Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Didja see that Odyssey movie that everyone’s talkin ’bout? I hafta admit that I ain’t actually made it out to see it yet – so no spoilers!!

Trivia 1

I was kinda just jokin ’bout “no spoilers” earlier, ’cause of course everyone & their mom knows the story of the Odyssey. Ol’ Odysseus tricks some folks with a big ol’ wooden horse, there’s a long trip back home, eventually he kills a buncha suitors – & also a buncha household staff? for some reason?? – & at the end of it he’s gotta go confuse some people with an oar.

Do ya remember that last bit? It’s the blind seer, Tiresias, who tells Mr. I-Invented-the-Trojan-Horse:

When you get home you will take your revenge on these suitors; and after you have killed them by force or fraud in your own house, you must take a well made oar and carry it on and on, till you come to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food, nor do they know anything about ships, and oars that are as the wings of a ship. I will give you this certain token which cannot escape your notice. A wayfarer will meet you and will say it must be a [ἀθηρηλοιγός] that you have got upon your shoulder; on this you must fix the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a boar to Neptune.

That’s from Samuel Butler’s translation of the Odyssey, although ya might’ve noticed I kept one word untranslated. That’s ’cause I want ya to tell me what the heck’s this wayfarer supposed to think the oar is for?

The Greek word ἀθηρηλοιγός translates literally to somethin like “chaff-destroyer”, & it’s an agricultural tool that’s used to separate grain from chaff. So in other words, what I’m askin ya to tell me is what’s the name for the process in which the grain is separated from the chaff?

Trivia 2

James Joyce’s Ulysses is famously & explicitly a – well, not an adaptation of the Odyssey, per se, but a kinda modernist riff on it. In it ya’ve got the characters of Leopold & Molly Bloom, who map more or less onto Odysseus & Penelope, respectively; whereas the Telemachus equivalent is what character, who also showed up in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man & is generally considered kinda like Mr. Joyce’s literary alter ego? Although Telemachus is Odysseus’s son, this character’s last name is an allusion to a famous dad from a different Greek myth entirely.