The Odyssey

         Between a number of recent new translations and the new blockbuster movie, “The Odyssey” has been having a high-profile moment, and of course as a fantasy poem it fits right into the purview of this blog.  So today I’m going to write a bit about the Odyssey - but first I’m going to confess that I have neither read any of the new translations nor seen the new movie!  So I will not be offering any opinions on these specific versions.

        What I do want to think about is how the Odyssey functions as a foundational bit of fantasy, why it seems to have such staying power, and what are some interesting things that have been done with it. First, though, I have to point out that, like all ancient texts, our definitions of “fantasy” don’t quite apply.  It’s impossible to know to what extent people at the time thought the events in this epic were what we now think of as literal historical truth, vs what we now consider speculative or mythic.  Not that “people at the time” has an exact meaning, either, since these stories were shared by thousands of people over thousands of years, and it’s not like they all interpreted the narrative the same way.  (Interested in epic poems more generally?  Here’s a recent short article I wrote about some history and characteristics of epic poems. Scroll all the way down to the bottom to find my bit.)  Nevertheless, the Odyssey has come down to the present day as fantasy, i.e. using non-scientific events to evoke wonder, to entertain, and to illustrate enduring truths about the human condition.

        That brings us to the question of why the Homeric epics have stuck around so long and been embraced so widely.  1. Humans love stories about flawed heroes.  (Admittedly, I don’t actually consider most of the characters in the Iliad to be heroes at all.  I find such a festering pit of toxic masculinity so idiotic as to be simultaneously pathetic, appalling, and eye-rollingly boring.  But obviously most of the humans calling the shots for most of human history have admired this sort of idiocy a lot more than I do.  Sigh.  Feel free to read my prior post on Heroic Heroes for my minority opinion.)  But the Odyssey is more interesting than the Iliad, and it includes a wide array of survival strategies, including brute strength, fighting skill, high intelligence, low cunning, quick opportunism, and careful planning.  All of these traits inspire us, or at least each of these traits inspires some of us.

        2. Humans suffer a constant conflict between desire for exploration pulling us away and the love of home pulling us back.  The Odyssey appeals to both by giving us a series of adventures and the arc of finding one’s way home.

        3. Humans love tales of how we mortals live in a world when we’re so often at the mercy of greater powers.  The Iliad and Odyssey explore questions of what it means to be mortal, what it means to be human, and what it means to be civilized.  It also explores questions of faithfulness.  What is faithfulness, what are its limits, and to whom do we owe it: our buddies, our rulers, our families, our spouses, our gods?  And what do we do when those loyalties directly conflict?

        4. Humans always love soap operas of love and lust, treachery and faithfulness, and whatever over-the-top scandal or adventure we’ll see in the next episode.  This also includes all those fantastical wonders that we now call speculative fiction.

        Because the Odyssey has been so famous for so long, it’s wielded a huge influence on our fantasy landscape.  From beautiful, seductive witches who will enchant you with their evil sexy wiles, to adventurers slaying one monster after another, and from the use of women purely as props for men, to the “hero’s journey” of self-discovery, the tropes of these ancient epics continue to riddle our modern stories, for good or ill.  There are hundreds if not thousands of adaptations and stories that borrow from the Odyssey, from the Arabic adventures of Sinbad the Sailor to the basic concept of Star Trek: Voyager.  Here are just a few.

     • Dante Alighieri, who wrote his own epic poem Divine Comedy in 1320, was deeply influenced by Homer, even though he knew of the Odyssey only through the Roman writers who referred to it.  He included Ulysses (the Latin version of the name Odysseus) in the eighth circle of his Inferno, condemned for perpetrating the fraud of the Trojan Horse, plus committing plenty of atrocities, as well as for being pagan.  The gods who could shield him in Homer’s work, one god protecting him against another no matter what crimes he committed, cannot shield him when there is only one god and only one moral law.

     • James Joyce’s Ulysses is, of course, heavily inspired by the Odyssey, set in Dublin in 1904.  However, it removes the fantasy and maps the episodes of the epic onto an “ordinary” man on an “ordinary” day.

     • The 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” is a loose reimagining of the Odyssey set in 1930s Mississippi.

     • Robert McCloskey’s 1943 short stories for children about Homer Price include many Odyssey references, beginning, of course, with our hero’s name.  (He also has uncles named Ulysses and Telemachus.)  In one story a clever woman with multiple suitors wins the day with a ruse involving the unravelling of her knitting.  In another story the children of Centerburg use the inspiration of Odysseus to stuff their ears with cotton so as not to be enchanted by magically-alluring music.

     • As for me, of course my new collection of short stories, poetry, and art inspired by traditional stories and myths had to have something based on the Odyssey.  I’ve got a poem about the end of the sirens in the modern world, a flash story in which the siren explains her own side of the story, and, just for silliness, a toddler cyclops.  You can find those pieces in Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns.  And now I’m currently working on a strange story inspired by the Trojan Horse.  (This weird idea has been rattling around for a while, but it wasn’t written in time to include in the book.  I guess it had to come in its own time.)

     • Finally, here are a few previous posts with connections to the Odyssey:

The Lure of Sirens

Words of the Month - Words of the Future

Magical Botany M

[Pictures: linoleum block prints (I think), illustrations by Joanna Lisowiec from Homer’s Odyssey retold by Barry B Powell, 2026 (Images from Joanna Lisowiec Illustration).]