104 Fun Facts About The Odyssey

Odysseus rules which island kingdom?

Modern Ithaca in the Ionian Sea is generally accepted as his home, though some scholars argue Homer meant the Paliki peninsula of neighbouring Kefalonia.

How long does Odysseus's journey home from Troy take?

Ten years, on top of the ten-year siege of Troy: he has been gone for twenty, long enough for everyone at home to presume him dead and for suitors to pursue his wife.

Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into how many books?

24 books, but the division is not original: it was probably made long after the poem was composed, and is often credited to scholars working in Alexandria.

In which poetic metre is the Odyssey composed?

Dactylic hexameter, six feet of dactyls (long-short-short) or spondees (long-long), is the metre of both Homeric epics; stock phrases such as 'long-suffering Odysseus' recur because they fit set slots in the line.

Roughly how many lines long is the Odyssey?

12,000 lines, or 12,109 to be exact, and every one was made to be heard: in a largely illiterate age, professional reciters called rhapsodes performed the poem aloud for audiences.

Where is Odysseus when the Odyssey, which opens in medias res, begins?

Held captive by the nymph Calypso on Ogygia is where the poem finds Odysseus; he does not appear in person until Book 5, after four books following his son.

Books 1 to 4 of the Odyssey, which follow Odysseus's son rather than Odysseus, are known as what?

The Telemachy is the scholars' name for Books 1 to 4, in which Telemachus travels to Pylos and Sparta seeking news of his father and comes of age in the process.

What trick does Penelope use to stall the suitors for three years?

Unweaving a shroud each night is her ruse: the shroud is for Odysseus's father Laertes, and she promises to choose a husband once it is finished, undoing each day's weaving until a maid betrays her.

Calypso is usually said to be the daughter of which Titan?

Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky, is named as Calypso's father in Book 1; her own name comes from the Greek kalyptein, 'to conceal', fitting for a nymph who hides a hero from the world.

Which god hounds Odysseus for blinding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus?

Poseidon hears Polyphemus's prayer that Odysseus reach home late, alone and on a stranger's ship, and it comes true: every other man is lost and Phaeacian sailors carry him home.

What name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus?

When the blinded giant bellows that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume he is being afflicted by the gods and wander off.

How do Odysseus and his men escape Polyphemus's cave?

Clinging beneath his sheep, each man tied under the middle ram of three, they slip out while the blinded giant feels only the animals' backs; Odysseus himself hangs under the largest ram.

What does Aeolus, keeper of the winds, give Odysseus to speed him home?

An oxhide bag of storms, holding every wind but the favourable west wind, is Aeolus's gift; within sight of home the crew open it looking for treasure, are blown back, and Aeolus refuses a second time.

Why does only Odysseus's own ship survive the Laestrygonians?

Moored outside the harbour, his ship was spared while his other eleven tied up inside, where the giants smashed them with rocks and speared the men like fish; he cut his cable and got away.

What does the enchantress Circe turn Odysseus's crew into?

Pigs is what Circe's drugged wine makes of the scouting party, though they keep their human minds; once Odysseus resists her spell the men are restored and the crew stay a full year.

Which god hands Odysseus the protective herb moly before he confronts Circe?

Hermes meets him on the path and adds a plan: when Circe strikes with her wand, rush her with drawn sword, then make her swear an oath to do him no harm.

Whose ghost does Odysseus travel to the underworld to consult?

Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet, is the shade Circe sends him to consult; he also meets his mother Anticlea there and learns for the first time that she has died.

Which dead hero tells Odysseus he would rather be a slave to a poor master than king of all the dead?

Achilles says it in Book 11, a pointed reversal of the Iliad, where the same hero chose a short, glorious life over a long, obscure one.

Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus's crew, dies how?

Falling drunk from Circe's roof, where he had slept and then missed the ladder, kills Elpenor; his shade is the first Odysseus meets in Hades, and his grave on Aeaea is marked with his oar.

How does Odysseus get his ship past the Sirens alive?

Tied to the mast, crew's ears waxed: Circe's advice lets Odysseus alone hear the song while the men row on, ordered to tighten his ropes if he begs release; Homer's dual forms imply just two Sirens.

