The Brick-Built Sea: Adapting the Odyssey in LEGO

Abstract

In the summer of 2014, a group of Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) designed and constructed a massive LEGO model of Homer’s Odyssey—a model worth analysing as an artistic adaptation of a canonical work of classical literature. Drawing on recent scholarship in the field of LEGO studies, this article examines this model in the context of LEGO as an artistic medium. It then considers the ways in which this model engages with modern conceptions of the idea of ‘epic’, while also using Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between epic and novel to explore some of the model’s more novelistic qualities. Finally, this article seeks to position the model within—and in opposition to—a wider landscape of LEGO-centric classical engagement.

LEGO, Odyssey, Homer, epic, Bakhtin, adaptation

INTRODUCTION: A PLASTIC ODYSSEY

The Odyssey itself, says Edith Hall, is as protean as the shape-shifting sea-god who wrestles with Menelaus on the sandy shores of Pharos. With each and every contact, the text ‘mutates ceaselessly into a different type of story[,] ... changing from a heroic epic into a quest narrative, a revenge tragedy, a domestic comedy, a romance, Bildungsroman, and biography’, its provisional form dependent on factors such as how, when, where, why, and by whom it is being received (Hall 43). While Hall focuses primarily on the Odyssey as a ‘generic shape-shifter’ (43), Homer’s maritime epic is certainly a transmedial shape-shifter as well: the Odyssey has been adapted into nearly every imaginable mode of creative production, even amidst a proliferation of new forms of media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contemporary scholars have rightly directed their attention towards adaptations of the Odyssey in films, graphic novels, contemporary music, television documentaries, and video games¹—the wide range of these efforts standing as a clear testament to the Odyssey’s supreme plasticity. But interestingly, it is not until now that any scholarly consideration has been given to the adaptation of the most plastic of epics in the most plastic of new media.

I am referring, of course, to LEGO, the colourful toy bricks made of injection-moulded ABS plastic. Consistently ranked amongst the world’s most influential brands (Mazzarella and Hains 2), LEGO has spawned a passionate network of fans-cum-creators who deploy their love of the brick-building play system towards various artistic, aesthetic, commercial, and/or educational purposes (Jennings 231–37). Naturally, given the noted ubiquity of the Odyssey across broad swaths of modern culture, some of these creators end up turning to the Homeric epic for inspiration. On YouTube, a quick search pulls up a handful of ‘brickfilms’—amateur stop-motion animations using LEGO bricks and minifigures²—based on the Odyssey, which either retell specific episodes or summarise the entire narrative. At their best, these Odyssean brickfilms, often created by students for school assignments, reframe the Odyssey through inventive techniques of remix and pastiche: The General Moe’s ‘Lego Space Odyssey: The Cyclops’, for instance, transposes Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus onto a sci-fi alien planet, while SDAlt’s ‘“The Lego Odyssey” Part 1’ plays The Lonely Island’s parody song ‘I’m on a Boat’ over a sequence of Odysseus and his men at sea.

None of these brickfilms, however, can match the scope or scale of what is, thus far, the most exciting adaptation of the Odyssey in the medium of LEGO. In 2014, a collective of Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) known as the Virtual LEGO User Group (Virtual LUG) constructed a 300-square-foot diorama of the Odyssey—using no pre-set instructions and no formal license from the LEGO company—and displayed it at that year’s Brickworld fan exposition in Schaumburg, Illinois. This massive model (Fig. 1) existed in its completed state for only a few days before it was dismantled at the end of the exposition, but the YouTube channel Beyond the Brick was able to record a 22-minute YouTube video—which includes an explanatory voiceover interview with Chris Phipson, a member of Virtual LUG—to thoroughly document the model’s layout. Additionally, a photo-essay on a LEGO fan website called The Brothers Brick provides images, titles, and short descriptions of the model’s individual scenes.

Figure 1.

A wide-angle view of the model. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 0:22,
https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=22.

