Nausicaa (also Nausicaä, Nausikaa) is a princess of the Phaeacians in Homer's Odyssey, daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Scheria. She finds the shipwrecked Odysseus on the shore, clothes and guides him toward her father's palace, and so begins the hospitality that finally carries him home to Ithaca. Her name is often explained as "burner of ships" (naus "ship" + kaiō "to burn").
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Nausicaa" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Princess of Scheria
Nausicaa is the only daughter of Alcinous and Arete among several brothers (Homer names Laodamas, Halius, and Clytoneus among the athletic youths of the court). Odysseus likens her beauty to the goddess Artemis. She is young, poised, and skilled in household work — the washing of clothes at the river is the occasion of her meeting with the stranger.
Athena prompts her dream so that she and her handmaidens go to the seashore; the goddess thus arranges the first human help Odysseus receives after leaving Calypso.
II.In the Odyssey
In Book 6 Odysseus, naked and brine-stained after the storm, emerges from the thicket and frightens the servants away; Nausicaa alone stands her ground. He begs for pity; she gives him clothing, food, and oil for bathing, then takes him to the edge of the town. Discretion keeps him from entering with her: she goes ahead and tells him to seek Queen Arete in the palace, for the people's goodwill hangs on the queen's favour.
During his stay Odysseus recounts his wanderings before Alcinous's court — the long flashback that fills much of the poem. Alcinous then furnishes the ship that bears the sleeping hero to Ithaca. Homer sketches an unspoken, unfulfilled attraction: Nausicaa wishes for a husband like Odysseus, and Alcinous would gladly give her to him, yet the two do not become lovers. She asks him never to forget her, "for I gave you life."
III.Later tradition and reception
Aristotle and Dictys of Crete report that she later married Odysseus's son Telemachus and bore a son (Poliporthes or Persepolis); some versions instead make Odysseus himself the father of one of her children. The encounter is often read as one of the earliest literary treatments of restrained or unrequited love — a potential match that the nostos leaves behind.
European painting from the Renaissance onward frequently shows her with her maidens at the river or presenting clothing to Odysseus (Tischbein, Leighton, and others). The name was revived in modern culture, notably in Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which borrows the Homeric princess's name and coastal grace rather than her full myth.