Baneful Night of Cimmerian Land: Poetry, History and the Whim of Chance

Abstract

The Odyssey places “the city of the Cimmerian men” in the immediate vicinity of the realm of the dead — in an area that is never illuminated by the rays of the sun. Meanwhile, Greek writers call by the same name «Cimmerians» a real people who invaded in the 7th century BC Asia Minor and who are called “gimir”/“gamir” in Assyrian sources. This context gave rise to many ingenious, sometimes extravagant lines of thought in the minds of scholars — ancient and modern. Two ideas became especially influential: according to one, the Cimmerians are the most northern people living in the conditions of the polar night; according to another, the Homeric image was due to the reports of fogs covering the shores of the Black Sea Colchis. A common tendency, however, was to ignore the poet’s words that “the breath of the North Wind” will bear Odysseus’s ship towards the realm of the dead. These words clearly imply that this realm is located in the extreme south, but such a conclusion seemed so strange to scholars that they preferred to pass over the issue in silence. The article explains that the unusual localization of the realm of the dead goes back to the Bronze Age. It is the notion of a solar disk bright only on one side, which stands behind such a localization. The Odyssey depends on a particular version of this notion that came, apparently, from Scandinavia. As for similar sounding of the names of imagined and real peoples, it is the whim of chance.