The Boy’s Odyssey
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| The Boy’s Odyssey |
The Boy’s Odyssey is not a scholarly translation, but a youth‑friendly prose retelling of Homer’s epic, richly illustrated, meant to make the adventures of Odysseus accessible to early 20th‑century readers.
Excerpt The Wanderings of Odysseus
More than twelve hundred years before the birth of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, a great war was being fought between the Greeks—who came from the Peloponnesus, or Southern Greece, now called the Morea—and the Trojans, who lived at Troy on the seacoast of Asia Minor near the Dardanelles.
The cause of the war was this: the gods of Greece dwelt in magnificent palaces of pure white marble and gold on the summit of Mount Olympus, on the borders of Thessaly and Macedonia. The chief god was Zeus (Jupiter), “the loud‑thundering,” who ruled over all the others. His wife was Hera (Juno), “the golden‑throned” and “white‑armed,” and his daughter was the wise Athene (Minerva), born in a strange fashion.
One day Zeus suffered a terrible headache. He called Hephaistos (Vulcan, the blacksmith god) and ordered him to split his head open with an axe. To their astonishment, Athene leapt forth from Zeus’s head, clad in bright armor and holding a lance. Athene became the goddess of war and wisdom.
The other gods included Apollo, “of the silver bow,” god of the sun, who drove it across the sky in a golden chariot; his twin sister Artemis (Diana), the virgin huntress and protectress of animals; Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea, who carried a great three‑pronged fork called the trident; Pluto, god of Hades, the underworld to which the spirits of the Greeks went after death; Hermes (Mercury), “the slayer of Argos,” who served as messenger of the gods; and Hephaistos (Vulcan), the blacksmith and architect who forged Zeus’s thunderbolts and built the palaces and thrones of the gods on Mount Olympus.
The Boy’s Odyssey (1902) is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey written by Walter Copland Perry (1814–1911), with illustrations by George Percy Jacomb Hood (1857–1929).
- Title: The Boy’s Odyssey
- Author: Walter Copland Perry (classical scholar, also wrote The Boy’s Iliad)
- Illustrator: G. P. Jacomb Hood, a well‑known British painter and illustrator
- Publication Date: 1902
- Publisher: George Bell & Sons, London
- Content:
- A simplified prose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey aimed at younger readers.
- Preserves the main adventures of Odysseus — encounters with gods, monsters, and trials — but in accessible English.
- Includes illustrations to make the epic vivid for children and students.