# ‘More postmodern than ancient’: why the Odyssey is everywhere, from Oz to Westeros

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/more-postmodern-than-ancient-why-the-odyssey-is-everywhere-from-oz-to-westeros/
- Published: 2026-07-12T09:00:14+00:00
- Updated: 2026-07-12T09:12:15+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/ng-interactive/2026/jul/12/christopher-nolan-odyssey-influence
- Topics: Culture, Entertainment, Film

## Key points

- Nolan's Odyssey film is expected to break box-office records.
- The 2,600-year-old epic still grips modern pop culture.
- Scholars trace the poem to an oral, bardic tradition.

## Summary

Christopher Nolan's forthcoming film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey is being tipped to break box-office records, and this Guardian feature explores why the director of Inception and Oppenheimer was so determined to bring the ancient Greek epic to the screen. It also asks a broader question: why a poem thought to date from around the 600s or 500s BC continues to exert such a powerful hold on modern popular culture, echoing through works from The Wizard of Oz to Game of Thrones.

The piece explains that although the Greeks attributed the poem to Homer, a supposedly blind bard from Chios, scholars now doubt it was the work of a single author. It notes that the American classicist Milman Parry, studying oral singers in the Balkans in the 1930s, showed the Odyssey and the Iliad grew out of a long oral tradition of bards performing through memory and improvisation. The writer argues the poem is strikingly self-aware — at times feeling "more postmodern than ancient" — containing scenes of bards telling stories that move their listeners to tears, and suggests such live performances may once have been even more overwhelming than Nolan's cinema.

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