At first sight, this story is rather difficult to take seriously. Giant cannibals?Thence we sailed sadly on till the men were worn out with long and fruitless rowing, for there was no longer any wind to help them. Six days, night and day did we toil, and on the seventh day we reached the rocky stronghold of Lamus- Telepylus, the city of the Laestrygonians, where the shepherd who is driving in his sheep and goats [to be milked] salutes him who is driving out his flock [to feed] and this last answers the salute. In that country a man who could do without sleep might earn double wages, one as a herdsman of cattle, and another as a shepherd, for they work much the same by night as they do by day.
When we reached the harbour we found it land-locked under steep cliffs, with a narrow entrance between two headlands. My captains took all their ships inside, and made them fast close to one another, for there was never so much as a breath of wind inside, but it was always dead calm. I kept my own ship outside, and moored it to a rock at the very end of the point; then I climbed a high rock to reconnoitre, but could see no sign neither of man nor cattle, only some smoke rising from the ground. So I sent two of my company with an attendant to find out what sort of people the inhabitants were.
The men when they got on shore followed a level road by which the people draw their firewood from the mountains into the town, till presently they met a young woman who had come outside to fetch water, and who was daughter to a Laestrygonian named Antiphates. She was going to the fountain Artacia from which the people bring in their water, and when my men had come close up to her, they asked her who the king of that country might be, and over what kind of people he ruled; so she directed them to her father's house, but when they got there they found his wife to be a giantess as huge as a mountain, and they were horrified at the sight of her.
She at once called her husband Antiphates from the place of assembly, and forthwith he set about killing my men. He snatched up one of them, and began to make his dinner off him then and there, whereon the other two ran back to the ships as fast as ever they could. But Antiphates raised a hue and cry after them, and thousands of sturdy Laestrygonians sprang up from every quarter- ogres, not men. They threw vast rocks at us from the cliffs as though they had been mere stones, and I heard the horrid sound of the ships crunching up against one another, and the death cries of my men, as the Laestrygonians speared them like fishes and took them home to eat them. While they were thus killing my men within the harbour I drew my sword, cut the cable of my own ship, and told my men to row with alf their might if they too would not fare like the rest; so they laid out for their lives, and we were thankful enough when we got into open water out of reach of the rocks they hurled at us. As for the others there was not one of them left.
(Odyssey, book 10, tr. by Samuel Butler; online at the Internet Classics Archive)
Leaving aside that aspect, however, there are some interesting features that suggest that this story is based on some half-remembered voyages.
- The land has 24-hour daylight or at least twilight; animal herders can work 24 hours a day if they wanted to.
- The harbor resembles a Scandinavian fjord, being rocky and stretching inland between steep cliffs.
Amber. Baltic amber. The Mycenaean Greeks are known to have acquired Baltic amber (Aspects of Mycenaean Trade, etc.), and if they had traveled to the Baltic Sea to get it, they would have passed by the Scandinavian fjords.
And they would likely have traveled during the summer, or at most late spring to early fall, when the weather is the most pleasant. They therefore would have remembered that place as having long daytimes. If they had spent the winter there, however, they would have seen a very short daytime, and if far enough north, only twilight.
They would likely also have seen the Aurora Borealis, a.k.a. the Northern Lights, which look like continually-moving glowing curtains in the sky.
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Later generations of Greek mythmakers described
Hyperborea ("beyond the North Wind") a land far to the north where the Sun shined 24 hours a day and the people there live a very pleasant existence:
But,Never the Muse is absent
from their ways: lyres clash and flutes cry
and everywhere maiden choruses whirling.
Neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed
in their sacred blood; far from labor and battle they live.
(Pindar, Tenth Pythian Ode; tr. Richmond Lattimore)
That also is likely a memory of long summer daytimes from visits to far northern latitudes, exaggerated into a very wonderful existence.Never on land or by sea will you find
the marvelous road to the feast of the Hyperborea.
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Far-north travels may also account for another oddity: the
Symplegades, also known as the Clashing Rocks or the Cyanean (Blue) Rocks. They appear in the Jason and the Argonauts story as two mist-shrouded rocks at the Bosphorus that those adventurers must pass between.Why blue rocks? That is an atypical color for rocks. However, ice floes and icebergs are sometimes bluish, and they float in the water. The northern seas can also be very foggy, making it hard to see ice floes in one's path.
Though ice floes are a good match for the appearance and some of the behavior of the Symplegades, their location is not; the Black and Mediterranean Seas are not known for having lots of ice floes in them. However, some imaginative storyteller could have decided that it is more dramatically interesting for them to be where Jason and the Argonauts are likely to travel, which is where we find them in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica.
This might also explain the Wandering Rocks described by Circe in Book 12 of the Odyssey, though those can also be
pumice rafts produced by eruptions of nearby volcanoes like Etna and Stromboli in Sicily.-
There are some difficulties with the Laestrygonians == Scandinavians hypothesis, notably the names. Those that can be identified are all Greek. Telepylos means "Far Gate" in Greek, and is the sort of name a Greek storyteller might give to some distant place. Also, Antiphates has a Greek name.
Since the original Laestrygonians lived in areas usually identified as the Germanic homeland or nearby (Denmark and southern Sweden), one might instead expect proto-Germanic names. One can work out some possibilities with historical-linguistic detective work, and none of the names looks recognizably Germanic. There's nothing that looks like "wolf", though a Greek-speaker would have turned it into something like "hylph" with appropriate endings. Something like the way that Pharaoh Amenhotep's name became Amenophis to Greek speakers.
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The first reasonably-clear first-hand account of the northern regions is from
Pytheas (~380 - ~310 BCE), a merchant and explorer from Massalia, now Marseille, France. Around 325 BCE, he searched for the origins of various trade goods like tin and amber, and apparently circumnavigated Great Britain. He also visited an island 6 days north of Britain, Thule, which had a night only 2 or 3 hours long. Going a day further northward, he ran into some slushy sea ice, and he could not proceed further. But he found not only tin from Cornwall, Britain, but also Baltic amber.Pytheas's account has not survived directly, but in quotes and paraphrases by such authors as Polybius, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Diodorus Siculus. But what they describe is enough to work out where he had been and what he had seen.