The Odyssey and The Dawn Treader

Today, I'm excited to welcome a fellow young writer to my blog! When Christopher approached me about writing this article, following the publication of my Beowulf in the Lord of the Rings, I was happy to accept. The article was enlightening, and I learned a lot! I hope you do too.

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Following Autumn’s article on the connections between Tolkien and Beowulf, I realized that a similar connection existed between two of my favourite stories: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, by Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis, and The Odyssey, by the ancient Greek poet Homer. 

This of course is no surprise to anyone who knows Lewis: he was a professor of mythology, and Tolkien used that interest to show him “the true myth” of Christianity. Of course his writing would be influenced by it! I thought it would be interesting to look, not at individual quotes like Autumn did, because honestly that sounds like pretty painstaking work, but at shared story elements and sequences. 

While I have never read an official version of the epic poem, I have read the introduction to Butcher’s translation here, Percy Jackson and The Sea Of Monsters (which pretty much retraces the Odyssey’s structure, but in a modern-day context), and listened to Epic: The Musical, which is a Gen-Z musical retelling of the epic poem and comes highly recommended. I also look forward to Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation coming out next year: I find him a reliable and unique storyteller. 

Overall, the stories’ similarities in genre caught my eye. Both stories feature a cast of heroes, aboard a ship, having adventures on unexplored and magical islands, striving toward a goal.

Really, what we have is Lewis’s inspiration from Odysseus’s voyages, not the Odyssey itself. After reading the short introduction to the Odyssey that I linked above, I was enlightened: The Odyssey proper is the story of Odysseus’s defeat of his Ithacan enemies at home. However, the introduction to his tale tells of a ten-year saga of disasters that resulted in his late arrival home. That backstory, picked apart and told as the plot of Epic: The Musical, or put in prose by that translator’s introduction I already mentioned, is very similar to our book at hand. 

I like to analyse stories, both my own and ones I read, by looking at characters, world, theme, and plot, the individual elements of the story.

First, we have characters. Caspian is the king, but technically Reepicheep is the character most similar to Odysseus. And who doesn’t love Reepicheep? He, the dauntless veteran and mouse-chief of Caspian’s war against the wicked Telmarines in Prince Caspian, sets off from Narnia in response to a river-spirit’s prophecy, and refuses to give up his goal of reaching Aslan’s country, even if he has to go alone. On every island, he shows bravery and chivalry of every kind. He is the first to trust Eustace in monster form, and was the continued impetus to keep pushing into the unknown. 

Odysseus is likewise beginning his journey after successfully leading 600 men through the Trojan war as a lesser king. Athena becomes his patron, trying to teach him the value of heartless warfare. He’s an altruist, trying to grant mercy to Cyclops, and never stops trying to get home. 

Where the Odyssey is set in a polytheistic world, Narnia has Aslan as the sole god with many mythical creatures and characters under his rule. Some that take the place of Homer’s gods would be Reepicheep’s dryad prophetess, Coriakin the Dufflepuds’ Magician, the fallen star on the island of the three sleepers, and his daughter.

Odysseus’s crew is drawn from the even earlier legend of Jason, a hero who went out to find the Golden Fleece with a band of heroes. On the Dawn Treader, we have a cast of legends from Narnia. Of course, there’s Reepicheep, everyone’s favourite, but we also have legends making up the rest of the crew. Caspian the king, with an oath to find the last remaining Lords of Narnia. Edmund and Lucy, rulers of Narnia from a millenium ago. 

Eustace… is no legend. He’s Lewis’s focus, the character that changes the most dramatically through the book, and whose arc we follow more than Reep, Caspian, or the siblings. Where Odysseus’s Cyclops is tricked and curses the journey, Eustace the Dragon reforms and becomes the new focus of the Narnia books.

Like the world of the Odyssey, the ship is sailed by a crew of dedicated sailors, most of whom receive little personality.  

