i think i am really circulating around some interesting issues about history, time, story telling, philosophies of theologies and histories. Penelope is in the middle of it all!

I am reading about the bard Demodocus (the one who retold the story of the Trojan war to Odysseus). He is blind but has recounted things as if her were there — inspired by the muses, who are divine and so were there. he is the first western historian and he tells the story of the war. but then there is Penelope, all the while, weaving stories into the shroud. she is a historian too — a weaver of texts — writing even earlier than Homer! and she, in a way, is absolutely literate! she is pre-literate. weaving/recording before a greek written language is even invented!!!

who is her muse? where is the vast theological/cultural infrastructure supporting her project? her epic? hers is an epic before even Homer’s! how/why does it get lost? how/why does the oral traditions of the bards supersede the textual productions of women like Penelope?

remember, the world we know of hers is lost, all we know is a little about the world that made it to Homer (sometime between the 8th and some even conjecture 2nd/3rd centuries BCE). If Homer got it wrong others did before him — after all, they didn’t know how to read! and since then the texts left by Homer etc have turned into the origins of a hemisphere — not just a story about some Greeks.

Keywords: homer history