Scylla and Charybdis have traditionally been located in which real stretch of water?

The Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily, is where later writers placed them, reading Scylla as a rock and Charybdis as a whirlpool; the Calabrian town of Scilla still bears her name.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus's last ship is destroyed after his crew eat what?

The sun god's sacred cattle, grazing on Thrinacia, are slaughtered by the starving crew; Zeus answers Helios with a thunderbolt and every man drowns except Odysseus, who washes up on Calypso's island.

In Penelope's final test of her husband, what does only the real Odysseus know cannot be moved?

Their marriage bed: Odysseus built it around a rooted olive tree, so when Penelope orders it moved, his outrage that anyone could shift it proves he is her husband.

What happens to sailors who eat the fruit of the Lotus-eaters?

They forget their homes and want to stay, weeping when dragged away; Odysseus lashes them under the rowing benches, and the historian Polybius placed the Lotus-eaters on Djerba, off Tunisia.

What lets the Cicones of Ismarus strike back at Odysseus?

His crew linger to feast on the plunder, ignoring his order to leave at once; the Cicones return with reinforcements and kill six men from every ship.

Naked and exhausted, Odysseus is found on the shore of Scheria by which princess?

She had come to the river to wash clothes with her handmaidens; Hayao Miyazaki later borrowed her name for the heroine of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Scheria, home of the Phaeacians who carry Odysseus home, is commonly identified with which Greek island?

Corfu, ancient Kerkyra, is the usual identification; the Phaeacians' ships needed no pilots and steered by thought, and the one that delivered Odysseus was turned to stone on its way home.

Sailing away from the blinded Cyclops, what does Odysseus do that lets Polyphemus call down a curse on him?

Shouts his real name: after hiding behind a false one, he cannot resist boasting who blinded the giant, and Polyphemus now has a name to curse when he prays to his father for revenge.

Who is the first to recognise Odysseus when he comes home disguised as a beggar?

His dog Argos, old and flea-ridden on a dung heap, drops his ears and wags his tail at his master after twenty years, then dies; Odysseus wipes away a tear.

Odysseus's old nurse Eurycleia recognises him by what?

A scar above his knee, left by a boar's tusk on a boyhood hunt on Mount Parnassus, gives him away as Eurycleia washes his feet; he seizes her by the throat and swears her to silence.

What is the occupation of Eumaeus, the loyal servant who first shelters the returning Odysseus?

Swineherd is his job: he keeps Odysseus's herds of swine in the hills, though he was born a prince on the island of Syra, kidnapped by Phoenician traders and bought by Odysseus's father Laertes.

Penelope's contest for the suitors requires stringing Odysseus's bow and shooting an arrow through what?

Twelve axe heads are set in a row and the arrow must pass through them all; none of the suitors can even bend the bow, and the ragged beggar strings it with ease.

Which suitor is the first to die when Odysseus turns his bow on the hall?

Antinous, the most arrogant of the suitors, takes the first arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup; his father Eupeithes leads the failed revenge raid in the final book.

Which goddess guides Odysseus and Telemachus throughout the poem, appearing as Mentes and Mentor?

Athena, Odysseus's patron, also disguises him as an old beggar on his return and, at the very end, steps in to halt the blood feud with the suitors' families.

Who was Mentor, the Odyssey character whose name gave English the word 'mentor'?

Odysseus's friend, left in charge of the household when the king sailed for Troy, is who Mentor was; much of his famous advice in the poem really comes from a goddess wearing his shape.

Whom does Telemachus visit in Sparta when seeking news of his father?

Menelaus and Helen host him in Sparta in Book 4; Menelaus recounts wrestling the shape-shifting sea god Proteus in Egypt to learn the way home, and Helen drugs the wine to banish grief.

What does the name Telemachus mean?

Far from battle is the usual reading of Telemachus, from tele, 'far', and mache, 'battle', apt for a son raised far from his father's war; it may also mean 'fighting from afar', like an archer.

In the lost epic the Telegony, how does Odysseus finally die?

Killed by his own son: Telegonus, his child by Circe, lands to raid cattle and wounds him with a stingray-barbed spear, not knowing who he is; in the sequel he then marries Penelope.

