Tim Severin. The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Drawings by Tróndur Patursson. Photographs by John Egan, Seth Mortimer and Tom Skudra. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1985.
The other day I picked up a rather handsome secondhand copy of Tim Severin's book The Jason Voyage for a trifling sum. I wasn't actually planning on reading it right away, but somehow it grabbed my attention and diverted me from all the other odds and ends - biographies, short story collections, graphic novels - I'm working my way through at the moment.
I remember seeing a documentary about the making of Severin's replica twenty-oar Bronze Age galley the Argo some years ago, and it was interesting to compare that to the rather more contextual approach to the myth he takes here.
Apollonius of Rhodes. The Voyage of Argo. Trans. E. V. Rieu. 1959. Rev. ed. 1972. Introduction by Lawrence Norfolk. Illustrations by Daniel Egnéus. London: The Folio Society, 2014.
After a while I thought I should check on the critical response to some of Severin's more audacious claims about the original voyage of the Argonauts, and found the following review on the Goodreads site, contributed by a certain Koen Crolla (29/10/2020):
... Tim Severin spent much of the '70s and '80s and other people's money recreating some historic boat journeys; in this case, that of Jason and the Argonauts, from Iolcus (now Volos in Greece) to Colchis (now Georgia)...
The book covers everything from the construction of the replica Argo in Greece to their successful arrival in Poti, (Soviet) Georgia, and, in the epilogue, their engine-powered return, but Severin is neither a classicist nor an archaeologist, so many of the more interesting detail [sic.] are skipped over: you'll find plenty of anecdotes illustrating the boat-builder's personality, for example, but few details regarding the construction of the ship itself, and none at all regarding the archaeological basis of the design.
During the journey itself, too, Severin's thoughts on the Argonautica range far beyond what conscientious euhemerism will actually allow, with every coincidence becoming a confirmation of the definite historical fact of Jason and everything he encounters. It doesn't help that Severin's knowledge of Bronze Age Greece is rudimentary at best and tainted by Gimbutasian nonsense ... but some of the blame surely falls on two archaeologists (Vasiliki Adrimi in Greece and Othar Lordkipanidze in (Soviet) Georgia) for filling this gullible oaf's head with nonsense.
Still, things are such that even dodgy experimental archaeology often yields useful results, and if you ignore everything Severin writes about landmarks that are definitely 100% the locations mentioned in the Argonautica, there's still actual information left about the feasibility of crossing the open sea and rough currents in a crappy galley, even with doughy and/or middle-aged rowers — even if Severin is enough of a narcissist that large swathes of his account are clearly unreliable. (At least National Geographic took a lot of pictures.)
And though the write-up is kind of a lost opportunity, it's still decent entertainment; I would have liked to have been one of the crew.
How surprising that they didn't think to invite Mr. (or is it Dr?) Crolla to accompany them! His lively good humour would have left the whole crew in stitches, I'm sure - especially that little side-swipe at the "doughy and/or middle-aged rowers" Severin enlisted to help him. Not according to the photos he included of their sinewy bodies toiling at the oars - talk about "sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows" (Tennyson, "Ulysses") ...
There were a couple of other points of interest in Koen Crolla's review, though. First of all, there was that intriguing word "euhemerism," which I must confess was new to me. Not any more, though:
Euhemerism:
is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named after the Greek mythographer Euhemerus ... In the more recent literature of myth ... euhemerism is termed the "historical theory" of mythology.
Well, there you go. You learn something new every day. That really is a perfect description of Severin's diegetic method. Nary a rock or a headland can be glimpsed without his pointing out how perfectly it matches Apollonius's description in the Argonautica: an epic poem composed in the 3rd century BCE, roughly a thousand years after the actual events of the original voyage are supposed to have taken place.
I was also intrigued by Crolla's side-reference to "Gimbutasian nonsense." Again, this was not an adjective familiar to me, but I presume it refers to Marija Gimbutas:
a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.