The model, which contains upwards of one million LEGO bricks, is composed of fourteen such scenes: City of Troy, The Greek Fleet, Lotus Eaters, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Island of Aeolus, Island of the Laestrygonians, Circe’s Island, Hall of Hades, Island of the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Isle of Helios, Isle of Calypso, Ithaca, and Mount Olympus (according to the titles given by The Brothers Brick). Between each scene, the empty space is filled with translucent-blue LEGO studs—between 400,000–500,000 in total—to represent the vast expanse of sea that Odysseus and his men must traverse (Beyond the Brick 7:50–8:00). With the exception of Mount Olympus, which sits at the centre of the display, the scenes are arranged in narrative order around the edges of a set of custom-built tables, allowing viewers to retrace Odysseus’ journey by walking around the model in a counterclockwise direction. The diffuse nature of the Virtual LUG collective—members of the group live in different parts of the world and mostly gather online or at specific LEGO expositions—means that this model was the collaborative result of individual efforts. Each scene was designed and built by a single member (or, in several cases, a team of two or three members); these members then brought their finished ‘builds’ to the Brickworld exposition, where they assembled the entire model for the first and only time (Beyond the Brick 18:00–20:00).³

Even the most cursory of written descriptions reveals that this model is a remarkable artefact. Moreover, it is an artefact that resonates within an extensive tradition of LEGO-based adaptations. As Madeleine Hunter points out, the very idea of adaptation was enshrined as an explicit tenet of LEGO corporate policy in 1999, when LEGO first licensed the Star Wars brand to produce a suite of franchise-themed playsets (276–77). This strategy proved so successful that it has since spawned an assorted profusion of licensed LEGO themes, including LEGO Batman,
LEGO Disney Princess, and even (in an amusing flip-flopping of the physical and the digital) LEGO Minecraft. Mark J. P. Wolf and Neal Baker, in two separate articles from the same edited volume, each offer perceptive interpretations of this type of licensed LEGO playset by using the academic framework of adaptation studies: Wolf charts the shifts in visual and narrative emphasis when Star Wars’ famous Death Star superweapon is reconfigured from movie set into LEGO set, while Baker traces the spatialization of narrative in LEGO sets themed on The Lord of the Rings. To circle back to Madeleine Hunter, the aggregated upshot of these adapted playsets, by virtue of their sheer number and variety, is a meta-adaptive promise that is now inherent in LEGO as a ‘conduit of intertextuality’, a mode of play that ‘[allows] users to connect different texts together (both figuratively and literally) by virtue of their shared presence in an individual collection’ (277). Hunter and others, such as Joyce Goggin as well as Dana Polan, have been especially interested in plotting these ideas onto 2014’s Hollywood blockbuster The LEGO Movie, the ultimate paean to LEGO’s meta-adaptability.

But what about that other, unofficial LEGO creation of 2014—Virtual LUG’s model of the Odyssey? What might be at stake in trying to gain a deeper understanding of how it functions as a LEGOfied adaptation of a classical source text? In this article, I aim to offer a number of ways to read Virtual LUG’s model within the contexts of medium, genre, and reception more broadly. I begin, drawing on recent scholarship in the emerging field of LEGO studies, by analysing this model based on the representative characteristics of LEGO as a medium. I then move on to consider the model’s ‘epic’ attributes (keeping in mind the present-day connotations of that term), before examining the model through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between epic and novel. Finally, I conclude with a brief positioning of the model within—and in opposition to—a wider landscape of LEGO-centric classical engagement.

THE MEDIUM OF LEGO

The young but dynamic field of LEGO studies has provided insights into an array of LEGO-related topics, from the use of LEGO in the classroom to the racial and gender politics of LEGO (Lachney; Cook; Merskin). Most pertinent to this article, though, is the subset of this scholarship examining the formal elements of LEGO as an artistic (or quasi-artistic) medium. Specifically, three scholars—Johnathan Rey Lee, Eddie Lohmeyer, and Jessica Elam—have provided observations that prove especially useful when applied to Virtual LUG’s model of the Odyssey.

Johnathan Rey Lee, working towards a philosophical theory of the LEGO medium, considers LEGO’s key media-specific quality to be bricolage,⁴ which he defines as ‘the creative reassembly of already significant elements’ (5). He provides an example from the LEGO Parisian Restaurant set, in which four croissant-shaped pieces are used as architectural details on the restaurant’s cornices (1–3). When reduced to its atomised essence, the croissant piece recognisably signifies the French pastry itself, but when combined with and arranged amongst other pieces, it also comes to represent an architectural element of the larger building (3). Ultimately, Lee identifies a distinctly ‘playful spirit’ in this particular instance of bricolage: the croissant serves as a ‘visual pun on a Parisian restaurant—both making and made of French fare’ (3).

