Even if that can be overcome, he says, the conclusion will naturally be that the author of the Odyssey is a different man: the realization that it was a woman is too large a leap for scholars’ minds. His evidence for this judgment is what he sees to be the biggest obstacle to the acceptance of his results: the long-held opinion that the author of the Iliad is also the author of the Odyssey. Thus Butler sees the need for readers of the Odyssey to come to the text with eyes as fresh as he considers his own to be, and if they do know anything of the scholarship about the text that they must purge it from their minds. Nothing short of this is of the smallest use” (Butler 1897:209). Immersing oneself in the text as he has done is the only useful approach, according to Butler, and he has not met a scholar in England (although he has in Sicily) who has “saturated themselves with the poem, and that, too, unhampered by a single preconceived idea in connection with it. Butler of Shrewsbury, if it had been harder to understand, it would have been sooner understood-and yet I do not know the “Iliad” is indeed much harder to understand, but scholars seem to have been very sufficiently able to misunderstand it (Butler 1897:209).Īlthough Butler displays some self-awareness about his disdain for professional Homeric scholars, he nevertheless insists that it is the straightforward and uncomplicated nature of his approach to the text that allows both for the best interpretation and for his conclusions in particular to shine through. The “Odyssey” is far too easy, simple, and straightforward for the understanding of scholars-as I said in the Life of Dr. These assumptions, once uncovered, are what I compare to the more recent gender-focused scholarship on the Odyssey. My use of it is not to revive or refute his conclusions, but rather to examine how assumptions about gender, authorship, and texts are used in his arguments. Butler’s book seems to have sold well and been widely read in his time, but the idea of female authorship of the Odyssey did not gain acceptance. It is this part of his argument that he must defend in a detailed argument, and the part that seems, based on Butler’s own account and that of Benjamin Farrington in 1929, to have elicited the greatest response from other readers of Homer. But surely the most controversial of his claims is that the author of the Odyssey was a woman, an “authoress” in his terms, and moreover, that she was “a woman-young, headstrong, and unmarried” (as the title to his chapter VII phrases it). Butler spends several chapters developing and defending those conclusions. He argues based on the landscape descriptions in the poem that the author of the Odyssey lived in Sicily (Trapani, specifically), and that its date of composition was between 10 BC. He claims that the author of the Odyssey is a different person from the author of the Iliad (a position he portrays as gaining acceptance) and also that the author was a single person, as he argues against what he calls the popular “Wolfian heresy” that would give each poem multiple authors (Butler 1897:2–3). In his book Butler makes several claims about the author of the Odyssey that could be controversial.
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