The Inklings on The Odyssey
What would Lewis and Tolkien think about adapting Homer's epic poem?
Following his critical and box-office success with Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan announced his next project would be an adaptation of The Odyssey.
We know both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, as literature professors, knew and appreciated Homer’s epic. Both would’ve been required to translate portions of Homer during their Oxford exams. One visitor to an Inklings meeting described the back-and-forth conversation: “Latin tags flying around. Homer quoted in the original to make a point.”
Lewis said the similarities between his own work and Tolkien’s were due to a similar temperament and common sources. “We are both soaked in Norse mythology, George MacDonald’s fairy tales, Homer, Beowulf, and medieval romance. Also, of course, we are both Christians.”
We can’t be sure what they’d think about a modern cinematic adaptation of the work, but, judging by other comments, we could take a guess.
Lewis: Listening to the Music of Homer for a Lifetime
As a teenager, Lewis learned Greek from his tutor by translating portions of Homer. Eventually, Lewis crossed what he called the language Rubicon and began thinking in Greek.
During this time, he developed a deep love for Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey. Speaking of The Odyssey in Surprised by Joy, Lewis wrote that “the music of the thing and the clear brightness that lives in almost every formula had become part of me.”
But it wasn’t just a youthful joy for Lewis, Homer came to mind when Lewis looked on the horrors of World War I. In Surprised by Joy, he wrote about the devastation he witnessed and the feeling he had when he heard the first bullet. “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.”
Homer and The Odyssey remained with Lewis through his academic career and writing. His academic work, A Preface to Paradise Lost, often draws on The Odyssey as an example of an epic poem. In his early notes for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he compared the journey to various islands to Homer’s.
Lewis spent his life reading The Odyssey. Friends would often come to his house and read the work together. He knew the book word-for-word. Once, Lewis bet a fellow Oxford professor that one particular Greek word was not in the text. Later in the records, the other professor records that he paid off the bet with a bottle of port. Lewis was, of course, right.
When he wanted to particularly praise a book, Lewis compared it to The Lord of the Rings and The Odyssey.
Perhaps, his review of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation gives an indication of how he would regard a movie adaptation. He frequently criticizes the work for not fully capturing Homer, but he sums up his review by saying:
On the whole, this version has much to commend it. As a substitute for Homer, tolerable—and what substitute was ever more than that? As a book to send the old back to Homer and goad the young on to Homer, it is very well worth while.
Tolkien: Homeric heroes braving a “few storms”
For the author of The Lord of the Rings, what would spark his love for reading? The epic poems of Homer. “I was brought up in the Classics,” he wrote in a 1953 letter, “and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”
In 1954, he wrote how he drew on works “like Homer, or Beowulf, or Virgil, or Greek or Shakespearean tragedy” for his own writing. In his letters, Tolkien uses “Homeric” to describe the good men of Middle Earth during the time frame detailed in The Lord of the Rings.
Because of his immense appreciation of the original, Tolkien would probably hate any film adaptations, but he did actually talk once about the possibility of an Odyssey movie and bringing Middle Earth to the big screen.
In an interview with The Telegraph in 1968, he said a teenage girl had written to beg him not to allow The Lord of the Rings to be adapted into a movie. “It would be like putting Disneyland into the Grand Canyon,” she said.
In 1957, Tolkien said he was open to the idea of an animated Lord of the Rings adaptation “with all the risk of vulgarization.” But that next year, he confronted what he considered a disastrous attempt at adapting his story.
In 1958, Tolkien responded to the script of a proposed Lord of the Rings film by Morton Zimmerman. He wrote several pages of criticisms, numbered through 34, on the first two parts of the movie. When he arrived at the final section, he said it was “totally unacceptable to me, as a whole and in detail.” He concluded the letter by saying, “The Lord of the Rings cannot be garbled like that.”
Probably with that experience in mind, Tolkien told The Telegraph, “It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.” With Peter Jackson’s trilogy of Tolkien’s work established as a modern masterpiece, maybe Nolan can adapt the Greek epic with a few storms.
Sources:
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life — C.S. Lewis
“Odysseus Sails Again” reprinted in Image and Imagination — C.S. Lewis
Becoming C.S. Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis — Harry Lee Poe
The Making of C.S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918-1945) — Harry Lee Poe
C.S. Lewis: The Companion and Guide — Walter Hooper
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings — Philip and Carol Zaleski
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien — ed. Humphrey Carpenter
JRR Tolkien interview: ‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey than The Lord of the Rings’ — The Telegraph, March 22, 1968
More people should read Homer. I think many are put off by the verse and the length of the books, but a good translation overcomes those problems. I read the Robert Fitzgerald translation as a kid. It never brought me to Homer, unfortunately. I still can't read Greek. 😕