Lee’s idea of playfulness meshes quite nicely, in fact, with Eddie Lohmeyer’s analysis of the aesthetics of LEGO. For Lohmeyer, all LEGO-based art—even when produced by artists like Nathan Sawaya or Ai Weiwei, whose work garners respect within the rarefied circles of the high-art world—is deeply engaged with what Walter Benjamin termed Spielraum, or ‘room-for-play’ (47). When artists turn to LEGO, they are appropriating a juvenile toy, a medium designed specifically for its ability to foster ‘the uninhibited and imaginative play of children’ (47). They can apply this medium towards innumerable ends—‘open[ing] up new perceptual associations, sensations, and experiences through irony, satire, and subversion’ (48)—but the ultimate aesthetic power of LEGO is that it is rooted in what is intrinsically a playful, childlike enterprise.

And LEGO remains playful even when it is used in the genre—surprisingly common amongst AFOLs—of the war diorama. Jessica Elam’s study of AFOL-made LEGO battlefield models, such as a fan-built model of the Omaha Beach D-Day landing, shows that a LEGOfied depiction of war often blends elements of violent realism with playful ‘Easter eggs’ (74). Even as the D-Day model captures (and perhaps unduly relishes in) the gory details of severed limbs and pools of blood, it also features the superhero Captain America riding his motorcycle along the beach and Princess Ariel from The Little Mermaid swimming offshore (74–76). Equally light-hearted cultural references abound in other LEGO war dioramas: a Beatles-style yellow submarine hides in the corner of a Vietnam War display, while minifigure sailors on the USS Missouri do the ‘Jack and Rose’ pose from the James Cameron film Titanic (74–75). In a way, this coming together of adult violence and childlike fun reconfigures the seemingly contradictory nature of ‘LEGO Serious Play’—a corporate-driven movement that markets the benefits of playing with LEGO to business professionals (Kristiansen and Rasmussen 11)—through the similarly seemingly contradictory lens of the ‘war game’ (Der Derian 38; Hilgers xii; Mead 24).

These characteristics of LEGO as a medium—bricolage, Spielraum, and light-hearted battlefield Easter eggs—are all exhibited in Virtual LUG’s Odyssey model. Indeed, this model’s bricolage in particular reveals itself on both micro and macro levels. In a moment that resembles Lee’s example of the croissant piece, Virtual LUG’s Isle of Helios scene features a temple faced with Corinthian columns (Fig. 2) whose capitals are represented by LEGO element number 15469: Plant Leaves 2 × 2 with 4 Petals and Axle Hole. Thus, the stylised acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order become, within the world of the model, actual leaves, endowing this LEGO temple with a degree of verisimilitude that not even the most talented ancient stonemason could have hoped to attain. Or, put another way, a piece designed as a stylised representation of actual leaves is recontextualized to signify a completely new type of stylised leaflike representation—an entangled, hyperreal illustration of Lee’s ‘creative reassembly of already-significant elements’. More broadly, too, the model as a whole is a work of bricolage, owing to Virtual LUG’s creative process of individualised collaboration. As the sum total of fourteen unique scenes built by different creators—fourteen ‘already significant elements’, reassembled inventively—this model that appears at first glance to be a unified whole actually turns out to be a bricolage of various design languages.
For example, while the model’s gigantic Cyclops (Fig. 3) and Laestrygonians (Fig. 4) both dwarf Odysseus’ miniature crew, the Cyclops is built in the simplified, cartoonish style of an enlarged yellow-hued minifigure whereas the Laestrygonians have human-like paunches and realistic skin tones. This type of scene-to-scene difference in vernacular, coupled with the fact that each scene is designated by its own placard listing its title and the name of its designer (Fig. 5), reflects what Lee calls the ‘atomistic’ nature of bricolage: that ‘the meaning of the whole is visibly made up of component parts that retain some distinctiveness rather than disappearing into the whole’ (12).

Figure 2.

Virtual LUG’s Corinthian columns. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 15:52, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=952.

Figure 3.

Polyphemus as an enlarged minifigure. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 4:35, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=275.

Figure 4.

The realistic Laestrygonians. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 19:05, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=1145.

Figure 5.

An example of an individual scene (in this case, the Island of Aeolus), with a placard showing which of Virtual LUG’s members designed it. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 4:55, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=295.