After his raft is smashed, how does the sea goddess Ino save Odysseus from drowning?

She lends him her veil: tied round his chest it keeps him afloat until he swims ashore, where he must throw it back into the sea; Ino had once been a mortal woman herself.

Who exposed the feigned madness Odysseus used to dodge the Trojan War?

Palamedes, with baby Telemachus, called his bluff: in the best-known telling he set the child before the plough and Odysseus swerved; most accounts have Odysseus frame him for treason in revenge.

Who gave Odysseus his name, choosing it because he had 'been angered with many'?

His grandfather Autolycus, a famous thief visiting for the birth, chose it; Homer ties the name to a verb meaning 'to be angry', a link dictionaries now treat as folk etymology.

Dante's Inferno places Odysseus (Ulysses) in the Eighth Circle among which sinners?

Counsellors of fraud burn in the eighth ditch, each hidden in a flame; Dante gives him a new ending, in which love of home cannot hold him and he leads his crew past the Pillars of Hercules to their deaths.

Which translator's 2017 Odyssey was the first English verse translation by a woman?

Emily Wilson wrote it in iambic pentameter and held herself to the same number of lines as the Greek to keep Homer's speed; it opens 'Tell me about a complicated man.'

Which poet's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' celebrates Chapman's translation?

John Keats wrote 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' in October 1816 after a night reading the Elizabethan translation with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke; it ends with 'stout Cortez' silent upon a peak in Darien.

What is the 'Homeric Question'?

Whether one poet named Homer wrote both epics, or existed at all, is the Homeric Question; Milman Parry showed the poems are built from the stock formulas of oral poetry, pointing to generations of bards rather than one author.

In James Joyce's Ulysses, which Dubliner stands in for Odysseus on a single day in 1904?

Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, is Joyce's Odysseus: the ten-year voyage shrinks to one day's walk around Dublin, 16 June 1904, which fans still mark each year as Bloomsday.

Who plays Ulysses Everett McGill in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

George Clooney plays the silver-tongued escaped convict, with John Goodman's one-eyed Bible salesman as the Cyclops; the Coens admitted they had never read Homer's poem.

Which novelist retold the Odyssey from the enchantress's side in the 2018 bestseller Circe?

Madeline Miller, who taught Latin and Greek to high-school students, lets Circe tell it herself: banished to her island for witchcraft, she meets Odysseus as one visitor in a very long life.

Who plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey?

Matt Damon leads as Odysseus; Nolan shot the whole film on IMAX film cameras, a first for a feature, after IMAX built him lighter, quieter ones.

With what do Odysseus and his men put out the eye of the drunken Polyphemus?

A fire-hardened stake, cut from the giant's own olive-wood club: they heat the point until it glows and twist it into his eye the way a shipwright works a drill.

Which 2003 film, set in the American Civil War, was structured on the Odyssey?

Cold Mountain, Anthony Minghella's 2003 film of Charles Frazier's novel, follows a wounded Confederate deserter's long walk home to his sweetheart, a journey Frazier modelled on the Odyssey.

Polytropos, Homer's first-line epithet for Odysseus, has been translated as what?

Man of many ways is Lattimore's rendering of polytropos, literally 'much-turning'; the word covers both his wanderings and his cunning, so translators keep trying new versions of it.

Which king does Telemachus visit first, at sandy Pylos, in search of news of his father?

Nestor, the garrulous old king of Pylos, hosts Telemachus in Book 3 and sends his son Peisistratus along as companion for the overland trip to Sparta.

Who edited the first printed Greek edition of Homer, published in Florence in 1488?

Demetrios Chalkokondyles, an Athens-born scholar teaching in Florence, edited the 1488 editio princeps of Homer, financed by the Nerli brothers of that city.

What does the Odyssey repeatedly call 'wine-dark', a colour term that later puzzled William Gladstone?

The sea is 'wine-dark' again and again in the poem. Gladstone noted in 1858 that the poet never describes nature as blue, and argued the Greeks sorted colours by light and dark rather than hue.

Which time of day does the Odyssey greet again and again with the stock epithet 'rosy-fingered'?

