A Long and Difficult Journey, or The Odyssey: Crash Course Literature 201

Hi, I'm John Green, welcome to Crash Course Literature!

You can tell I'm an English teacher because I'm wearing a sweater, but you tell I'm the kind of English teacher who wants to be your friend because I'm wearing awesome sneakers.

This is actually season two of Crash Course Literature.

If you want to watch season one, you can do so over here.

It's season four of Crash Course Humanities – it might even be like, season 7 or 8 if you count all the science stuff.

Whatever let's just get started!

[Theme Music]

We're going to start at the beginning of literature, or, at least, a beginning of literature.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of a man who lets all his shipmates die,

lies to everyone he meets, cheats on his wife with assorted nymphs,

and takes 10 years to complete a voyage that, according to Google Maps, should have taken 2 weeks.

That man is, of course, one of the great heroes of the ancient world.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Odysseus, star of Homer’s The Odyssey.

Did I just say the odd at sea?

That’s a good pun. Not in the original Greek though.

Now everyone knows that you can’t properly enjoy a book until you know a lot about its author,

so before we discuss The Odyssey, we’re going to begin with a biographical sketch of Homer, the legendary blind poet of ancient Greece. What’s that?

Apparently we know nothing about him.

Well, in fact we know that whoever wrote them didn’t actually write them, because they were composed orally.

And was Homer even blind?

Well, there are some verses about blindness in the Homeric Hymns and there’s a blind bard who appears in The Odyssey,

But if authors only wrote about characters who were like themselves, then James Joyce’s

characters would have all had one eye, and I would be an astonishingly handsome seventeen-year-old.

As for the subject of Homer’s poems, archeological evidence tells us that the Trojan War occurred

around the twelfth century BCE, although it probably included far fewer gods and similes than in the epics based on it.

Then again, maybe not; it’s not like we have pictures.

Anyway, Homer composed The Iliad and The Odyssey in the eighth century BCE, so centuries after the events it describes.

And then no one bothered to write them down for another 200 years,

which means that they probably changed a lot as they were passed down via the oral tradition,

and even today there are arguments about which parts are original and which parts are additions.

There were a lot of competing poems about the Trojan War, but Homer’s were by far the most famous,