As for the model’s Spielraum, the subject matter itself brings the model into alignment with a vision of childlike play. The Odyssey is not a children’s tale per se, but children’s book authors have often reformulated its story in this more juvenile genre. Francesca Maria Richards, in her study of adaptations of the Odyssey for children (see also Murnaghan 196–200), argues that children’s literature is responsible for the ‘privileging of the adventure episodes of the Homeric epic’ in our present-day cultural consciousness (7). In particular, Richards discusses how Charles Lamb’s 1808 The Adventures of Ulysses, which takes Book 9 of the Odyssey as the starting point of its narrative, recasts Odysseus’ nostos as the prototype for the swashbuckling adventure stories that would become irresistible to young boys in the British Empire (106, 122, 145). For Richards, the outsized and continually snowballing influence of a Lambian interpretation of the Odyssey explains how, even though ‘Odysseus’ adventures constitute less than one third of the poem’, in today’s popular imagination the Odyssey as a whole is nearly synonymous with the apologoi, the series of adventures narrated by Odysseus (7). Accordingly, Virtual LUG’s model—which altogether skips the Odyssey’s first four books (the Telemachy), and greatly compresses the epic’s Ithaca-set second half—operates within a tradition of reception of the Odyssey as a children’s adventure tale. In essence, it provides descendants of those Lamb-loving schoolboys with a three-dimensional, 300-square-foot map of the daring exploits that their progenitors surely imagined and re-enacted time and again with their own childhood playmates. And indeed, in light of Kyle Meikle’s idea that children’s fiction as a genre invites a level of participation and interactivity that other scholars might see as atypical of the novel’s supposed media-specific passivity (542–43), it becomes even clearer that Virtual LUG’s playful Odyssey is very much in line with the spirit of Lamb’s adaptation.

With that said, one specific scene that is prominently featured in Virtual LUG’s model does not appear in Lamb’s book, for it makes only the most fleeting of appearances in the Odyssey itself: the City of Troy scene. This depiction of the sack of Troy (Fig. 6), along with the nearby Greek Fleet scene (Fig. 7), seems indebted to the LEGO war diorama genre described by Elam: the scene’s overall composition is reminiscent of a D-Day-esque amphibious assault. Explicit violence is not portrayed to the extent that Elam finds it in other war dioramas (curiously, here the Greeks appear to have climbed out of their Trojan Horse prematurely and have assembled on the beach outside of the city walls), but warriors on both sides are bristling with weapons and prepared for the impending clash. What is particularly noteworthy is that this battle scene (including 
the Greek Fleet) features the largest cluster of Easter eggs in the entire model: a Greek-inspired emblem of the Virtual LUG group⁵ on the shield of Achilles; a Chicago Bears logo⁶ on the sail of a raft; Star Wars Wookiees as well as characters from The LEGO Movie mixed in with the Greek seamen; and even a ship full of ‘signature figures’ representing the members of Virtual LUG who contributed to the model.⁷ While similarly playful Easter eggs are scattered throughout the other scenes as well, they are unmistakably concentrated most heavily in the area of the model threatened by the greatest spectre of mass violence, as though there is an implicit understanding amongst AFOLs that the menace of grisly realism must be counterbalanced by the light-heartedness of a winking reference.

Figure 6.

The sack of Troy. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 19:40, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=1180.

Figure 7.

The Greek Fleet, featuring Star Wars Wookiees (left) and Virtual LUG’s “signature figures” (right). Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 2:42, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=162. N.B.: Although the oarsmen are facing Troy, which suggests that they would be rowing in the opposite direction, the ships are clearly meant to be sailing toward Troy. Their prows are pointed that way, and in his interview Phipson refers to the ships as the “invasion fleet” (Beyond the Brick, 3:00–3:10).

AN EPIC MODEL

Clearly, Virtual LUG’s model of the Odyssey is deeply influenced by the established conventions of its medium. At the same time, though, it owes much of its shape and spirit to the ways in which it interprets its source material. We have already seen that the popular reception of the Odyssey as an adventure story impacts Virtual LUG’s LEGO adaptation; how else might the model converse with modern conceptions of its classical source?

