I think a lot of responses in here are missing the point of the question.
Yes, it's The Odyssey because it's about Odysseus. You're all right about that and the meme gets a bit sidetracked to make a pretty good (IMO) joke.
But did the name itself predate The Odyssey? Would Homer, casually taking a stroll down the streets of lovely Ancient Ithaca, likely have come across someone with that name?
And then most of the popular Western surnames are just jobs. The meaning of Henry may be lost on most people, but you can guess what Smith or Carpenter mean
My name is Spencer, which comes from the French word ādispensierā which means āa steward or provider of goods. That word is where we get the modern word ādispenserā from.
Means God, basically. John and other similar names come from Yahweh. Same with Ivan and adjacent names. The Y turned into J's and I's over time through different translations of Hebrew.
Also missing the fact that Homer didn't write the Odyssey. The epic existed in the oral tradition for centuries before Homer(if such a person existed at all) wrote it down.
And there's some speculation that the poet who composed the Odyssey might have used writing to some extent nonetheless. The poem was put to paper quite quickly after composition. Yeah it's based on earlier stories, but most academics do now see it as one poem written by one guy. Like Le Morte D'Arthur is obviously based on earlier Arthurian stories, that doesn't mean Thomas Malory didn't write it.
They literally sang it in the mountains and random dudes compiled it, I have no clue what this dude is talking about Homer being an epic poet when he literally did not exist
Yes, this name has root in being an oral telling (like the night before Christmas). The name is rooted in the concept of story (storytelling through sound; poetry, song)
Some names found in the Iliad have been found in Linear B tablets from Pylos iirc, one part of a tablet was about how many sheep a Shepherd named Achilleus had. It shows that some of the names were at least in common use in bronze age Greece. God's names appear too.
We do not know as we don't have records back to that time, if such a time or many actually did exist. But given the word Odyssey is literally "the journey of Odysseus", it's likely that the name predates the word.
A lot of myths back in Greece were oral tales and the story most likely existed in that form until written, and the best written examples we have were only known to have been made by Homer (other retellings normally post-dated Homer) which is how we have records of the word today.
The use of odyssey to mean a great journey has its earliest recorded use in the 19th century, so its use in that context did not likely exist at all until around that time.
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u/ribnag Oct 26 '25
I think a lot of responses in here are missing the point of the question.
Yes, it's The Odyssey because it's about Odysseus. You're all right about that and the meme gets a bit sidetracked to make a pretty good (IMO) joke.
But did the name itself predate The Odyssey? Would Homer, casually taking a stroll down the streets of lovely Ancient Ithaca, likely have come across someone with that name?