TOP 10 ADAPTATIONS OF THE ODYSSEY (SPECIAL MENTION)

 

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

Yes, I’ve featured my Top 10 Adaptations of the Odyssey, 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

 

Apparently, there’s music and operas based on or adapting the Odyssey, but I don’t know any of them except for the loose and quasi-musical adaptation of the Odyssey by the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? Where are the rock opera or Broadway adaptations? They would rock! (Feel free to tell me there are actually rock opera or Broadway adaptations apart from my penultimate special mention).

I’m more familiar with adaptations of the Odyssey in art, particularly for the Sirens (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 – 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 adaptations of the Odyssey 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.