on August 07, 2026
The culture demands that, every 20 years, all art majors have a moment in the sun. Starting with the basics: the Greek word for cunning intelligence is mêtis. Composing and weaving were described as the same act. Ancient poets spoke of weaving verses the way a woman worked a loom. And in a society and time that gave women little voice but not little importance, weaving was taken over by women through their wits. They knew the physical craft of interlacing threads matched the very essence of communication and language. And Homer seems to know it too. Every time a woman sits at her loom in the Odyssey, the plot changes. The woman at the loom is always singing and sometimes plotting.
Captivity
The trajectory of the Odyssey changes over and over, with the recurring image of a woman singing at her loom. When the messenger of the gods Hermes lands in Ogygia searching for Odysseus, he hears a song before seeing anything. He follows it and it leads him to Calypso. He finds her moving back and forth before a great loom, singing as she works.
Calypso is content, occupied and timeless. She is a goddess who lives forever and she chooses to fill her endless days with beautiful work; weaving with shining threads. Singing here is the prison itself rather than the bait. Odysseus weeps and she weaves and that's the whole point: her craft is the making of his captivity. The loom marks her as someone with all the time in the world, holding a mortal who is running out of it.
One nuance for accuracy, she only lets him go because Zeus orders it. She doesn't relent on her own. The film reinterprets the original text where Calypso claims they were in love for seven years before she eventually takes pity on him and releases him. Christopher Nolan blames Odysseus’ delirium on the lotus flowers that he eats. However, the text gives all credit to Calypso. Book Odysseus never ate any lotus flowers and book Calypso was in fact holding him against his will.
Bait
Homer gives both Calypso and Circe nearly the same words, the same song and the same shimmering thread. So once again, a group of men hear a lovely song and follow it, to find a woman occupied with a gleaming loom. They call out; she welcomes and feeds them. And then she drugs the food and strikes them with her wand, turning them into pigs.
For Circe, the loom scene is genuinely bait, the beauty is the mechanism of the trap. The men who follow the lovely sound are forced into staying. They get “unmade,” stripped of their human shape entirely and become stuck. To make it even more brutal, they keep their human consciousness while existing in the form of animals. They're still inwardly themselves, aware of what they've become.
Circe is a goddess-witch, living alone on her island, and turning men who arrive into animals is simply what she does. Another distinction between the text and the film is that the film gives her a backstory and a reason to harm. Nolan translates her actions as defence while Homer does not elaborate why. The book lets some women be equally as ruthless as men, without a reason to justify their complexity. And perhaps this is why the text is still striking to this day, it has room for mystique and imagination. In a Greek Epic, violence does not necessarily need to be made palatable.
Resistance
Described as an equal to Odysseus, Penelope is perhaps the most beloved woman in the Odyssey. If Helen of Troy had beauty and rebellion, Penelope had beauty, rebellion and wits. She faces the pressure to remarry since Odysseus has been gone twenty years and everyone assumes he's dead. Her house is filled with over a hundred suitors. She can't refuse them outright; she has no army and no power. She tells the suitors that she must finish weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus's aging father, so he won't lie unhonored when he dies. Only when she finishes she'll choose one of them to marry.
An unimpeachable excuse: pious, dutiful, exactly the kind of proper womanly obligation no one can rush. And she weaves the great shroud by day, and secretly unravels it at night. Greeks wove schemes but Penelope schemes by weaving and that is her act of resistance. She runs this for three years, and it only ends when one of her maids betrays the secret and the suitors catch her at it.
A Modern Take
All in all, one of the limited tasks woman were freely permitted in that era was the quiet work of the loom. The Odyssey hands it to each woman and turns it into something the world didn't intend: a way to captivate, to bait, to resist. Denied every other pen, these women wrote in thread.
As for the book vs. film debate, there is beauty in creative freedom. Nolan gives Calypso a love story and Circe a reason to defend herself, motives that let us understand them, sympathize with them and maybe even forgive them. It's an endearing interpretation, and a very modern one. Homer simply does not reach for it. His women defy and hold and destroy without apology or backstory, and the poem lets them stand exactly as they are. Strangely, there is power in that refusal to explain and it is one of the reasons why these stories are still talked about centuries later. The ancient Greeks would probably be delighted to know their stories are still sung today.
