for the whole project, at

http://www.odysseus-unbound.org/

he is not the first to point to kephallenia, and his is not the first book on the topic, as you can see from this web page [though most of those books listed are not in english]:

http://tinyurl.com/d4hmm

he is, however -- as far as i know -- the first to bring satellite imaging technology or modern seismology to bear upon the issue. you can read more about 'world wind,' the NASA '3D planetary visualization' software at

http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/odysseus.html

another review of bittlestone:

http://tinyurl.com/9c2da

here's the fundamental issue underlying all of this: how 'real' is the odyssey? you can set aside the question of whether athena and zeus are real [or *don't* set that one aside, if you prefer], but: what about the people and palces in homer? it's not so very long ago that people would have heaped scorn upon anyone who tried to assert that there had actually been a troy or a trojan war. and yet, well, there you go. and excavations at mycenae and sparta make it pretty obvious that there were glorious and mighty kings in those places during the period homer describes. [agamemnon and menelaus? you decide.]

so the next question is: did odysseus and penelope and telemachus ever exist? and if so, where did they live? *that* is the place to which odysseus would be trying to get back, after the trojan war [and note that if there *was* a trojan war, one assumes here that odysseus did participate in it].

another book [actually a summary of three previous books] that appears to agree with the bittlestone theory:

http://tinyurl.com/aawz8

this author, gilles le noan, claims to have actually identified the palace of odysseus. you see the ramifications of such archaeological quest[ion]s? if there was a palace, was it once actually overrun by suitors? if there were suitors, was there actually once a contest of the bow and axes? and so on, and on. the boundaries between history and fiction [fantasy?] begin to blur significantly.

if you want more bittlestone, you can start by reading the cambridge UP description of the book, at

http://tinyurl.com/7cgoj

the whole book is over 600 pages! but from the link above you can get a sneak peek by downloading a 1.1 MB excerpt, in PDF format, that includes numerous illustrations and a good map.