Who was Nausicaa in the Odyssey?

The princess and the laundry

Odysseus reaches Scheria half-drowned, after Poseidon smashes his raft, and falls asleep under dead leaves near a river mouth. The island belongs to the Phaeacians, seafarers who live apart from the rest of the world; later Greeks, the people of Corfu first among them, claimed Scheria as their own island. That night Athena visits the king’s daughter in a dream, disguised as a friend, with a message about neglected laundry and a wedding coming soon. At dawn Nausicaa asks her father for a wagon. She calls him “Papa dear,” talks about her brothers needing clean linen for dances, and says nothing about her own wedding. Her father understands anyway.

Standing her ground

At the river the girls wash the clothes and play ball. A throw lands in deep water, they shriek, and a naked, salt-crusted stranger comes out of the bushes holding a leafy branch. The maids scatter. Nausicaa stays, because Athena has put courage in her heart. Odysseus speaks from a distance, rather than risk offending her by clasping her knees as suppliants did, and wishes her a husband and a home, since nothing is better than a man and wife “of one mind in a house.” That phrase returns when Penelope tests her husband.

Her answer is practical. Anyone who comes from abroad is protected by Zeus, she reminds her maids, so feed him and let him bathe. Then she hands him a plan: follow the wagon, but wait outside the town, because people will gossip if the princess is seen with a handsome stranger; at the palace, ignore the king and go straight to her mother, Queen Arete. Privately, she tells her maids she would like a husband just like him.

Did Odysseus marry Nausicaa?

No. King Alcinous, taken with his guest, says plainly that he would be glad to have him as a son-in-law, but promises that no one will keep him against his will, and gives him a ship instead. Before he sails, Nausicaa waits by a pillar in the hall to say goodbye: “do not forget me when you are safe at home again,” she tells him, since he owes her his life. He promises to bless her all his days, “for it was you who saved me.” After that Homer never mentions her again.

The song that made him weep

At the feast that night Odysseus, still nameless, asks the blind bard Demodocus for the story of the wooden horse, his own trick. Homer then gives him a startling image:

He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself on the body of her husband who has fallen before his own city and people, fighting bravely in defence of his home and children.

Troy’s destroyer cries like one of its widows. Only Alcinous notices. He stops the song and asks his guest’s name, and at last Odysseus gives it. Whether a real horse ever stood at Troy is another question.

A woman’s Odyssey?

For a character who appears in only three books, Nausicaa has had a long afterlife. In 1897 Samuel Butler, whose translation of the Odyssey followed in 1900, argued in The Authoress of the Odyssey that the poem was written by “a very young woman” of Trapani in Sicily, who put herself into it as Nausicaa. Few scholars agreed. Hayao Miyazaki named the heroine of his film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) after her.