Cyclopes and Warlocks

Sea monsters. Giant one-eyed men. Bags filled with winds and cows being hoarded by the gods. Conversations with the dead and the mysterious lands of foreign peoples and cultures. These are the components of one of the very first written epics of the human age.

The Odyssey is one of the most prevalent works of literature in the world. Its predecessor, the Iliad, hosts the reason for our main character’s journey; however, this poem in itself is not a work of fantasy. While the Iliad may be a work of legend, filled with demigods and heroes, the author or authors of this particular work does not create an entirely new world (more on that later). In fact, it is such a real world that historians and classicists of the modern age are still attempting to decipher whether or not the Trojan War was a feasible conflict of the ancient world that actually happened. It is this trait of believability, however, that lends to the grandeur of the Odyssey.

Yes, yes, yes. We know that a cyclops was an unlikely adversary to the hero Odysseus, and it is seriously doubtful there was an entire island tripped out on fruit of a lotus tree. But like all of the greatest fantasies, these aspects hold grains of truth or belief. While cyclopes were not necessarily real individuals, they played a crucial part in Greek history. How else would the large walls of early ancient civilization like Mycenae, Agamemnon’s home, have been built? The large stones, themselves, stand taller than the average man on the short side. Those cyclopes then further the embodiment of one of the most dangerous threat of the ancient world – hostile hosts. Traveling in the ancient world would have been treacherous enough without the concept of xenia (hospitality) in the Greek world, a concept that existed in many forms in other cultures. The land of the Lotus Eaters and sirens draw men away from their quest to return home, enticing them into a life (or death) away from their families. Equally, Scylla (a sea monsters whose had dangling legs and gnashing teeth) and Charydbis (a giant whirlpool) represent dangers of the sea. Such elements make it into works like The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, where Elrond and Beorn contrast greatly with Thranduil and Smaug in their concepts of hospitality and generosity. Mirkwood draws the company away from their quest, and goblins and trolls attempt to capture them along the way. Such fantastical creatures and their functions draw their roots from those in the mythologies of the ancient world -- whether it be Greek or not.

Long before the world had King Arthur and Merlin, the Odyssey presents the reader with a practitioner of magic that both helps and hinders the hero in his journey. Circe is a woman of great power, a goddess bound to the earth who interacts directly with the Odysseus. Unlike Merlin, or Sauron or Saruman or Gandalf, the morality of this woman is uncertain and magic was not fully defined at this time in Greek culture. While Circe imprisons the hero, she also willfully helps him on his way. She is a strong women, bound by a higher, natural order, such as the role of Galadriel in Lord of the Rings. Yet, she are a reflection of something that the ancients accepted that modern readers have moved away from in the fantasy realm: they are not strictly good or evil. Just like the protagonist, their motives are flawed and so are their actions. The reader will not find a dramatized evil, such as Sauron or Smaug, nor will they find an overwhelmingly good character, such as Gandalf or Aslan. All of the characters of the Odyssey were flawed – even the hero and even the gods. Magic is not white or dark, but colorful and morally grey.

All of these factors are compounded by the fact that the author remains a mysterious figure in the historical record. While both the Iliad and the Odyssey are recorded in history as being written by Homer, a blind poet of the legendary age of Greece, it was initially passed on as an oral performance. Because of this, rather than the central world building of one mind, it is likely that this work evolved as it traveled throughout space and time before it became part of the written record. Individuals could have enhanced the script, working in their own experiences of the ancient world or their own descriptions of the creatures, just as individuals could have added their hometown to the “Catalogue of Ships” found in the Iliad. These stories, in this way, become more personal and relatable to the audience at hand. The initial creator(s), whoever he, she, they may have been, developed a work that not only resonated at its initial delivery but was adaptable enough to expand over time throughout the country and the entire world.

Homer’s Odyssean landscape was a world that literally both existed and yet, not quite. This world would come to inspire individuals for centuries to come. People would draw from these works to establish lineages, to create the next great epics, and to demonstrate their own virtuosity. In the Western world, such an influence has yet to disappear. Without the Odyssey, we would not have developed the worlds of Middle Earth, Westeros, and Diagon Alley. It has been so adaptable that we can find fragments in epics written from the ancient world to the modern era, and we can see how its world has been combined with those of other cultures’ mythologies to create entirely new worlds. Homer, i.e. the army of storytellers that populated the entire ancient world, created a work that would come to combine and multiply with those stories throughout the world to create modern tales of the adventure and glory.

It was not the Greeks alone that created the fantasy genre, but a culmination of Greek, Roman, African, Asian, and Greater European influence. With any luck, this fantasy genre will continue to grow so that we can see the total influence of indigenous worldviews as well as others that have remained largely unexplored. What greater fantasies the next age could create!