I always get a kick out of it when I’m reminded what a fine journalist and nature writer Homer was.
There is an island covered with forests, not far
from the harbor of the Cyclopes, yet not so near,
and upon it the wild goats breed in numberless flocks
and are never disturbed by the comings and goings of humans,
since hunters never visit to force their way
through the thick woods and over the mountain ridges.
Nobody grazes flocks there or till the fields,
but the land is unsown, unplowed, empty of men,
and is just a habitation for bleating goats,
because the Cyclopes don’t have ships; there are no
shipwrights among them to build strong sailing vessels
that would take them across the sea to visit the towns
of others, as human beings do in their travels.
This would have allowed them to settle the island and make
a colony there, for the land is extremely fertile
and would yield fine crops in their season. Along the shore
are lush waters meadows where grapevine would never fail;
there is land that is level for plowing, and they could be sure
of always reaping a good crop at every harvest,
so rich is the soil beneath. And the island has
an excellent harbor, where ships can easily land
without any need for anchor-stones of stern-cables;
you can beach your ships and wait there until the crew
are ready to leave and the wind blows fair for departing.
And then, at the head of the harbor, there is a spring
of fresh water that gushes out from beneath a cave,
and on either side of it is a large grove of poplars.
That’s from Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of The Odyssey, which arrived in the mail the other day and from which I’ve now learned that I shouldn’t call the poet who wrote The Odyssey Homer.
According to Mitchell in his introduction, Homer wrote The Iliad; scholars have decided another poet working after Homer and heavily influenced by him but still with a talent and style all his own wrote The Odyssey.
News to me.
On two counts, the second being that scholars have decided that each epic was written by a single poet, just not the same poet. Last I checked in with the scholars, there was no Homer. Homer was just an umbrella name for the many poets and bards who over a long period time---centuries, maybe---collectively created what somebody eventually wrote down as if it had all been written by one person.
At any rate, now we’re back to an individual poet. Poets. And Mitchell calls the second one the Odyssey poet. I suppose I should too, except that it says Homer right there on the cover. So Homer it is.
Homer 2?
Homer Jr?
Whoever.
Thing is, I didn’t start re-reading The Odyssey because UPS dropped Mitchell’s translation on the doorstep. I was already re-reading it---Robert Fagels’ translation---for my class.
My other class.
Don’t think I’ve mentioned here that in addition to the Wired Critics course I’m teaching a seminar for first semester Honors students called Harry Potter and His Avatars: Myth and Fairy Tale in Popular Culture. Here's the official course description:
Harry Potter, Clark Kent, Luke Skywalker, King Arthur, and Hercules share common origins in a number of myths and fairy tales and their stories can be read as re-tellings of those old stories, the ones Sam Gamgee says "really mattered." And that's what we're going to be doing in this course, looking at some of those myths, like the coming of the Chosen One and the Hero's Journey, and tales to throw light on their stories, throwing in Bilbo Baggins, Katniss Everdeen, and anyone else we can think of, and then turning things around to use their stories to bring new life to those old tales and adventures. In class, we'll be telling each other stories and watching clips from relevant movies and taking turns leading discussions. The course will finish with a group trip to see a performance of the SU's School of Drama's production of Bertholt Brecht's anti-heroic The Good Woman of Setzuan.
These 100 level seminars are intended to get students thinking of themselves as honors students and that means getting them to understand what’s expected of them and what their responsibilities are. But part of the point is also to introduce them to some of their fellow honors students and encourage them to see themselves as part of community of scholars and intellectual leaders. And it’s supposed to be done in a fun way with no heavy lifting. Since they’re required to take one of these seminars on top of a regular course load, the amount of reading and writing they’re to have to do is to kept to a minimum.
That means no textbooks.
If we had a formal reading list, though, The Odyssey would be on it, along with The Hobbit, Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex, Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, Philip Pullman’s Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, and several of the Potter books.
You notice how I’ve arranged to be able to talk about comic books in class?
I chose to build the class around Harry Potter for several reasons.
Since there would be no reading list, I wanted students to have a shared literary background and frames of reference they could call on in class discussions and I could count on anyone signing up for a course called Harry Potter and His Avatars having read a few of the books, even all of them, several times over, which turns out to be the case.
Harry Potter is the myth of their generation. It means as much to them as Star Wars does to Gen Xers and Tolkien did to many Boomers. Not that they don’t also know and love Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. But for many of them, Harry was the foundation of their imaginative lives.
And I like Harry Potter myself. The books and the movies.
Except for Goblet of Fire.
The movie and the book.
Even so, we haven’t started out focusing on Harry. We’ve started with Odysseus.
And Bilbo Baggins.
And Tony Stark.
