From Scott:
What I think is most promising about taking the Odyssey as our point of departure is that this story has been retold and reshaped across three millenia, whether in later translations, adaptations or spin-offs. To cite only a few examples from the last century: Sarah just read a Margaret Atwood novel written from the perspective of Penelope; James Joyce's "Ulysses" is a modern transposition of the narrative into 1904 Dublin; "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" loosely follows the Odyssey's episodic structure. And it's this very episodic quality that I think makes it particularly open to revision: discrete plots (Telemachus' journey; the sojourns with Circe and Calypso; the encounters with various monsters and gods) each have their own internal coherence.
To what extent Homer was an individual figure remains a matter for scholarly debate. It's arguable that the composition of the epic itself was crafted in bits and assembled over time by various poets, who in retrospect came to be known as a composite "Homer" -- as Vico put it, "the Greek people were themselves 'Homer.'" One suggestive take on this topic looks at some medieval fragments of the poem, and speculates that "the poems were performed and recorded with a considerable amount of fluidity in antiquity. . . . In such a tradition no poem is ever composed, performed, or recorded in exactly the same way twice. In the earliest stages of the Iliad and Odyssey, each performance would have resulted in an entirely new composition."
In many respects, our children undertaking this Odyssey will be continuing a tradition of recreation that goes back to the compositional origins of the epic itself, recreating their own versions of the story in art and song and performance.
We can't wait for this week's first gathering of the crew!