TOP 10 ODYSSEY ADAPTATIONS (SPECIAL MENTION)

 

Sing, Muse, of the special mentions for my Top 10 Odyssey Adaptations.

Yes, I’ve featured my Top 10 Odyssey Adaptations, but there’s almost three millennia of adaptations for my usual twenty special mentions.

 

(1) MYTHOLOGY – AENEID

 

Wait, what? What’s going on with these special mentions?!

Mythology as an adaptation of the Odyssey? Isn’t the Odyssey itself mythology?

Well yes but as one of the oldest extant literary works of mythology, it obviously had an ongoing influence within classical (and other) mythology as it featured in other literary works.

Some of those literary works have been lost, as with the so-called Epic Cycle – the larger mythos of the Trojan War of which only the Iliad and Odyssey survive – which includes a ‘sequel’ to the Odyssey, the Telegony.

Foremost among the surviving literary works is the Roman Odyssey or Virgil’s Odyssey, also known as the Aeneid.

The Aeneid was essentially imperial propaganda for Augustus, seeking to outdo the Iliad and the Odyssey by combining both – adapting them to the Roman ancestral hero, Aeneas.

After fleeing the falling Troy with family and companions, Trojan hero and legendary founder of Rome, Aeneas, has his own odyssey to Italy, matching many of the same beats from the Odyssey including his own prophetic visit to the underworld. In Italy, he fights his own version of the Iliad but founding a kingdom rather than destroying one.

Bonus points for name-dropping Odysseus (in his Latin name Ulysses) – and with snark to boot.

 

(2) POETRY & LITERATURE – DIVINE COMEDY (INFERNO)

 

As the oldest and foundational work of Western poetry and literature – well, together with the Iliad and excluding any ancient Middle Eastern literature such as the Bible – the Odyssey obviously had an ongoing influence on poetry and literature ever since, as we’ve seen with my top ten entry for Tennysons’s Ulysses.

There’s a few more entries of poetry and literature among these special mentions but for this entry I’ll focus on Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly its Inferno as it seems directly influenced by the Odyssey via Virgil, at least for its underworld journey – and not least because Odysseus is in it, under his Roman name Ulysses, receiving the punishment reserved in hell for deceitful counsellors.

Dante out-Virgils Virgil, with his epic fantasy voyage through the afterlife, starting of course with the most famous (and fun) of its three parts, Inferno – the characteristic katabasis of heroes or poets into the underworld, or Hell in Dante’s case, with Virgil as his guide no less.

 

(3) FANTASY & SF

 

“Brian Stableford, who described it as a kind of forerunner to science fiction, says it has been reconfigured as science fiction more than any other literary work.” – “The Emergence of Science Fiction, 1516–1914” in Neil Barron (ed.). Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction.

Not surprisingly, there’s a few fantasy & SF entries among these special mentions.

 

(4) ART & MUSIC

 

There’s music and operas based on or adapting the Odyssey, aptly enough given its origin as bardic performance. I don’t know any operas but I do have my top ten entry for the musical adaptation of the Odyssey by the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? There’s also my penultimate special mention.

There’s also adaptations of the Odyssey in art, with the Sirens as a popular recurring subject (albeit more their subsequent mermaid or nymph-like forms rather than their original bird-women version).

 

(5) TROPES – ODYSSEY

 

The Odyssey pretty much has all of them as the ur-example or trope maker – and as per TV Tropes, “we can’t forget to mention that “odyssey” became a word in the English lexicon (and in the many other languages too) for a particularly long and complex journey.”

 

(6) GOSPEL OF MARK

 

Okay, this is a fringe theory but I have to give it special mention as Odyssey adaptation – Dennis R. MacDonald argues in “The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark” that the gospel author was deliberately adapting Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

His thesis is that the gospel author wrote it as “a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek ‘Bible’ of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey” – presenting Jesus as a “new hero” that mirrors but transcends those of Homer. (Ironically, the Nolan film does something similar for Odysseus as moral hero).

 

(7) JAMES JOYCE –

ULYSSES (1922)

 

I can’t have special mentions for Odyssey adaptations without featuring its most famous literary adaptation, in which the Odyssey is adapted to a single day, Thursday 16 June 1904, in Dublin – with Leopold Bloom as Odysseus, his adulterous wife Molly Bloom as Penelope, and Joyce’s alter ego from A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, Stephen Daedalus, as Telemachus.

Not that it’s famous in terms of people actually reading it. I’m always prompted to recall a quip that Ulysses is acclaimed as the greatest novel of the twentieth century and we’ll all know for sure when it is translated into English. The punchline is of course that Joyce wrote it in English but in his idiosyncratic version of it – a version that was on its way to becoming almost completely indecipherable in Finnegan’s Wake.

There’s also the running gag about the book’s “great preface” by Irish comedian Sean Hughes in his TV series Sean’s Show -“I took a year off to read Ulysses. Great book. Well, the preface is, anyway.” Yeah, that’s pretty much where I stopped reading it as well.