The notion of epic—and, in particular, the new popular meaning that the term has taken on—looms over Virtual LUG’s model. After all, the model is an adaptation of one of the foundational examples of the epic genre, so it would be difficult for it to completely avoid engaging with the idea of epic. But for Virtual LUG, ‘epic’ does not seem to hold the same meaning as it does for classicists and literary scholars. Within the academic community, epic is a term of ever-increasing complexity. Minna Skafte Jensen notes that the explosion of anthropological fieldwork on the epic tradition in communities all over the world has made it immensely challenging for the post–Parry and Lord scholarly community to establish a working definition of epic that takes into account the astonishing diversity of its instantiations (2–4). Similarly, Adeline Johns-Putra acknowledges that constructing ‘a simple definition of the epic’ is impossible, as it ‘would have to account for the endless variations displayed by all the texts currently considered epic’ (1–2). Richard Martin questions the practice of using a narrow reading of Aristotle as our authoritative image of the Greek concept of epic, arguing instead that Greek epic was a ‘rich and varied archaic verbal tapestry’ subject to temporal and contextual change (10–12). Indeed, for Martin, even Homeric epic is deceptively challenging to pin down as a genre: he reminds us that Homer was also purportedly the author of the lost Margites, a humorous story about ‘the ridiculous adventures of a numbskull’, and the survival of that poem would have given us a vastly different understanding of what we regard as characteristically Homeric (12–13).

Virtual LUG, meanwhile, seem entirely unconcerned with these debates. For that matter, they are not even particularly concerned with gaining a complete understanding of the Odyssey’s narrative, let alone the contested nature of its genre. Throughout his explanatory interview, Virtual LUG member Chris Phipson continually struggles to recall specific plot points. For example, he implicitly reveals that he forgets exactly how Odysseus winds up encountering Polyphemus (Beyond the Brick 3:35–3:40: ‘There’s a whole story; it’d take an hour just to tell this section’), and later he outright confuses Calypso for Circe (6:10–6:20: ‘Odysseus spends approximately seven years on the Isle of Circe as her lover’). On two occasions, he directly states that he has not read the Odyssey (14:25–14:30: ‘I think Apollo’s worked in there somewhere, but, you know, hey, I only watched the movie... I didn’t sit down and read the Odyssey’; 17:35–7:40: ‘I strongly suggest reading the book, even though I didn’t’), and at another point, he suggests that only one member of Virtual LUG is especially interested in Homeric literature (18:40–18:45: ‘Kevin is very passionate about the Odyssey, so we put him in charge’).

By no means do I mention any of this to denigrate Phipson; I merely intend to contextualise his group’s work. The Virtual LUG collective is composed not of classicists but of members of the general public, and (apart from Kevin) they seem not even to have any particular affinity for classics. Their reception of Homer, as a result, comes from a popular rather than a specialised perspective; it therefore follows that their understanding of epic is informed less by Parry and Lord and more by mass culture. In contemporary popular discourse, ‘epic’ has become primarily an adjective, and it is used to describe anything that is big, spectacular, impressive, or otherwise larger than life: an epic battle, an epic fail, or last night’s epic football match (Paul 2–3).⁸ By this definition, Virtual LUG’s model certainly is epic, and reading it in this way can account for many of the artistic decisions behind it. Virtual LUG devote a great deal of table space to their enormous rendition of the sack of Troy, for instance, even though in the Odyssey its primary mention is a brief summary in Book 8: this iconic scene provides the pretext for an epic showpiece, with massive troop formations and towering fortifications, and thus it must be given top billing. Elsewhere, too, fidelity to the source material is sacrificed in favour of sheer spectacle, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the so-called Hall of Hades scene. The actual text of Odyssey 11 sees Odysseus performing a nekyia, a ritual in which he digs a shallow pit and sacrifices two sheep in order to summon shades up from the Underworld.⁹ But instead of replicating this nekyia scene—which, admittedly, could come across as static and underwhelming if rendered in LEGO—Virtual LUG opt for the far more spectacular fare of a full-on katabasis, an actual descent into the Underworld (Fig. 8). Moreover, they inset this katabasis into a sunken portion of their table display, and they enhance the ensemble with glow-in-the-dark blacklights, a magnetic levitating platform, a swirling portal of doom, and a ‘Haunted Hell Ship’ sailing down a river of fiery red LEGO studs (Beyond the Brick 9:00–9:05). Never mind that almost nothing about Virtual LUG’s scene has any direct grounding in Book 11 of the Odyssey; the point is that the visuals are so stunning—and the building techniques are so downright impressive (A levitating platform! A swirling portal!)—that the interviewer from Beyond the Brick is inspired to enthusiastically commend Virtual LUG for ‘just tak[ing] it to the next level to make it so much cooler’ (11:05–11:15). Similarly, the Isle of Helios scene (the highlight of which is undoubtedly the flashing LED-lit thunderbolt destroying Odysseus’ ship) also includes an entire undersea tableau (Fig. 9) complete with mermaids, schools of fish, and a motorised shark chasing a hapless swimming sailor. In the Homeric version of this scene, the only hints of underwater description come when the helmsman ‘fell from the deck like a diver’ (12.414–15: ἀρνευτῆρι ἐοικὼς/ κάππεσ᾽ ἀπ᾽ ἰκριόφιν) and the other sailors ‘were carried on the waves like sea-birds’ (12.418–19: κορώνῃσιν ἴκελοι.../ κύμασιν ἐμφορέοντο). Virtual LUG’s model, on the other hand, uses the scene as an excuse to luxuriate in a vibrant, kinetic, richly detailed aquatic world that takes up nearly as much physical space as the Isle of Helios proper.

