Pomona's Hero's Journey Blog

Everett’s redemption in the song scene in O Brother is an easy comparison to the archery contest in the Odyssey. In this very important scene, he shows his true colors both to his wife and to everyone, although, just like in the archery contest, the crowd doesn’t understand who he is at first. This blog post is a long and rambling discussion about the leading couples in both the Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou, and what their reunion scenes tell us about each. He shoots down a leader by foiling the campaign of the reform-championing politician. He also gets a chance to display his archery singing prowess. (I just noticed that in O Brother, singing has a bunch of meanings. It can represent storytelling, prophecy, boasting, deception, seduction, fighting, etc., and the meaning is dictated as much by the situation as it is by the song!) Most importantly, Everett manages to impress his wife: I am the great lead singer of the Soggy Bottom Boys!  Now obviously, the s...

In 7 th hour today I talked briefly about loaded dice. In Rome, the story goes, dice were almost always clearly misshapen or loaded. The Romans, however, didn’t care, because they thought that the outcome of each role was decided by a god, not by the shape and weight distribution of the dice. I did some research on this story tonight and it turns out that I was most likely wrong, since I only found one article that mentioned this Roman faith in Fortune. And I know that Rome and Greece exist in vastly different time periods and are different cultures, though they have very similar religions. But regardless, I think that the anecdote is a great analogy for how the gods act in the Odyssey. The gods are loading the dice of almost every major scene that Odysseus or Telemachus appear in. Most of Odysseus’s good standing seems to come from the gods, and conversely, the gods are also the ones who forced him to suffer so much. To a modern reader, the idea that some of Odysseus’s decision...