The "Kurgan hypothesis" turns out, on investigation, to be a fairly well-regarded theory about the origins of the proto-Indo-European (or "Aryan", as they used to be called) languages in an area north of the Black Sea. What I think Crollas must be referring to, though, is her later work:
Gimbutas gained fame and notoriety in the English-speaking world with her last three English-language books: The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974); The Language of the Goddess (1989) ... and the last of the three, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), which, based on her documented archaeological findings, presented an overview of her conclusions about Neolithic cultures across Europe: housing patterns, social structure, art, religion, and the nature of literacy.Aha! The penny drops. I'm certainly familiar with all the ideological battles over whether or not there ever was an ancient, peaceful woman-centred culture in Europe which was supplanted by the incursion of violent, male-dominated, warrior tribes. Once again, one point up to Crolla, though his reference to Severin as a "gullible oaf" still seems a little uncalled for.
The Goddess trilogy articulated what Gimbutas saw as the differences between the Old European system, which she considered goddess- and woman-centered (gynocentric), and the Bronze Age Indo-European patriarchal ("androcratic") culture which supplanted it. According to her interpretations, gynocentric (or matristic) societies were peaceful, honored women, and espoused economic equality. The androcratic, or male-dominated, Kurgan peoples, on the other hand, invaded Europe and imposed upon its natives the hierarchical rule of male warriors.
Tim Severin. The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Drawings by Will Stoney. Photographs by Kevin Fleming, with Nazem Choufeh and Rick Williams. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987.
It isn't really the voyage of the Argonauts that's the problem, though. It's the Odyssey.
After rowing his painstakingly constructed galley through the Aegean and across into the Black Sea to reenact the Argonautica, the second part of Severin's master-plan clicked into action. Now he would attempt to sail the same boat from Troy, on the coast of Asia Minor, to the island of Ithaka, in order to chart the much-vexed Odysseus's difficult ten-year journey home.
Here's one of the standard interpretations of this voyage:
And here's Tim Severin's own route from Troy all the way to the Ionian sea, as navigated (for the most part) by his own Trojan-war-era galley:
And here's an overview of his blueprint for the entire voyage:
Both versions agree on a side-trip to North Africa, and a long haul back from there. The difference, however, is that the earlier version has Odysseus's 12-ship flotilla blown all the way down the coast to Tunisia, whereas Severin calculates that the ships must have battened down and furled their sails and thus made landfall far further east, in Libya.
Severin therefore postulates a much shorter trip back to Greece, followed by some cruising around the island of Crete, whereas the other theory has Odysseus landing in Sicily, followed by excursions to the Balearic islands - possibly even as far as the Pillars of Hercules!
Which of these two routes sounds more plausible to you: the one Severin actually sailed in his own boat, or the one dreamed up by desk-bound scholars measuring distances on the map?
Here are a few of the problems I foresee arising from any attempt to answer this question:
- It presupposes that there was once a person called Odysseus / Ulysses
- It assumes that he took part in the Trojan War
- And also that there was an actual, historical "Trojan war"
- It also takes for granted that legitimate, topographically precise details of his journey home can be gleaned from the Odyssey, a poem probably written around the 8th or 7th century BCE, about a war which took place at least 4-500 years earlier, around the 12th or 13th century BCE
- There are further assumptions built into it about the poet we refer to as "Homer", who may (or may not) have been the "author" - whatever precisely we mean by that, in a predominantly oral Bardic culture - of both the Odyssey as well as the Iliad
- And isn't it just a little bit problematic that the one fact all accounts of Homer agree on is that he was blind? Could he really have been the keen yachtsman and ocean swimmer postulated at certain points in Severin's narrative?
Such speculations can be a lot of fun, mind you. I'm a big fan of Robert Graves' historical novels, one of which resuscitates Samuel Butler's hypothesis - from The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) - that the real maker of the Odyssey was a Sicilian woman, who employed well-known landmarks from her own island for most of its more famous incidents.
Graves has her casting herself as Nausicaä, while her hometown is forced to play double duty as both Phaeacia and Ithaka. The whole concludes with a massacre, just like the Odyssey itself.