 

(8) NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS –

THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL (1938)

 

Kazantzakis is better known for his novel The Last Temptation of Christ but of course, being Greek, he wrote an epic poem sequel to the Odyssey. Odysseus sets off on more adventures and ends up in Antarctica, which is strangely apt given the concluding line from Tennyson’s Ulysses used as epitaph for Antarctic explorer Scott’s memorial there

 

(9) ROBERT GRAVES –

HOMER’S DAUGHTER (1955)

 

Such is the prevalence or profile of female characters in the Odyssey, particularly when compared to the Iliad, 19th century English novelist Samuel Butler proposed that the “Homer” who wrote the Odyssey was a woman. Butler opined that it was a Sicilian woman, hence setting much of the Odyssey’s fantastic voyage in Sicily – and inserting herself in the Odyssey as Nausicaa.

Not surprisingly, Robert Graves picked up this ball and ran with it in his book Homer’s Daughter.

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(10) ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF –

THE WANDERINGS OF ODYSSEUS: THE STORY OF THE ODYSSEY (1995)

 

Rosemary Sutcliff was an English novelist best known for her retellings of history and mythology for children – as here for the Odyssey, published posthumously.

 

(11) PHILIP JOSE FARMER –

RIVERWORLD (1965-1993)

 

Okay, this is not so much an adaptation of the Odyssey – although it is something of an afterlife odyssey – but an adaptation of Odysseus, who is among the billions of humans resurrected in Riverworld after life on Earth and is allied with the other resurrectees recruited by the Mysterious Stranger to reveal the secrets of Riverworld.

Interestingly, there is a history of Farmer’s creation published in 2026 with the title Riverworld Odyssey.

 

(12) S.M.STIRLING & DAN SIMMONS –

ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME & ILIUM / OLYMPOS (1998-2000 & 2003-2005)

 

More SF adaptations of Odysseus.

The premise of Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time series, sometimes called the Nantucket series, is that the modern island of Nantucket (in Massachusetts) is displaced in time back to the Bronze Age (1250 BC) by the mysterious “Event” – with all its contemporary technology. Obviously that shakes up the Bronze Age and creates an alternate history. One of the few Bronze Agers to ascertain the nature of the time interlopers is Odysseus – or Odikweos as he is called here.

The premise of the Ilium / Olympos books by Dan Simmons is in some ways the reverse of that of Stirling’s series, as future posthumans have used their god-like technology to recreate and study the Trojan War…on Mars, aptly enough near Mons Olympus. Of course, Odysseus features prominently in it.

 

(13) RICK RIORDAN –

PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS (2005-2009)

 

Adapting much of the Odyssey to its young adult fantasy series – most notably in the second book, The Sea of Monsters, which has the premise that its mythical sea, much like Olympus and its deities, “moves” to where Western popular imagination (or its Jungian “collective unconscious” places it. Which in this case is the Bermuda Triangle.

 

(14) MADELINE MILLER –

THE SONG OF ACHILLES / CIRCE (2011-2018)

 

The adaptations here should be obvious. Miller adapts the character of Circe from the Odyssey – including her liaison with Odysseus in it – but also her other references in classical mythology, including the lost “sequel” to the Odyssey, the Telegony, featuring her son from Odysseus, Telegonus.

And yes – the adaptation in The Song of Achilles has an obvious focus on Achilles through the eyes of Patroclus but Odysseus also features in it. Indeed, the scenes with Odysseus are easily the coolest in the book, with the arguable exception of those featuring Thetis – so when they appear in the same scene together, that is definitely the coolest in the book.

 

 

(15) VALERIO MANFREDI –

ODYSSEUS: THE OATH / THE RETURN (2013-2014)

 

I was introduced to Manfredi by his trilogy about Alexander the Great. The title of these two books reveals their subjects, Odysseus in his role in the Trojan War (bound by the oaths they swore) and in the Odyssey (with his return to Ithaca).

 

(16) ULYSSES 31 (1981)

 

Ulysses, Ulysses, soaring through all the galaxies.

Anime Odyssey IN SPACE!

That pretty much sums up this French-Japanese animated series.

 

(17) THE ODYSSEY (1997)

 

Yes – it’s the 1997 TV miniseries. It’s decent, if somewhat cheesy in parts and hokey in effects at times.

 

(18) THE RETURN (2024)

 

Is there anything Ralph Fiennes can’t do or anyone he can’t be? Here he’s Odysseus in the second half of the Odyssey, returning to Ithaca

 

(19) EPIC: THE MUSICAL (2022-2024)

 

A sung-through adaptation of the Odyssey – apparently has been picked up for adaptation to animated film

 

(20) THE ODYSSEY XXX (2026)

 

You know my drill for final or twentieth special mention as my kinky entry – and of course there’s an adult film parody version of Nolan’s Odyssey.

In fairness, you could argue that it’s putting all the s€x back into the Odyssey that Nolan took out – Nolan’s films being somewhat notoriously s€xless.

I mean, Inception would have to be the least er0tic dreamscape ever.