All of Narnia has Greek elements, admittedly mixed with Norse, Roman, English and original Narnian elements. Tolkien himself is famously quoted as saying, “it won’t work, you know,” about this mixing of mythologies in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. Thankfully, he was wrong this once, and both Lewis and Tolkien’s writings made it into family libraries everywhere.

Where the theme is concerned, there is another divergence. The way I’ve seen it painted, the Odyssey is about a man who learns ruthlessness over mercy. Whenever he chooses mercy, he loses friends and gets pushed away from his wife. He has to lose everything before he finally chooses himself and his wife over his 600 crewmates and the lives of anyone in his path, or that’s the way Epic puts it. 

Narnia is a children’s story, about determination, reformation, and with Eustace as the main character, it’s a story about salvation. God chooses, tests, and transforms his elect without asking them. All hardships are for good. And even nasty modern kids can be made decent with enough exposure to whimsy and hard knocks. 

When it comes to theme, Lewis clearly took the familiar as a pattern to follow, but changed things up. First of all, the entire goal is reversed. Where Odysseus will give anything to reach home, Reepicheep will do anything to get to the end of the world. Also different is the fact that the plot is designed to teach Eustace traditional truth, so the kingly pieces of Odysseus’s journey are taken by Caspian, and where Odysseus learns ruthlessness, Eustace is taught his lesson of humility instead. 

I put the main plot points (around a chapter per row of the table) below, beside their Odyssey counterparts. It is so close to matching that I refuse to believe Lewis could have written this without intentionally thinking of Homer. 

Conclusion

To Autumn’s many readers who also write, this should be further proof that to write great fiction, you need only a fresh spin on an old story. Homer himself recycled age-old myths into a combined storyline that has stood the test of time. 

Some of you also participated in the Young Writer’s course on C.S. Lewis, and I hope you enjoyed another glance into his inspiration. 

To those of you who read without writing seriously, I also hope you had fun here. I’ve always enjoyed connections between books I enjoy, and further background to the author’s writing process. 

I would love to see some comments with further connections, criticism of my ideas, nerdy details, and so on. Studying history’s great works of literature is no waste of time.

Voyage Of The Dawn Treader	Odysseus’ Voyage
In England: the Narrator’s Introduction	Introduction: Odysseus with audience
Into Narnia, Reepicheep’s normal world	The end of the Trojan war
The Lone Islands (last of civilization)	Lotus Eaters, a corrupted little island of addicts, give direction to Odysseus and introduce him to the Sea Of Monsters.
Renewed and directed, push onwards
N/A	Wind King gives “gift”
N/A	Crew betrays, is eaten by Laestrygonians
The storm comes up and blows for 13 days	The 10-day storm blows them out of course
Land on Dragon Island for repairs and food	Land, need of repairs and food
Eustace becomes dragon through greed	Cyclops traps and eats sailors
Reform of Eustace (the beginning of sanctification)	Diverges here: Cyclops curses Odysseus by Poseidon
Empty island, Sea Serpent	Scylla attacks (Out of Order)
Deathwater	Clashing rocks (Out of order)
Lucy hears the voices	The last crewman tells Odysseus about Circe
Lucy uses the magician’s book, then meets both Aslan and the Magician	Odysseus defeats Circe, then gains her help
The Duffles restored	All the enchanted men freed
Sail through darkness of nightmares, rescue Rhoop	Circe sends the crew and Odysseus through Hades
Find the last three Lords put to sleep by knife Meet woman, Caspian in love Crew mutiny, on the island for 3 days total	Apollo’s island with forbidden food Calypso’s Island Odysseus alone, imprisoned for eight years
The beginning of the end of the world	Odysseus rescued from the gods?
The wonders of the last sea	Sirens, Odysseus in the water, the final block
The very end of the world	Odysseus alone, sees his home. Diverges: Narrator does not see the end of the tale, and there is no further conflict.

---"Christopher Moore is a Christian writer from the currently frozen wastelands of Canada and a student at the Author Conservatory. When not frantically writing down new ideas, he can be found reading, listening to music, or talking about something random." 

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I hope you enjoyed! Let us know what you think.