And then there's his earlier novel The Golden Fleece [retitled "Hercules, My Shipmate" for the US market], which turns the whole quest into a "Gimbutasian" struggle between Goddess worshippers and savage Apollonian invaders.
Or, as one of the more positive commentators on Goodreads puts it:
The Golden Fleece is an encyclopedic novel of all things Greek and pre-Greek. Graves incorporates or refers to many myths and legends, from the cosmogony through the trade war between Troy and Greece and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. And from various cultures, including Pelasgian, Cretan, Thracian, Colchian, Taurean, Albanian, Amazonian, Troglodyte, and of course Greek, he works into his novel many interesting customs, about fertility orgies, weddings, births, funerals, and ghosts; prayers, sacrifices, omens, dreams, and mystery cults; boar hunting, barley growing, trading, and ship building, sailing, and rowing; feasting, singing, dancing, story telling, and clothes wearing; boxing, murdering, warring, and treaty negotiating; and more. It all feels vivid, authentic, and strange.In other words, there's no harm at all in reimagining and reinterpreting these old myths, as long as it's in the interests of sharpening our responses to the stories themselves - as well as the consummate works of literary art in which they've been preserved.
However, it's important to bear in mind that Apollonius of Rhodes was a scholar and librarian at the Library of Alexandria when he composed the Argonautica. Homer was - well, nobody really knows, but probably a Bard and performer of his own poems, in a possibly pre-literate culture. They were, in other words, completely different poets, from widely separate eras of Ancient Greek culture, who lived 500 years apart.
Try transposing these dates onto Le Morte d'Arthur, Malory's version of the Arthurian legends, published by William Caxton as one of the first printed books in English. The five and a half centuries between Malory and us should give you some idea of the actual distance in time between Homer and Apollonius.
If you extend the metaphor, and go back 1,000 years from Malory, you'll find yourself in the approximate era of the real King Arthur (if there ever was such a person). That gives you some idea of the gap between Apollonius and his own heroes, Jason's Argonauts.
Homer, by contrast, lived only 500-odd years later than his subject-matter, the siege of Troy (and its myriad dire consequences). Malory certainly could (and has been) used as a kind of guidebook to Arthurian Britain, but the more precise and "euhemeristic" these educed details become, the more absurd the whole project seems.
It'd be lovely to go back in a time machine and check out the facts for ourselves - though it might be a bit difficult to square the border region referred to in Hittite records as Taruisa (Troy?) or Wilusa (Greek "Wilios" or "Ilios") with the Troy of our imaginations.
Enterprises such as Severin's are certainly not futile. There is, however, little doubt that he tends to take an ahistorical, over-literal approach to both the textual and topographical details of the folktales that inspired his journeys. Whether or not this assists us in interpreting these myths, and the poems that embody them, is more debatable.
An alternative approach can be found in the work of the modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, who set out instead to remind us of the deep metaphorical significance of these legends for all of us - but particularly those who still inhabit those ancient lands today. Here's his great poem "Ithaka" (along with my own attempt at a version for contemporary travellers):
Ithaka Before you set out for Ithaka pray for a long itinerary full of protracted stopovers. Customs officials, Interpol, the zombie Police Chief – not a problem: as long as you keep your shit together, staple a smile to your fat face, they won’t be able to finger you. Customs officials, Interpol, the paparazzi, will look right through you – unless you invite them up for a drink, unless they’re already inside your head. Pray for a long itinerary: landing for the umpteenth time on the tarmac of a third-world airport at fiery psychedelic dawn; haggling in the duty-frees for coral necklaces and pearls, designer scents & silks & shades, as many marques as you can handle; visiting every provincial town, sampling every drug & kick … Never forget about Ithaka: getting there is your destiny; no need to rush – it’ll still be waiting no matter how many years you take. By the time you touch down you’ll be bone-tired, happy with what you snapped in transit, just a few daytrips left to do. Ithaka shouted you the trip, you’d never have travelled without her. She’s got fuck-all to show you now. Dirt-poor, dingy … she’s up front. It’s over now; you’ve seen so much there’s no need to tell you what Ithaka means. (30/8-12/10/04)
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