Figure 8.

The Underworld. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 10:55, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=655.

Figure 9.

The Isle of Helios, with its large underwater portion. Beyond the Brick, detail from YouTube video, 18:39, https://youtu.be/PvsYEniseGk?t=1119.

This reading of Virtual LUG’s creative philosophy maps nicely onto a set of reflective comments that Phipson makes at the end of his interview. Thinking back on past Virtual LUG models (the group had done The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz in the three years prior to the Odyssey), Phipson remarks that the group’s goal is always to ‘get bigger and bigger and bigger’ with each new model they produce for the annual Brickworld exposition, which is their showcase event of the year. ‘Unfortunately’, he continues, the colossal scale of their Odyssey model means that ‘we have to get bigger, better, stronger, and faster for next year’ (21:15–21:25). This is no easy feat, he reminds the interviewer: ‘next year, it’s gotta be bigger than 300 square feet, and it’s gotta be a better story, and it’s gotta be more involved’ (21:45–21:55). But his group remains undeterred, because ‘the general consensus is, Virtual LUG: go big or go home’ (22:00–22:05). This, for Phipson, is exactly what Virtual LUG represent. They are on an increasingly frenetic upward trajectory of bigger, more spectacular, more impressive, larger than larger than life. They need to find a way to make it bigger than a set-piece battle at the gates of a mythical city; they need a better story than a fiery descent into a glow-in-the-dark hellscape; they need a more involved scene than a full-on underwater extravaganza. Whatever they do, it has got to be epic—in the modern sense of the word, that is.

FROM EPIC TO NOVEL

But intriguingly, in Phipson’s 22-minute conversation with his interviewer, the word epic is not mentioned once. Surely this omission was not intended to gesture towards any deeper significance (in all probability it was not even deliberate); nonetheless, it raises the question of whether Virtual LUG’s Odyssey is better understood as something other than an epic.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is worth turning to Mikhail Bakhtin. His seminal treatment of the generic distinctions between epic and novel has proven endlessly useful to classicists, both for its virtues and for its apparent oversights. In particular on the latter front, John Peradotto opines that ‘close readers of Homer are far more likely to recognize the Odyssey in Bakhtin’s characterization of the novel than in his account of epic’ (53). And if the Odyssey as a text resembles a Bakhtinian novel, then what about the Odyssey as a LEGO model? It is beyond the scope of this article to rehearse all of Bakhtin’s characteristics of the novel,¹⁰ but especially relevant to Virtual LUG’s model is the Bakhtinian notion of the novel as polyphonic. This idea, closely linked to the similar concept of heteroglossia, takes its shape from Bakhtin’s famous description of Dostoevsky’s novels as containing ‘a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’ (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 6). For Bakhtin, polyphony is a defining textual feature of what makes a novel a novel—and this feature, as it were, can also be found in physical form within Virtual LUG’s model. In other words, though Virtual LUG’s members (with the possible exception of Kevin) would freely admit to not being Peradotto’s ideal ‘close readers of Homer’, they have nonetheless nestled a key quality of the Bakhtinian novel within the core of their adaptation of the Odyssey.

