Saturday afternoon the High Fantasy Track welcomed Bethany D.J. Kesler (moderator), Shane McInnis, D.L. Wainwright, and Katherine Wibell to the Hyatt International South ballroom to explore Homer’s The Odyssey and its adaptations. Motivated to no small degree by the release, success, and controversy generated by Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation, the panel came together to explore this tale of the ultimate ‘journey home.’
The panelists came to the Odyssey by different paths, from various translations and editions in print, to television mini-series, and movies. What touched them all, however, was the mythological power of the story. Nolan’s adaptation of the story for his film really served as an undercurrent of the entire panel, in part because of its controversial reception. Nolan credits Emily Wilson’s edition of the Odyssey as his source and inspiration. What generated so much controversy was Wilson’s critique of the film. While she was critical of several decisions Nolan made in dealing with the material, Wilson was always quick to point out that Nolan is telling his version of the story. Every version of the Odyssey is a retelling shaped by the storyteller and in this sense, Nolan is no different. The panelists keyed on to that. McInnis basically pointed toward the scholarship of translation which offers two options: ‘word to word,’ and ‘thought to thought.’ Which approach a particular translator uses is up to them, but the idea is that a translator must decide whether to try to produce an exact word for word translation or one that focuses on capturing the idea. That decision will have an impact on how the story is told. The language of the Odyssey is figurative, and it can be extremely challenging to take what is figurative in one language and make it figurative in another. It is not an easy thing, and choices must be made.
Translating the text, and the concept to a modern audience is also quite challenging, and that includes the very articulation of what “heroic” means. The tale is rooted in the ancient Greek “Age of Heroes,” but as the panel pointed out, what constitutes a hero today is not what made a hero then. Homer’s heroes lived in a patriarchal, martial, misogynistic world that dates to around 1200 BCE and is centered in the Aegean. At the time the bard sang the songs that eventually became the Odyssey, the great goal of the hero was to achieve glory, kleos. That glory would foster its own kind of immortality, one guaranteed through song and remembrance. It’s a very different sensibility than what we think of as a hero in the twenty first century.
McInnis was quick to remind those in attendance that the story is loaded with smaller morality tales. One of the most famous is the tale of the Cyclops. The Cyclops is clearly a representative of the “other” that exists beyond the confines of civilization. More than that, according to McInnis, it is an example of the Greek tradition of creating characters that were “slightly human” but not human. He described it as a “bestial version of ourselves.” In that story, in order to escape, Odysseus had to (a) take out the eye of the Cyclops and (b) disguise himself and his men as animals. Essentially, McInnis pointed out, the Greeks see Odysseus and his men becoming the very thing the Cyclops represents, beasts. It was a warning about just how fine the line is between humanity and the “beast.” It also warns us about what humans can do to themselves.
The panel all agreed that ultimately the Odyssey is an example of the archetypal hero’s journey home. Nolan’s Odysseus is traumatized by war, but he’s still on the journey. Understanding the power of that archetype goes a long way toward explaining the popularity of the tale. It’s much more popular and widely engaged than Homer’s other piece, The Iliad, and it is the universality of emotion associated with the journey home that explains it.
Those members in attendance were treated to a fascinating hour examining the power of myth, and the legacy of the singer of tales.
