In the early 1990s I had an experience that may be of some interest in the context of chapter 8 of the book. During that time I commanded an Infantry company based in the extreme north of the island of Gotland in the Baltic off the Swedish East Coast. As it is public knowledge that the Swedish military organisation in Gotland has since been completely overhauled and that the base I was attached to has been closed this is no longer sensitive information. Just to the NE of the former base is the island of Fårö, of Ingemar Bergman fame. One of my fellow company commanders hails from Fårö, and his then 90-something-year-old mother then stilled lived on Fårö. He told met that she had never in her life been to the “Mainland”. Now, to most Swedes this would have indicated that she had never been off Gotland – to which we would think that Fårö really pertains: to us it’s all one island. But to her the “Mainland” did not mean the Swedish mainland but Gotland: she had never in her life been off Fårö. For her the “Mainland” was the island of Gotland not Sweden, rather like Cephalonia would have been the “Mainland” to the ancient Ithacans on the book's theory. I think this goes to show that, if the channel theory bears up, it is reasonable to assume that it would have been natural for the Ithacans to refer to (the rest of) Cephalonia as the "Mainland" for everyday purposes.

This is an interesting example of how the word "mainland" is sometimes used today in a sense that is relative to the terrain of the observer, rather than geographically absolute. Another example is provided by the main island of the Shetlands, which is itself called Mainland. Both of these modern usages correspond to the interpretation of "epeiros" that is proposed in Chapter 8 of Odysseus Unbound.