Homer’s Odyssey has topped the BBC Culture poll on the “100 Stories that Shaped the World. The poll addressing writers and critics looked at epic poems, plays and novels from around the globe that have influenced history and changed mindsets.
Top Five
- The Odyssey (Homer, 8th Century BC)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852)
- Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1949)
- Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)
The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem of the 8th Century BC, topped the poll. Why was it the first choice? According to writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes: “Because it is one of the great foundational myths of western culture; because it asks what it means to be a hero; because it has great female characters in it, as well as men; because it is full of gods and monsters and is properly epic and because it forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and the ever-current issue of what it means to return home.”
Lisa Appignanesi, novelist and critic, picks out its influence on all that followed, arguing “It’s a basic story template – of the journey which is also a return”.
Kenneth W Warren, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, agrees. “There’s no getting around how foundational Homer’s epic has been for storytelling in the West. The Odyssey has provided the architecture for the quest narrative and the template for characterising male and female virtue in ways that shape, enable, and limit our storytelling habits into the present.”
David Varno, literary critic, highlights the ingenuity woven through the epic poem: “The many triumphs of wit and grit on the part of Odysseus and Penelope must have counted for something over the millennia.”
Meanwhile, Bethanne Patrick, Contributing Editor of Lit Hub, picks out another strand. “I believe the journey of Odysseus defined a streak of individualism particular to Western culture that has led to much change in the world – good and bad.”
And the novelist Beverley Naidoo hones in on the ways it has become embedded in wider culture: “The multiple stories within Odysseus’ 10-year journey home after the Trojan war, while faithful Penelope waits for him and son Telemachus seeks him, have seeped deep into our cultural consciousness. The human elements within this myriad of stories continue to resonate down the centuries, allowing endless reinterpretation.”
Natalie Haynes explains why the epic story of Odysseus remains so central in modern times culture. she writes among others:
If any story can be considered the greatest tale ever told, Homer’s Odyssey has a better claim than most. Twenty-four books long, it runs to more than 12,000 lines of hexameter verse (the poetic form used in Greek epic and Latin epic after it) and follows the adventures of the wily, complicated Greek hero, Odysseus, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. The Odyssey has been valued as a cultural highpoint for millennia: in the 5th Century BCE, the Athenian playwright Aeschylus referred to his tragedies as “slices from the banquet of Homer”.
Writers from Dante to James Joyce to Margaret Atwood have taken inspiration from this original quest story. But Odysseus’ quest itself is an almost mundane affair, amid the gods and monsters which populate the poem. Because it is not about sailing off to find something wondrous and new (a golden fleece, for example, or an undiscovered land). It’s about a man trying to get home at the end of a 10-year war.
And this is surely the reason that the poem remains so central to our culture today, some 2700 years after it was composed (in the 8th or more probably 7th Century BCE). It is a story which is simultaneously grand and intimate, vast in scope but with attention paid to the smallest details (the flowers which grow outside Calypso’s cave, the softness of the fleece of the Cyclops’ sheep). It is a story that asks questions about what it means to be a man, particularly when he has been stripped of the context that has previously defined him: Odysseus is a husband away from his wife, a father who has missed his son growing up, a warrior whose war is over, a king who is far from his kingdom, a leader whose men all die, an adulterer who is the plaything of goddesses, and a son whose mother dies of a broken heart because she believes him dead. He is a voyager, a pirate, an adventurer, a refugee.
The most popular authors of the top 100 stories were Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka, with three stories each. In among the recognised classics, there are a few texts less well-known globally: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which directly led to the introduction of new federal laws on food safety, and Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto, praised as “a classic short story that translates the trauma of Partition through the post-Partition exchange of lunatics across the India and Pakistan border”.
The book lovers who contributed to BBC Culture’s poll hail from 35 different countries – from Uganda and Pakistan to Colombia and China – and only 51% claim English as their ‘mother tongue’. These critics, scholars and journalists who voted were 59% female, 40% male.
BBC poll results: Top Ten Stories that Shaped the World
PS I am deeply disappointed to see my favorite author Charles Dickens to be represented with only one story “A Christmas Carol” that reached 73. position. Maybe Dickens just shaped social awareness privately but did not inspired other authors. I remember when I was studying English Literature, Dickens was off the list.
