Heinz Warnecke brings Homer's Odyssey back from literary abstraction to historical reality, initiating a paradigm shift in Homeric philology. He addresses the question of Odysseus's homeland by considering all the details of the Homeric epics and demonstrates, on a solid philological basis, that the fictional journey of Odysseus traverses geographical spaces that lose nothing of their reality in the form of mythologizing narration. Additionally, the insights into the history of the material are groundbreaking for resolving the Homeric question. Furthermore, the historical identity of the poet of the Odyssey and his homeland can now be reliably established. Alongside a wealth of new arguments, Warnecke has added a chapter on the history of the Ithaca question in the second edition. This book makes an extraordinarily important contribution to the understanding of the Odyssey.