Just to expand upon that a little, I don't think of my father's father as my grandfather. He died when I was a baby, so I never knew the man. Only a handful of things have really been said about him to me. Every Christmas I hear this song, and I wonder what sort of man loved this thing that much.

Unable to use any of his tricks to change identities and slip away before his immortality is discovered, he toiled for decades without hope, knowing one day his secret will be the death of him. Meanwhile, the mystery woman he fears to meet arrives by train and checks into a nearby hostel.

I hope the people who have been listening so far will agree I end with a bang.

Our narrator tells about the time he was captured and made into a field slave by the all-but-forgotten raiders remembered as 'The Sea Peoples' during the Bronze Age Collapse.

As someone who had the conflict told to me from the English perspective, it interests me that at the start of the war even 'The English' didn't have an English perspective. That identity came into being through the failure to win control of France until they were no longer French in their own minds.

Well, they definitely have them in stock. Is this joke I will need to remind her about on Christmas morning and only I will find funny worth $8-$25? Probably not...

Why would that be, and what would that have looked like as it was happening? The narrator of my story was there as it happened, and the explanation is both surprising and also self-evident if you really think about it.

Give it a listen!

linktr.ee/taperecorder...

The Odyssey, meanwhile, was definitely created second, and is much more likely to be a collection of many sailors' tall tales across centuries gathered together into a sequel to The Iliad rather than a cohesive albeit exaggerated account of any single voyage.

To the extent that scholars agree on anything, the general consensus is The Iliad was conceived first as an almost-complete epic applying a mythological storytelling flair onto a notable Bronze Age conflict.