This physicalized polyphony is encoded into Virtual LUG’s aforementioned creative process of individualised collaboration—the model as macro-scale bricolage. Put another way, the model, with its fourteen different scenes produced by separate creators, is polyphonic: it is the result of fourteen ‘independent’ efforts, of fourteen ‘fully valid voices’ interpreting their own specific scenes. Granted, Bakhtin’s notion does not fit perfectly here, as these voices are collected into one composite model rather than remaining fully ‘unmerged’—but because each scene remains visually distinct from the others, their ultimate arrangement might be read as analogous to the way that many disparate perspectives are woven into a single polyphonic novel. Revealingly, Phipson recounts several anecdotes about last-minute hiccups in the model’s construction that shed further light on the polyphonic nature of the endeavour, with its co-creators often talking past one another as they attempted to bring their independent efforts together. Phipson mentions one especially frantic incident when he and another member had a misunderstanding about who was supposed to construct the table to display the Isle of Helios scene, resulting in a mad dash back to Phipson’s home to custom-build a new, precisely-measured wooden table in order to avert the crisis (Beyond the Brick 15:25–16:00). Less dramatic but no less significant is the fact that, at the time the interview was filmed, one of the model’s signature features—a halo of LEGO clouds designed to slowly rotate around the peak of Mount Olympus—was no longer working because the scene’s creator needed to leave the exposition early, taking with him the motor that powered the effect (12:45–13:20). Such assorted miscues and miscommunications reveal that Virtual LUG’s model exists in an unstable equilibrium, with a polyphonic tug-and-pull quietly threatening to tear apart this collection of various perspectives.

But in the end, there is one crucial perspective that goes wholly unrepresented in Virtual LUG’s model. Within Virtual LUG’s depiction of Odysseus’ wanderings, two scenes from the source text are missing. The absence of the first—the siege of Ismarus, a blink-and-you-miss-it attack on a minor outlying city at the beginning of Book 9—can be easily explained by Virtual LUG’s desire to reproduce a more iconic battle (namely, the sack of Troy) instead. But the second should give us pause: there is no Scheria, land of the Phaeacians. In Homer’s Odyssey, a beaten, battered Odysseus washes up on the shore of Scheria; he is led to the court of King Alcinous, where he tells his hosts the story of his arduous journey, and only after his tale is finished do the Phaeacians escort him back to his homeland. All of this is to say that, in truth, there should be an additional island amidst Virtual LUG’s vast LEGO sea, situated just between the Isle of Calypso and Ithaca: a scene of Odysseus, holding forth at a sumptuous Phaeacian banquet, narrating his trials and tribulations while a rapt royal audience listens in spellbound awe. What is so crucial about this scene is that it is the closest that we, the reader of the Odyssey, come to a face-to-face encounter with Homer. In witnessing Odysseus as storyteller, as bard, we are witnessing the performance of epic poetry.¹¹ For this reason, Scheria is the most epic (in one strict sense, at least) of the Odyssey’s many locales: it is the place where the most diegetic epic narrativizing occurs. It is, in short, the place where tales are sung by singers of tales. For Scheria to be entirely omitted from Virtual LUG’s model is for the epic genre as a whole to be omitted, to be left without a seat at Chris Phipson’s custom-made, precisely measured, last-minute wooden table. In the most novelistic of twists, it seems, this polyphonic model has no need for a rhapsode.

CONCLUSION: PLAYING WELL

Inventive as they may be, Virtual LUG are not the only LEGO creators to have situated their work within the context of classics. Ryan McNaught and Rocco Buttliere, for instance, have each built models of ancient buildings and cities, and Liam D. Jensen has designed minifigures of notable modern-day classicists such as Mary Beard, Donna Zuckerberg, Bettany Hughes, and Gonda Van Steen. But these other projects are ones that lay claim to a certain amount of scholarly heft, and their creators betray a keen desire to be taken seriously within a more exclusive academic community. McNaught built his models—of the Colosseum, the Acropolis, and Pompeii—for exhibitions at the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Museum,¹² where the curatorial staff likened them to cork models from the Grand Tour era (Barker 41). Buttliere is even more direct about the seriousness of his enterprise: he supplemented his model of Imperial Rome (commissioned by the Museu da Imaginação in São Paolo) with a 7000-word descriptive artist’s statement that positions his work as a spiritual heir to such ambitious projects as Rodolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis Romae and Italo Gismondi’s Plastico di Roma Imperiale (Buttliere). Meanwhile, Jensen’s website includes a page titled ‘SERIOUS USE OF LEGO’, with links to examples of LEGO being used in university classics departments (Jensen).

