Jonty Claypole
speaker
11,327 appearances
34 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard yesterday
Jonty Claypole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 34 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And he's writing this at a time when there's some fascinating new research coming to light.
So he was really taken by a book by a man called Walter Leif, published in nineteen twelve, called Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography.
And in this book,
Leif puts the text of the Iliad alongside the physical landscape of Northwest Anatolia, where Troy was believed to have been.
And he's really mapping out where Troy or the events of the Iliad were taking place on a kind of modern map of Turkey.
And this is something Joyce is really interested in.
Like if you're to take the events of the Odyssey and map it onto Dublin, if you'll take to take the Mediterranean.
Or the fantastical Mediterranean of the Odyssey with its sirens, where would he make those as places in in Dublin?
The other book he's really drawn to is a book by a French scholar called Victor Bérard from 1902 called The Phoenicians and the Odyssey.
Bérard argued that by going into old Phoenician log books from 500 BCE, you could see elements of the Odyssey represented there.
And what Bérard ends up arguing is that the Odyssey was.
Created by Phoenicians.
Now, who are the Phoenicians?
They're not the ancient Greeks.
They're people from what is now Lebanon and the coast there.
So they are Semitic.
That doesn't mean they're Jewish, although some of them may have been, but they're Semitic.
So the Phoenicians are from that part, that coastline of the Mediterranean.
Now Joyce got incredibly excited by this because in his story that he's telling, in which Stephen Deedlas, who was the Joyce Avatar, is rescued as Joyce was by the Jewish friend of his father, the idea that the Odyssey itself had this kind of Semitic origin was completely captivating to Joyce.
He he couldn't believe it.
Showing 3061–3080 of 11,327 · page 154 of 567
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