27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 5 works from No Country for Old Men to Iliad. Back to all 27 works
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
2005
Cormac McCarthy
Contemporary American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's crime novel set in 1980 West Texas, alternating the chase between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh with first-person monologues by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Direct source, well documented.
The film adapts McCarthy's novel closely, keeping its plot, its title, much of its dialogue (including Chigurh's coin-toss scene at the gas station) and Bell's closing account of his dreams. The Coens cut most of Bell's interior monologues and Moss's encounter with the teenage hitchhiker but preserve the novel's decision to have Moss die offscreen.
1985
Cormac McCarthy
Late twentieth-century American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's novel of the Glanton gang of scalp hunters on the 1849-50 borderlands, dominated by the philosophizing, apparently unkillable Judge Holden.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Chigurh descends from Judge Holden: both are near-supernatural killers who explain their violence as the working of fate or necessity. No Country moves Blood Meridian's borderland violence into the 1980 drug trade and asks the same question about whether evil in the region has ever changed.
1667
John Milton
English Restoration. England. Written in English.
Blank-verse epic of Satan's rebellion and the fall of Adam and Eve.
Disputed link, conjectural.
Critics have read Judge Holden as a Satanic figure in Milton's mold, a fallen intelligence of great eloquence in rebellion against moral order. McCarthy has not confirmed the debt.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Ahab is modeled partly on Milton's Satan, a proud rebel against cosmic authority. Melville annotated his copy of Milton, and Ishmael calls Ahab a figure of Promethean, Satanic defiance.
c. 750 BCE
Homer
Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.
Epic of the wrath of Achilles during the Trojan War.
Structural model, probable.
Milton opens with an invocation to the Muse and stages the war in heaven with Homeric set pieces. He presents his poem as surpassing 'the wrath of stern Achilles' as a heroic subject.
Structural model, well documented.
Virgil built the second half of the Aeneid on the Iliad, with Aeneas fighting Turnus as Achilles fought Hector. The epic similes, battle catalogs and invocations are taken from Homer.
This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.