Dawn is 'rosy-fingered' in line after line, a ready-made phrase that fits the metre and served singers as a memory aid. She is the goddess Eos, spreading fingers of light.

What do Odysseus and his men drive into the eye of the sleeping Cyclops Polyphemus to blind him?

A heated wooden stake does it: the crew sharpen the giant's own club, bring the point to a glow in the fire, and Odysseus twists it like a shipwright's drill.

Which sinner does Odysseus watch in the underworld of the Odyssey, forever heaving a huge stone uphill?

Sisyphus strains with hands and feet in Book 11, but the stone rolls back to the plain each time he nears the crest. Odysseus sees him just after Tantalus, who stands in water he can never drink.

Which god, petitioned on Olympus on Odysseus's behalf, orders the nymph Calypso to set her captive free?

Zeus sends his messenger to her island with the order. Calypso obeys, but not before complaining that the gods always begrudge a goddess her mortal lover.

What does the nymph Calypso offer Odysseus in the Odyssey if he will stay as her husband?

Immortality and unending youth are the offer, and Odysseus turns it down. He tells her frankly that Penelope cannot match a goddess for looks, and that he longs for home all the same.

Which king, cut down at a feast on his return from Troy, warns Odysseus in the underworld against trusting a wife?

Agamemnon says he was butchered like an ox at the stall with his wife's help, and urges Odysseus to land in secret, though he grants that Penelope is far too prudent to do the same.

Why do Odysseus's crew undo the wind-king Aeolus's parting gift when their home shores are already in sight?

They expect treasure, gold and silver their captain is keeping for himself, and let every contrary wind loose instead. The ship is blown all the way back, and Aeolus refuses to help a second time.

Whose ghost does Odysseus try three times to embrace in the underworld of the Odyssey, grasping only air?

His mother, Anticlea, slips through his arms like a shadow or a dream. She tells him she died of longing for him, a loss he learns of only among the dead.

Which director borrowed the Odyssey's name for a 1968 science-fiction epic about a voyage to Jupiter?

Stanley Kubrick took the poem as his model for 2001: A Space Odyssey, hoping to lift it above the 'monsters-and-sex' science fiction of the day. He had first announced it as Journey Beyond the Stars.

What kind of sea hazard is Charybdis, which Odysseus survives a second time by clinging to a fig tree?

A whirlpool: three times a day Charybdis gulps down the sea and spews it back. Circe advises hugging the opposite cliff, since losing a few men to its monster beats losing the whole ship.

In early Greek art, the Sirens who sing to Odysseus have women's heads on the bodies of which creatures?

Birds, not fish: by the 7th century BC Greek artists regularly showed Sirens as human-headed birds. The Odyssey never describes their bodies, and the fish-tailed mermaid version came later.

What do the Sirens of the Odyssey promise Odysseus in their song if he will stop his ship and listen?

Knowledge of all things is the bait: the Sirens claim to know everything that happened at Troy and everything that will happen on earth. Their song also flatters him as the great glory of the Greeks.

Which blunder by Odysseus, made while sailing away from the blinded Polyphemus, lets the giant curse him?

Boasting his real name undoes his own trick. Polyphemus can now pray to his divine father that Odysseus reach home late, alone and on a stranger's ship, and every word comes true.

What does nostos mean, the Greek word behind the Odyssey's great theme and half of the English 'nostalgia'?

Homecoming is the sense, and 'nostalgia' pairs it with algos, pain. A medical student in Basel coined the word in 1688 for the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries serving abroad.

Which condition did most ancient biographies give Homer, the poet credited with the Odyssey and the Iliad?

Blindness is the tradition: the most widespread ancient account made Homer a blind bard from Ionia. The Odyssey has a matching figure, the honoured singer at the Phaeacian court, who was given sweet song in exchange for his sight.

In a comic song performed at the Phaeacian court, which god is trapped in bed with Aphrodite by her husband's net?

Ares is the lover caught: Hephaestus, the wronged smith god, hangs a net too fine to see over the bed. The other gods crowd in to laugh, while the goddesses stay home out of modesty.

What is the name of Odysseus's aged father, found in a patched tunic tending a vineyard at the end of the Odyssey?

