I just finished reading the Odyssey for the first time last week. I picked a translation from the 1940s by E.V. Rieu, because it was the one sitting on my dad’s bookshelf. He himself had acquired it for school back in the day. Most people only read The Odyssey if they have to; and half of them just skim the SparkNotes/Wikipedia online rather than slogging through the ancient tale. But since I’ve been trying to get back into reading novels for fun after graduating college, the Odyssey seemed like a story so influential and important that I owed it to myself to know the whole tome, top to bottom. In a lot of ways, it subverted my expectations.
The first surprise for me was how little of the story follows Odysseus through his journey directly. Instead, the book starts by following his son, Telemachus, for several chapters as it establishes the situation in Ithaca, our hero’s hometown. Dozens of suitors are attempting to win Penelope’s hand: the queen of Ithaca has been without her beloved Odysseus for 19 years, and many believe it is time for her to remarry. Penelope, however, remains steadfast in the hope that her husband will return. Telemachus, just now approaching manhood, has reached an age where he can do something about the situation.
So he goes off to speak with Odysseus’ former comrades from the Trojan war, in the hopes of learning of his whereabouts. He learns very little in doing all of that. Then we finally catch up with Odysseus in the midst of his titular “odyssey”, where he’s been held captive by the goddess Calypso for seven years. She lets him go, and he soon reaches a people that can finally take him home to Ithaca on one of their ships. So, now he’s already near home. But the night before they take him home, he recounts for the king and court his journey that led him there. And that’s how we hear about the bulk of the actually Odyssey: in flashback narration. Here Odysseus details the exploits of himself and his crew, from being held captive by the Cyclops, to hearing the Sirens’ call, to a journey to Hades. Going into the book, I expected this to be the central focus of the Odyssey. Instead, Odysseus tells his tale for a number of chapters, and then gets brought back to Ithaca, where the final third or more of the book revolves around him plotting his vengeance against the suitors. He eventually slays every last one of them with the help of his son and a few other key figures.
Takeaway number two: Athena is the original Gandalf. I didn’t realize that Odysseus was a little bitch that needed an immortal goddess to constantly intervene on his behalf. Athena sets Telemachus on his path to find out where his father has gone; she helps Odysseus multiple times escape death and thwart the plans of other gods in the story; she even changes Odysseus’ appearance on a regular basis, whether it’s to disguise as a beggar to infiltrate his palace and the suitors, or to appear more handsome and godlike to earn the acceptance of various characters in the story. In fact, the Cyclops dilemma was the one story that comes to mind where Odysseus himself comes up with the solution without any divine aid. Essentially, Athena appears disguised as different mortal people throughout the story; she appears to Odysseus or Telemachus when they are in dire straits, presents a solution to them, and then leaves. In the Hobbit particularly, Gandalf does this frequently, leaving the group only to save them for peril such as the trolls. The trolls preparing the eat the dwarves, in fact, holds a general similarity to the Cyclops scene in the Odyssey. That brings me to my next takeaway, though this one I wouldn’t characterize as a surprise.
Takeaway number three: learning about even more references and tropes that later storytellers pulled from the Odyssey. One example would be the Gandalf-like nature of Athena in the book, of course, but did you know how much Studio Ghibli pulls from this book? Odysseus meets a princess named Nausicaa, who lives in a city by the water, and at the end of the tale, Poseidon raises up the land around the city on three sides, essentially putting them in a “valley of the wind”, if you will. The other main similarity: a witch casts a spell on Odysseus’ crew members who eat tempting food, only to be transformed into pigs! Just like Chihiro’s parents in Spirited Away! I could keep going, but you probably would have guessed this point, since it is the ODYSSEY after all.
My final takeaway: Odysseus is not actually all that noble. He’s very cocksure, and makes decisions that jeopardize his crew. In the end, sure, the crew members could be blamed, but Odysseus saves his own skin while every single crew member eventually dies. And you might be thinking, well, it’s character development: Odysseus starts the book an arrogant, brave fighter, but ends it a wizened, battered old man. But that didn’t seem to be the case at all. He solves the problem with the suitors by killing them all! It’s true that they plotted to kill Telemachus, and would most likely have tried to murder Odysseus too if they’d learned of his imminent return. But instead of contriving a clever solution and diffusing the situation without unnecessary violence, Odysseus locks the suitors in a room and kills them all with the help of his son, Athena, and a few servants. These suitors are noblemen from Ithaca and nearby cities; wouldn’t killing them all alienate most of his closest allies and turn their fathers and relatives on the warpath against him? Did Odysseus actually think this plan through? Just such a thing happens in the book; the father of a suitor raises an army to go fight Odysseus. Then Odysseus kills the father and tells the rest to stop. Well…I guess that’s that? As you can tell, I found the ending drawn out, uninteresting, and silly. And Odysseus was an arrogant man who didn’t seem like someone I’d view as a glorious, honorable king. But then again, I didn’t grow up in ancient Greece. I have to appreciate that the time and place under which Homer wrote was very different from our own. With that in mind, I accept these elements of the story. But the simple fact is that it’s hard to relate to characters that are not only fictional but written for an audience thousands of years old.
That about covers my thoughts on the Odyssey. It’s a book I’m glad to have read, but often didn’t enjoy reading. Think I’ll read a few books written in more recent centuries, now.
