‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros

Illustration: Steven Wilson/The GuardianView image in fullscreen Illustration: Steven Wilson/The Guardian‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to WesterosChristopher Nolan’s take on the Odyssey is set to break box-office records. What made the director so determined to adapt the ancient Greek epic? And why does a poem from 600BC hold a vice-like grip on pop culture?

Warning: contains 2,600-year-old spoilers Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie has all the hopes of a summer blockbuster pinned to it, and all the promise – as the trailers have showed – of magnificent effects, shocks and thrills. You will be taken inside the cave of the terrifying one-eyed giant, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who likes to dine on human flesh. You will visit the dim and misty shores of the land of the dead, where no warm-blooded human should ever tread.

You will flee the pounding tread of cannibals. You will be tossed on stormy seas sent surging by vengeful gods.And all of this spectacular adventure, for sure, is part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of world literature, which was written down soon after the Greeks acquired the technology to do so, probably in the 600s or 500sBC.

The ancient Greeks attributed the poem to a man called Homer, often described as a blind bard from the island of Chios.In recent centuries, though, the idea that the poem can be meaningfully called the work of one single creator has been firmly called into question. Particularly after the 1930s, when the American classicist Milman Parry studied the composition techniques of nonliterate epic singers in the Balkans, it became clear that the Odyssey, and the other Homeric Greek epic, the Iliad, were written forms of poems that drew on a long oral tradition.

That means that versions of what we call the Odyssey were – perhaps for centuries, long before they were consigned to writing – performed by bards, using a combination of memory and on-the-hoof improvisation.Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return and homecoming, of war and death and the fragile, tender threads that hold a husband and wife and a family together.

I have a feeling that the bard’s performance in this dark hall might have been a more thrilling and overwhelming experience even than that created by Nolan’s cinematic imagination. Had we been there, in that shadowy hall, we might now be weeping together at the emotional force of the stories of the bard. I think this is the case because within the Odyssey – a poem that is so knowing and alert about its own status as an artwork that, at times, it can feel more postmodern than ancient – there are several scenes in which bards in palace halls tell stories, and these stories are sometimes stitched seamlessly into the epic itself.

And, hearing these stories, the listeners-in-the-poem weep to hear their own experiences – or experiences they fear, or long, to have – turned into song.The question is: why are we still connecting with stories that were told in those ancient halls, their animating sparks perhaps as old as the Greek bronze age? Why has the director of Inception and Oppenheimer been so determined to adapt them, and why will so many people want to experience his vision of them?

View image in fullscreenPoetry in motion … Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus in The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesThe answer partly lies in the fact that the Odyssey – the story of a warrior’s homecoming, his long and tortuous journey to reintegrate himself within his own household – has passed into the bloodstream of many storytelling traditions.

In his introduction to his recent translation, classicist and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn lists Dante’s Inferno, Star Trek, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, The Catcher in the Rye, Gladiator, Pride and Prejudice, and Game of Thrones as works in which the Odyssey’s ideas and motifs resurface.More obviously still, there’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, which maps the events of an epic day in Dublin on to specific episodes from the Odyssey; Omeros, Derek Walcott’s long poem about colonialism and the slave trade; and a whole host of contemporary novels from Madeline Miller’s Circe to Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. You could add to Mendelsohn’s list a multitude of other works: The Lord of the Rings, Homeland, The Return of Martin Guerre, and earlier cinematic adaptations of Homer, such as the 2000 Coen brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I have read the Odyssey many times – starting with storybook adaptations as a child, through to plunging through it, imperfectly, in Greek as a teenager, to rereading it in different English translations as a youn