Laertes has withdrawn to his farm in grief for his missing son. Odysseus proves who he is by listing the trees the old man gave him as a boy: thirteen pear, ten apple and forty fig.

Which Roman poet modelled the wandering first half of his epic about a Trojan refugee on the Odyssey?

Virgil set out to rival both Homeric epics in one poem: the Aeneid's first six books follow Aeneas's sea wanderings to Italy, and its last six turn to war in the manner of the Iliad.

Which First World War soldier and author published a prose Odyssey in 1932 under his adopted surname, Shaw?

T. E. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Arabia of the desert war, changed his name to Shaw after the press exposed his first alias in the RAF ranks. His translation of the poem came out under the new one.

Which Victorian poet's 'Ulysses' ends with the aged hero resolved 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'?

Alfred Tennyson wrote it at 24, after the death of his close friend Arthur Hallam. His Ulysses is an old king, restless at home, who talks himself into one last voyage.

Which Canadian novelist retold the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view in the 2005 novella The Penelopiad?

Margaret Atwood wrote it for a series in which modern authors rewrite ancient myths. Her Penelope looks back from the land of the dead, while a chorus of her maids keeps breaking in with its own version.

Which English actor plays the returning Odysseus opposite Juliette Binoche's Penelope in the 2024 film The Return?

Ralph Fiennes and Binoche were paired on screen for the third time, after Wuthering Heights in 1992 and The English Patient, the 1996 Oscar winner.

Which island does the disguised Odysseus claim as his birthplace in the false life stories he tells at home?

Crete is his cover in tale after tale: he tells one version to the servant who shelters him, another to his patron goddess, and to Penelope he poses as a Cretan prince named Aethon.

Told to carry an oar inland after killing the suitors, Odysseus must walk until a stranger mistakes it for what?

A winnowing fan, a farm tool for tossing grain, would prove he had reached people who know nothing of the sea. There he must plant the oar and sacrifice to the sea god, and his journeys will be over.

Which Greek hero's ghost snubs Odysseus in the underworld, still bitter over a lost contest for a dead man's armour?

Ajax lost the armour to Odysseus and afterwards killed himself. Odysseus says he wishes he had never won the prize and begs the ghost to master its anger, but it walks off without a word.

Penelope says in the Odyssey that true dreams leave through a gate of horn, and false dreams through a gate of what?

Ivory is the gate of false dreams, and the pairing rests on Greek wordplay: the word for horn sounds like 'fulfil' and the word for ivory like 'deceive'.

What fate do the maids who slept with the suitors meet after the slaughter in Odysseus's hall?

They are hanged from a ship's cable by Telemachus, who refuses them a 'clean death' by the sword. First they are made to carry out the bodies and scrub the hall.

Which shape-shifting sea god does the king of Sparta ambush among a colony of seals to learn his way home from Egypt?

Proteus turns into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, even running water and a tree before he gives in and answers. His escapes gave English the word 'protean' for anything that keeps changing form.

Which Greek word names the sacred bond between host and guest that Penelope's suitors abuse throughout the Odyssey?

Xenia obliged a host to feed a stranger before even asking who he was. The suitors turn the custom inside out, settling in uninvited and eating up an absent host's estate.

Which king of the Phaeacians hears Odysseus's whole story at his banquet table and then sends him home by ship?

Alcinous is so taken with the stranger that he offers him his daughter's hand before he even knows his name. He also promises that no Phaeacian will keep the guest against his will.

What becomes of the Phaeacian ship that carried Odysseus home, punished by the sea god near its own harbour?

It turns to stone at one slap of the sea god's hand and is rooted to the seabed. The Phaeacian king takes the hint and orders his people to stop ferrying strangers home.

What is uncanny about the ships of the Phaeacians, the sailors who finally carry Odysseus home in the Odyssey?

They steer by thought, their king explains: the ships need no helmsman or rudder because they read their crews' minds and know every city on earth. Wrapped in mist, they never fear wreck.

Which chore brings a Phaeacian princess and her maids to the shore where they find the shipwrecked Odysseus?

Washing clothes is the errand, planted in a dream by a goddess who hints that the princess's wedding day is near. The girls are playing ball afterwards when a stray throw and a shriek wake Odysseus.

