Notes for the Penelopiad

NOTES FOR THE PENELOPIAD Use this guide to assist you while reading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. This guide will provide you with important information about different characters, events, and references. MARGARET ATWOOD Canadian author Margaret Atwood is a prolific and award-winning novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. From a young age, Atwood has been keenly interested in mythology and folk/fairy tales, which inspire much of her poetry. Atwood is one of Canada’s most famous and respected literary figures. Published in October 2005, Atwood’s original novella The Penelopiad was part of a Canongate series of myths retold by contemporary authors. The Penelopiad reexamines Homer’s epic story the Odyssey through a variety of genres: narrative, a classic Greek chorus, various types of poetry and song, and modern settings including a court trial and an anthropology lecture. THE PENELEOPIAD The layout of this novel is characterized by monologues and narration from Penelope in the underworld, flashbacks to important events in Penelope's life, and poetic and musical segments from the maids, both in the underworld and during the flashback. The story begins with Penelope alone in the Greek underworld of the dead. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus and renowned for her faithfulness, has decided to tell her side of the famous Odyssey story. Penelope is haunted in the underworld by the spirits of her twelve maids, the ones who Odysseys ordered to be killed upon his return to Ithaca. HOMER Like Shakespeare, Homer is a highly influential but extremely mysterious literary figure. His exact birthdate is unknown, and seven cities in Greece all claim to be his birthplace. Homer is attributed with two of the most famous works of ancient Greek literature: the Iliad and the Odyssey (even that is contested by some, though without much concrete support). Scholars estimate that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written sometime in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE, making them the first known literature in Europe. Many, from history through modern times, believe Homer was blind—however, there is no proof supporting this (especially since Homer uses vivid imagery and color descriptions in his poetry). ORAL TRADITION Homer’s works come from and are shaped by a long oral tradition of storytelling. One theory states that the Odyssey was originally developed orally, at least in part. This theory suggests that Homer may have used oral performance to develop the story in parts. Much of the support for this comes from the style in which Homer writes—a style originating from an oral tradition of improvisational bardic performance. Features of this style include a mishmash of eras (the Bronze Age of the Mycenaean era and the then-modern Iron Age seem to exist simultaneously in the Odyssey) and dialects from different time periods (the early Aeolic and the later Ionic). This is attributed to the centuries-old oral tradition, traveling from generation to generation and producing a poetic style with a blend of forms and time periods, old and modern. Another feature of this oral tradition is the repetition found throughout the Odyssey, such as the descriptive epithet attached to a name (e.g., “wily” Odysseus). These epithets did function in a descriptive manner, and perhaps to remind audiences of who the character was—however, their main function was to aid bards in improvisational performance. These bards could choose an epithet for a character from a pool of possible titles of varying lengths. Choices could be made depending on how many syllables the poet needed to complete a line according to the rigid rules of dactylic hexameter. SUMMARY OF THE ODYSSEY Homer's Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's ten year journey home to Ithaca after the ten year Trojan War, fraught with many perils, mythic creatures, and divine beings. By the time he makes it back to Ithaca, he finds his home overrun with one hundred and eight suitors all vying for his faithful and cunning wife Penelope's hand in marriage. Odysseus, with help from his son Telemachus and his patron goddess Athena, kills all of the suitors and the twelve palace maids found to be disloyal. ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION Ancient Greek religion was based on the belief in a multitude of gods who possessed immortality, superhuman powers, and a wide range of personalities. Greek mythology was based on stories and legends originating in the Mycenaean era, which were passed down orally through to Homer’s time. Greek religion had almost no specific guidelines that practitioners must obey—all a Greek individual had to do was to believe the gods exist and perform sacrifices and rituals in the gods’ honor. Greek religion had a vast body of myths about their gods, realms, and heroes. Notably, these stories were not held sacred and untouchable; it was perfectly acceptable for poets, bards, and dramatists to alter or invent myths. Homer’s works were highly influential in Greek religious beliefs about the gods, the afterlife, and the great Greek heroes. THE OLYMPIANS The twelve major gods in the Greek pantheon were believed to reside on Mount Olympus, the tallest mountain in mainland Greece, and were hence frequently referred to as the “Olympians”. The twelve most commonly portrayed Olympian gods were as follows: Zeus (king of the gods), Hera (queen of the gods), Poseidon (the sea), Athena (wisdom, war, weaving), Apollo (music and prophecy) and his twin sister Artemis (hunting), Hermes (the messenger, and god of guides), Aphrodite (love), Ares (war), Hephaestus (metalworking), Demeter (agriculture), and either Dionysus (wine and theater) or Hestia (domesticity). THE TROJAN WAR According to mythology, the ten-year Trojan War was waged between the Anatolian city of Troy and the Achaeans (a term used by Homer to refer to the Greeks as a united whole). The war was caused by the goddess of strife and discord, Eris. Eris sent what has been aptly called the “Apple of Discord” to Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, a golden apple marked “for the fairest.” Of course, the three goddesses argued over for whom the apple was intended. The goddesses took the matter to Zeus, who prudently decided to not get involved. Instead, he took the apple to the young and handsome Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. Paris couldn’t decide who the apple should go to, so the goddesses chose another tactic: bribery. Hera offered power over all of Eurasia, while Athena offered wisdom and glory in battle—but Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world for a wife. Surprising no one, Paris decided the golden apple should go to Aphrodite. In return, the goddess made the beautiful Helen (already wife of the Spartan king Menelaus) fall in love with Paris and run away with him to Troy, earning him the enmity of Hera, Athena, and all the Achaeans. (Whether Helen was seduced, abducted, or left of her own will varies from story to story. Another variant is whether Aphrodite specifically told Paris that she would give him Helen.) Before Helen was married to Menelaus, she had been avidly pursued by many powerful princes, kings, and great warriors (around ten to thirty suitors, depending on the story). Helen’s mortal father, the Spartan king Tyndareus, feared that once a suitor was chosen, the unchosen suitors would take offense and perhaps even resort to violence. One of Helen’s suitors, Odysseus, came up with a solution for Tyndareus and brokered a deal among Helen’s suitors: the men would swear to uphold the honor of whomever won Helen’s hand. This meant that when Helen ran off with Paris, all of her old suitors were now honor-bound to go to war against Troy for Menelaus’s sake. (Side note: Odysseus tried to get out of his own oath by feigning madness/idiocy to the messenger that brought the news of war; he hitched a donkey and an ox to a plow and sowed his fields with salt. The clever messenger decided to test him by placing his infant son, Telemachus, in front of the plow. Odysseus swerved to avoid hitting his son, thus ousting him as a mentally sound man. Off to war he went.) The Trojan War lasted ten years. Major figures in the tale included Hector (the heroic warrior-prince of Troy), Agamemnon (the king of Mycenae, brother of Menelaus, and leader of the united Achaean army), Ajax (a fearfully strong Achaean warrior), Achilles (the superhumanly strong Achaean warrior centrally featured in the Iliad), and cunning Odysseus (who got a sequel all to himself). The Achaeans were finally able to breach the city with Odysseus’s Trojan horse idea: the Achaeans pretended to give up and sail away, leaving behind a large wooden horse ostensibly as an offering for Athena, but actually filled with a select group of Achaean soldiers. The ploy worked—the Trojans (whose symbol just so happened to be a horse) cheerfully brought the horse into the city as a trophy and celebrated their victory. When night fell, the Achaeans snuck through the city to open the gates and let in the rest of their army. The Achaeans destroyed the city, killing all the Trojan males and keeping or selling the females and children as slaves. Some of the casualties of the war included the great heroes: Hector, Achilles, and Ajax. Many Achaean heroes experienced hardships on their journeys home—there were gods on both sides of the fight, and the losing gods were angry with the winning side. The Achaeans’ brutality in the sacking of Troy only angered these gods further. Odysseus and Menelaus both had very long and difficult journeys home.

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