Quote Originally Posted by rockzmom View Post
kidkboom (or anyone else who has read The Odyssey) my daughter would like to have your take on Chapter 11 The Kingdom of the Dead and Chapter 12 The Castle of the Sun. As you gave an amazing summary and put it into understandable every day English, she'd like to hear what you have to say about them.

Thanks!
Sure, I'll do whatever I can! First my links and resources, the copy of Odyssey I'm referring is The Odyssey of Homer in English verse - Homer - Google Books (there's a more authentic copy, but I can't read Greek).. and the SparkNotes (just to make sure I know what I'm talking about) I used are here => SparkNotes: The Odyssey: Books 10–11

Well a lot is going on in Book 11 - Odysseus was instructed by Circe (a witch and one of his more lengthy "flings") to speak to Tiresias in the land of the dead (Hades) to find a safe way to return home (which is his overriding goal for most of the literature), so he goes to the land of the Cimmerians, to the River of Ocean ("the furthest edge of Ocean's stream") which is where, vaguely, all souls enter into the afterworld.. There they perform some weird sheep-blood sacrifical ritual that Circe explained to him, wherein the blood "attracts the souls of the dead" and he begins to speak to them.. His intent is to speak to Tiresias but he ends up speaking to like 400 people in no particular order.. the important ones, scholastically speaking, would be Elpenor, one of Odysseus' men, who got too drunk in Circe's palace and fell down a ladder and died, rather gruesomely, and begs Odysseus to bury him properly.. (Greeks had strong beliefs about proper burial being relative to proper admission to the afterlife) .. Then ""Odysseus then speaks with the Theban prophet Tiresias, who reveals that Poseidon is punishing the Achaeans for blinding his son Polyphemus. He foretells Odysseus’s fate—that he will return home, reclaim his wife and palace from the wretched suitors, and then make another trip to a distant land to appease Poseidon. He warns Odysseus not to touch the flocks of the Sun "" -(literally, sheep the Sun owns)- ""when he reaches the land of Thrinacia; otherwise, he won’t return home without suffering much more hardship and losing all of his crew."" Then a long scene where Odysseus talks to him mom Anticlea (heh, Aunty Cleah) and she tells him how crazy things have been back home in Ithaca, his wife sorrowfully waiting for him; she tells him that she herself (mom) died of grief waiting for him (major guilt trip! =P ) -- So did I speak, and my reverend mother forthright replied: "Nay, but with a patient spirit thy wife doth abide / In thy halls; and evermore, for the burden of sorrow she bears / Her days are consumed with heaviness, yea, and her nights with tears."

At this point Book 11 is getting wordy so Homer breaks up the text, by having Odysseus say he wants to go to sleep - which pisses off his hosts the king & queen of the Cimmerians, they ask him to be polite enough to finish.. so he agrees and goes on. (Scholars say this is ONLY written in to break up the monotony.) [This text is written as if Alcinous the king and Nausikaa the queen are actually there, as if the ritual was being performed in their court - they even mention the 'people' of Phaecia as being shared hosts of these sailors their guests - yet in the beginning of the book, the scene is only set as being in the land of Cimmeria, in their "dreary" and "grey" town they have there; and the ritual involves digging little holes in the dirt for filling with libations, from what I can tell, so why the king and queen are actually THERE I'm a bit loose on as a writer.. wish I could actually ask that question to a real live scholar, which I'm not..] Anyway accepting that the king and queen and some Phaecians are in the background of the scene they go on.. Some of these meetings and recounts go beyond the scope of an average class and writing into the meat of Greek Myth. Majors's studies..

The most important meaning of all these events is a) Teiresias giving Odysseus a bunch of warnings and helpful advice, free of charge (which is the sort of mistake that led T. to be blind in the first place [[..different stories were told of the cause of his blindness, the most direct being that he was blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets.]] ), then b) tying together a lot of prior events in the book and foreshadowing some upcoming ones, and c) tying the characters throughout the Odyssey in to the colloquial Greek life, so that Greek audiences would appreciate the story more.

I'm going to try to jump back on later tonight and cover Book 12 - luck/life/kidk