I can’t have them read the whole of The Odyssey. But I can have them read parts of it. And that’s what I’ve led off with.
I had them read Book IX, Odysseus’ adventure in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus and then we watched clips from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and Iron Man:
Riddles in the Dark…
…and Tony Stark building it in a cave with a box of scraps.
Here are the questions I had them mulling over in class. In what ways are Tony’s and Bilbo’s adventures in their caves like Odysseus’ adventure in Polyphemus’ caves? In what ways are Tony and Bilbo like Odysseus? What do they each come out their caves with? What effect does it have on the course of their next adventures?
Why a cave?
They had good answers but I won’t get into them now in case you want to put your own answers in the comments.
We followed up with listing all the cave scenes from the Harry Potter books. There’s at least one in just about every book. The most obvious one is the climax of The Chamber of Secrets, which is also a visit to the dragon’s lair scene, another favorite trope of myths and fairy tales that we’ll be getting into later. But another important cave scene occurs in The Half-Blood Prince. That’s a case where J.K. Rowling really shows she was up on her Tolkien. But it’s also the case that Harry and Dumbledore aren’t the avatars of Odysseus or Bilbo you might take them for at first glance. They’re too late. They’re following in the footsteps of Regulus Black and he’s the one who apparently had the adventure in the cave of myth of legend.
Probably better to see it as the three of them dividing the role of Odysseus’ avatar, since Regulus fails to complete the adventure himself and it’s up to Harry to see that the job gets done.
Rowling was often coming back to Regulus Black but never following through. Made me wonder if she was planning another series built around him. Her Lord of the Rings, the adult fantasy that grew out of a children’s book.
Or her Odyssey to her own Illiad. The story of a trickster anti-hero following up her war epic.
Just a thought.
We’re going to be picking up Wednesday with wood scenes. Lots of those in the Potter books too.
What does it mean when characters go into the woods?
But back to caves.
One of my students wondered if the scene in The Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry visits Ollivander’s Wand Shop can be considered a cave scene. After all, it’s a descent into the dark and Harry comes out of it with a magical weapon and a new sense of identity or at least the beginning traces of one. But Harry isn’t trapped, Ollivander isn’t a monster or a threat or Harry’s shadow self, and Harry doesn’t have to trick Ollivander out of the wand or connive his way out of there. What it’s more like is another trope in which the hero encounters a weird stranger---weird as in wyrd, unearthly, mysterious, magical, but not necessarily odd, eccentric, or bizarre, although that’s often the case---who gives him a weapon or special knowledge that will carry him through the next stage of his adventure. And this brings me to something else I recently learned.
In the original version of The Hobbit Tolkien published 1937, Bilbo doesn’t steal the ring from Gollum or trick him out of it. According to Corey Olsen, in Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Gollum gives it to him as the prize for winning the game of riddles. And it is a prize. Tolkien himself didn’t know the ring the Ring because he didn’t know yet what he was going to do with it when he got down to writing the story that became The Lord of the Rings.
As we begin to approach Gollum, we must recognize the fact that he is the character that people are most likely to be familiar with already when they read The Hobbit for the first time. This is even more true of Gollum than of Bilbo, for we get to know Gollum much better as a character in The Lord of the Rings than we do Bilbo. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will find The Hobbit’s Gollum quite familiar and will see his encounter with Bilbo as anticipating and setting up Gollum’s relationship with Frodo later on.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that this similarity was imposed upon Gollum retroactively. When Tolkien set down to write The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to The Hobbit. He wanted, therefore, some link that he could establish between the story of The Hobbit and the later story, some seed that he could take from The Hobbit and grow into a new story. The link he decided on was Bilbo’s magic ring, but in the process of developing the story of The Lord of the Rings, he decided that Bilbo’s ring would be much more than just a very useful invisibility ring. That change in the nature of the ring did not conflict with all of The Hobbit but it did require a significant reconsideration of the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, and of the character of Gollum in particular. When Tolkien sent his publisher some corrections to the text of The Hobbit in 1950, therefore, he made some very important changes to his original depiction of Gollum, making him much more like the [wicked and miserable] Gollum that we read about in The Fellowship of the Ring and finally meet in The Two Towers. Thus, though the story of Bilbo and Gollum’s meeting was published twenty years before The Fellowship of the Ring, I think it is fair to say that the Gollum in The Hobbit, as it now stands, is actually based on the Gollum of The Lord of the Rings, and not the other way around.
In other words, Tolkien himself did to his book The Hobbit what a lot of people, including Tolkien’s son Christopher, are mad at Peter Jackson for doing with his movie versions, changing things to make it more of a piece with The Lord of the Rings.
Please join us on our Facebook group page, Potter's Avatars. And you're all welcome to join the Wired Critics group too.
Comments