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Jan 11, 2022 · Nostos in the Odyssey refers to Odysseus’ return home from Troy by sea. The word nostalgia is also derived from the words “nostos” and “algos,” which is translated to “the pain of the need to return to one’s home.”
The key word for this hour is nostos, ‘return, homecoming; song about homecoming; return to light and life’. The last of these meanings is mystical, having to do with ideas about immortalization after death. Our first impression is that such ideas are foreign to Homeric poetry.
Odysseus’s nostos and the Odyssey’s nostoi: rivalry within the epic cycle. In this article we explore some of the ways in which our Odyssey engages with other epic homecoming (nostoi) traditions and how they help prepare for and glorify Odysseus’s return home.
- Elton T. E. Barker, Joel P. Christensen
- 2016
The return is not only about returning home physically, but also focuses on the hero retaining or elevating their identity and status upon arrival. [2] The theme of nostos is brought to life in Homer's The Odyssey, where the main hero Odysseus tries to return home after battling in the Trojan War.
The Odyssey is an epic journey, but the word journey must be broadly understood. The epic focuses, of course, on Odysseus’s nostos (“return home” or “homeward voyage”), a journey whose details a Greek audience would already know because of their rich oral mythic tradition.
From this perspective, the Zeus of Nestor’s Nostoi is thematically equivalent to the Zeus of the Odyssey’s main narrative and to the Zeus Nestor invokes in Iliad 15, where the fated, inevitable return of “Mr. Nostos” is represented as the dispensation of the supreme god.
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The Odyssey is the ultimate endorsement of nostos, or homecoming, the idea that a heroic warrior’s greatest triumph comes when he returns from war to his own home and family. Odysseus’s trials end with the offer of not one but two alternative wives, and two alternative places to live.