At the Phaeacian games, Odysseus silences a courtier's jeer that he is no athlete by hurling which object?

A discus heavier than any the Phaeacians use sails past every mark, thrown without even taking off his cloak. Odysseus then challenges all comers at any sport, admitting only that a Phaeacian might outrun him.

Which wary crewman of Odysseus hangs back from Circe's doorway and so escapes the spell she casts on his companions?

Eurylochus smells a trap, waits outside and runs back to the ship with the news. He is Odysseus's second-in-command, and later talks the hungry crew into the forbidden feast that dooms them.

How does the disguised Odysseus settle his quarrel with Irus, the greedy beggar who orders him off the palace doorstep?

A boxing match, egged on by the suitors for sport, ends with one blow under the ear. Odysseus pulls the punch on purpose so that no one will guess who he is.

The Odyssey compares Odysseus stringing his great bow to which kind of expert handling the tool of his trade?

A musician fitting a new string to his lyre is the image, and the bowstring sings like a swallow when Odysseus tests it. The suitors turn pale at the sound.

As the slain suitors' souls are led down to the underworld in the Odyssey, to which squeaking animals are they compared?

Bats fluttering in a cave after one drops from the cluster is the simile, with the ghosts gibbering as they go. Their road runs past the White Rock, the gates of the Sun and the land of dreams.

Whom does the poet of the Odyssey call on in its opening line to tell the story of the wandering hero?

The Muse is asked to do the telling, as if the singer were only her mouthpiece. The poem never says which one, though later tradition gave epic poetry to Calliope, chief of the nine.

Which paperback series was launched in 1946 with E. V. Rieu's translation of the Odyssey as its first title?

Penguin Classics began with that Odyssey, and Rieu went on to edit the whole series. He recruited novelists as translators, hoping to avoid the 'archaic flavour' he found repellent in older versions.

Which sudden noise from Telemachus makes Penelope laugh and call it a good omen for the suitors' destruction?

A sneeze rings round the hall just as Penelope wishes Odysseus would come back and punish the suitors. She laughs and says her son has 'sneezed a blessing' on her words.

In which country did Milman Parry record epic singers in the 1930s to test how the Odyssey was composed?

Yugoslavia still had guslars, singers of oral epic, and Parry recorded them on two trips. He argued that Homer's repeated stock phrases were the same kind of aid to memory and improvisation.

The Victorian novelist Samuel Butler argued in an 1897 book that the Odyssey was really composed by whom?

A young Sicilian woman, Butler claimed, set the poem's scenes along her own coast near Trapani. Robert Graves later spun the theory into his novel Homer's Daughter.

Which University of Kansas classicist opens his 2000 translation of the Odyssey with the words 'Speak, Memory'?

Stanley Lombardo designs his translations to be performed aloud, as the poems first were, and has recorded them himself as audiobooks.

Who kidnapped the child prince who grew up to be the loyal servant sheltering Odysseus in Book 14 of the Odyssey?

Phoenician traders seduced his nurse, who smuggled the boy aboard as the price of her passage. She died at sea a week out, and the child was sold to Odysseus's father.

What is the calling of Theoclymenus, the fugitive killer whom Telemachus takes aboard his ship on the voyage home?

Seer is his trade, and he proves it at the suitors' last feast. He sees the walls dripping with blood and the court crowded with ghosts, and they only laugh at him.

What parting gift does the queen of Sparta hand Telemachus in the Odyssey, to be kept for his future bride?

An embroidered robe she made herself, the widest in her chest, is to lie in Penelope's keeping until the wedding. Her husband adds a silver mixing bowl said to be a god's work.

Which grief-numbing drug from Egypt does Telemachus's hostess in Sparta slip into the wine in Book 4 of the Odyssey?

Nepenthe is so strong, the poem says, that whoever drinks it sheds no tear that day even if his family is killed before his eyes. Botanists borrowed the name for a genus of carnivorous plants.

On which island does the enchantress Circe keep her hall, where Odysseus lingers for a year in the Odyssey?

Aeaea was later pinned by Roman writers to Mount Circeo, a cape about 100 kilometres south of Rome. Marshes and sea around its base may once have made the headland look like an island.