But Virtual LUG have chosen a different route. They make no gestures towards a classicising tradition, nor do they justify their work with an appeal to intellectual seriousness. They are adapting the Odyssey because it is a good story, not because, as Seth L. Schein details, the Great Books-ification of America has gilded Homeric references in their latest coat of cultural cachet (279–80). (Indeed, based on his interview, Phipson at least does not even seem fully aware of the cultural cachet that Homer can confer.) In some sense, then, Virtual LUG’s engagement with classics actually mirrors that of LEGO as a corporation: its founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, named his toy business after the Danish words for ‘play well’, and it was only after his death that anyone at the company made the coincidental connection (aided by a fairly liberal approach to translation) that ‘lego’ can also mean ‘I put together’ in Latin (Lauwaert 222).

Likewise, the members of Virtual LUG most certainly play well. They play with form and genre; they play on an epic scale. And when they put it all together, it just so happens that they are playing with classics.

Footnotes

See, among many others, Gregory N. Daugherty’s criteria for what makes a film an adaptation of the Odyssey; Abram Fox and HyoSil Suzy Hwang-Eschelbacher’s and C. W. Marshall’s Odyssean contributions to Son of Classics and Comics; Hara Thliveri on Mikis Theodorakis’ song-cycle Odyssey; Fiona Hobden on the Odyssey in documentaries; and Richard Cole on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey—which, despite its title, is not primarily based on the Odyssey but is instead an open-world mythological reworking of the Peloponnesian War.

For a deeper analysis of this phenomenon, see Shannon Brownlee’s article on the aesthetics of brickfilms.

It is worth noting—if not directly related to the immediate concerns of this article—that both Virtual LUG and their creative output straddle the physical/digital divide, resulting in an interesting circularity. The Virtual LUG collective is an online group that comes together to construct an in-person end product, which then lives on only because it is fed back online. (Its 1.1 million YouTube views—and counting—far outstrip the number of LEGO fans who saw the physical model in the several days it existed at Brickworld.) This cycle complicates the idea of digital fandom in ways that Paul Booth and Lucy Bennett both hint at in their influential works on the subject (Booth 128; Bennett 15). See also a more recent article by Lynn Zubernis and Katherine Larsen, which addresses more extensively the role of ‘real-world’ interactions (including at fan conventions like Brickworld) within digital fan communities.

Here, Lee passes up an opportunity for an excellent pun, perhaps because other scholars had already capitalised on it: in the titles of their respective 2018 articles, Peter B. Gregg and Madeleine Hunter both (independently, to my knowledge) make tongue-in-cheek references to LEGO as bric(k)olage.

The Greek letters λ, υ, and γ surrounding a capital V, an inversion of the supposed Spartan Λ.

Because the exposition took place in Illinois.

See Robert M. Mentyka’s philosophical reading of the signature figure (sigfig) phenomenon in the AFOL community.

Joanna Paul goes on to argue that, within the context of cinema, the definition of epic remains more layered than its everyday use connoting ‘scale and spectacle’ (3).

The nekyia is treated in some detail by Gunnel Ekroth, whose 2018 article examines Odysseus’ ritualised communication with the Underworld and how it might correspond with historical Hittite religious practices.

Bakhtin begins to lay these out—after, appropriately, referring to the ‘plastic possibilities of the novel’—several pages into his essay (‘Epic and Novel’ 3, 7). See also Nagy (72–74), Kahane (passim), Paul (29–30), and Arnott (359–60) for fuller discussions the Bakhtinian novel vis-à-vis Homeric epic.

This is a somewhat contentious claim, and one that is borne out of my own personal taste: I like to interpret Odysseus amongst the Phaeacians as a stand-in for the poet-cum-rhapsode. (He is, after all, delivering his story in hexameters!) Others, like Ruth Scodel and Deborah Beck, make worthy counter-arguments that Odysseus here is not a bard but rather ‘just’ a gifted non-bardic storyteller. But even those who reject an Odysseus-as-bard reading do so by setting Odysseus in opposition to the unambiguously bardic figure of Demodocus, the poet of Alcinous’ royal court who sings of the Trojan War (Scodel 171–73; Beck 226). In any case, this technical quibble does not affect the main thrust of my observation: Scheria is the closest we come to a face-to-face encounter with Homer. (You just need to decide for yourself whether Homer looks like Odysseus or Demodocus.)

The Acropolis model is now on display at the Acropolis Museum in Athens—which was well worth a visit even without any LEGO, but which certainly does not suffer from its brick-built addition!