I’ve written a few, but mostly they are notes and little snippets I’ve yet to publish here I think. I’ve yet to find my notes and stories and properly put them in order sorry about that.
I am so sorry, and it’s not your fault, but I will never understand your stories… I know it’s just a me problem, but I still can’t understand them though.
I always love a good mythological adaptation, and the idea of bringing together the various pantheons is an interesting way to do reimagine the old material.
I thought the use of minor characters like Melinoë (a late Orphic addition) and Macaria (only mentioned once, and that in a post-classical work) was especially interesting. The role reversal is also interesting. Melinoë, also known as the nymph of madness, was often portrayed in Orphic literature as someone to be overcome in the Underworld, a sinister figure. Macaria, on the other hand, as the goddess of righteous death, seems positive. Also, Melinoë is sometimes portrayed as the result of a clandestine rendevous between Zeus and Persephone rather than as a true daughter of Hades. But the ancient Greeks had many different interpretations of their own gods. Hardly anyone is uniformly portrayed as good or evil. That's one of the things that makes them so ripe for reinterpretation.
Thanks! This is one of my grander tales, and one I enjoyed writing back in the day, as to Melinoë she but plays a small role compared to her younger sister. In this tale they are both daughters of Hades and Persephone, as the original version of the stories I read as a child had them featured in that capacity that said I to have read the Zeus version.
Ah, yes, there are so many competing versions. As an English teacher, I can tell you that makes the subject somewhat challenging to teach. Modern readers are used to absorbing literature in novels in which characters behave in a coherent way, changing only as circumstances change. Myths presented in a modern anthology format, which is usually kind of thing selected as a class text, inevitably portray gods and heroes both in a variety of inconsistent ways.
Many do, some such as Heracles are mostly consistent but he's an odd-ball, the Norse gods and Shinto ones behaved consistently but this is more due to Snorri Sturluson and the Kojiki having aimed for consistency. But even they have inconsistent moments and stories, just as the Egyptians had them, and the Babylonians were also pretty inconsistent.
The Greeks have quite a few weird contradictions in their stories, so that streamlining is a long, tedious task but can also be quite fun. My hope is that once I finish with the Olympnomachi and the tale of the Escape from Narratsiiya (the origin of the Elves), I will be able to move steadily more towards my own myths.
The main figure from Greek Myths I'm enthusiastic about writing about though is Heracles, an old favourite of mine.
But glad you like these stories, I can only imagine the difficulties you as an English teacher must face when recounting the stories of the Greeks. I'm sure you do a fantastic job of it though.
Interestingly, I've found Heracles to be one of the difficult ones. That's partly because I was using Edith Hamilton, who paints him as a dumbass (which really only a couple of stories suggest). More problematic are the stories that paint Heracles as a savage. They are probably products of the period after the Dorian invasion. The Dorians claimed descent from Heracles, so it's likely that myths attempting to cast Heracles as a villain dated from that period.
As for doing a fantastic job, well, I tried. Edith Hamilton has great style but was writing for adults interested in mythology, not for fourteen-year-olds, and anyway adopts kind of a Victorian approach to the myths. You don't want a really explicit version for fourteen-year-olds, anyway, but Hamilton polishes the rough edges so much that some of the stories are barely recognizable.
But what really got me was that she made no real attempt to present characters consistently from story to story. She also cut stories in odd ways, for example, having Jason appear before Pelias wearing only one sandal without explaining how he'd lost the sandal in the first place (which also explains why Hera took an interest in Jason). Students used to reading novels had to get through a lot of what amounted to disconnected stories.
Hamilton was also very ethnocentric, making it sound as if all other ancient people were wallowing in darkness until the ancient Greeks brought light into the world.
Sigh!
Finding a general study of Greek myths that was written for teenagers rather than scholars on one end or little kids on the other was tough. After retirement, I ended up writing my own. But that's a story for another time.
Ahhh fascinant, I love this comment thanks for telling me about Edith Hamilton and your own history. You've lived a fascinating life and done much good by recounting the Greek tales.
I myself always looked to Heracles, as a model of a proud defender of his fellow man and also a sinful man who suffers too much. I guess some of my views were modelled after Legendary Journeys, and also by those stories where he shows mercy and pity upon the likes of Prometheus and is humbled before Omphale.
Wait were there stories before this involving the elves and the world during the titans?
I’ve written a few, but mostly they are notes and little snippets I’ve yet to publish here I think. I’ve yet to find my notes and stories and properly put them in order sorry about that.
I am so sorry, and it’s not your fault, but I will never understand your stories… I know it’s just a me problem, but I still can’t understand them though.
It's okay, they're pretty weird and out there and bent towards mythology.
I always love a good mythological adaptation, and the idea of bringing together the various pantheons is an interesting way to do reimagine the old material.
I thought the use of minor characters like Melinoë (a late Orphic addition) and Macaria (only mentioned once, and that in a post-classical work) was especially interesting. The role reversal is also interesting. Melinoë, also known as the nymph of madness, was often portrayed in Orphic literature as someone to be overcome in the Underworld, a sinister figure. Macaria, on the other hand, as the goddess of righteous death, seems positive. Also, Melinoë is sometimes portrayed as the result of a clandestine rendevous between Zeus and Persephone rather than as a true daughter of Hades. But the ancient Greeks had many different interpretations of their own gods. Hardly anyone is uniformly portrayed as good or evil. That's one of the things that makes them so ripe for reinterpretation.
Thanks! This is one of my grander tales, and one I enjoyed writing back in the day, as to Melinoë she but plays a small role compared to her younger sister. In this tale they are both daughters of Hades and Persephone, as the original version of the stories I read as a child had them featured in that capacity that said I to have read the Zeus version.
So glad you enjoyed this tale.
Ah, yes, there are so many competing versions. As an English teacher, I can tell you that makes the subject somewhat challenging to teach. Modern readers are used to absorbing literature in novels in which characters behave in a coherent way, changing only as circumstances change. Myths presented in a modern anthology format, which is usually kind of thing selected as a class text, inevitably portray gods and heroes both in a variety of inconsistent ways.
Many do, some such as Heracles are mostly consistent but he's an odd-ball, the Norse gods and Shinto ones behaved consistently but this is more due to Snorri Sturluson and the Kojiki having aimed for consistency. But even they have inconsistent moments and stories, just as the Egyptians had them, and the Babylonians were also pretty inconsistent.
The Greeks have quite a few weird contradictions in their stories, so that streamlining is a long, tedious task but can also be quite fun. My hope is that once I finish with the Olympnomachi and the tale of the Escape from Narratsiiya (the origin of the Elves), I will be able to move steadily more towards my own myths.
The main figure from Greek Myths I'm enthusiastic about writing about though is Heracles, an old favourite of mine.
But glad you like these stories, I can only imagine the difficulties you as an English teacher must face when recounting the stories of the Greeks. I'm sure you do a fantastic job of it though.
Interestingly, I've found Heracles to be one of the difficult ones. That's partly because I was using Edith Hamilton, who paints him as a dumbass (which really only a couple of stories suggest). More problematic are the stories that paint Heracles as a savage. They are probably products of the period after the Dorian invasion. The Dorians claimed descent from Heracles, so it's likely that myths attempting to cast Heracles as a villain dated from that period.
As for doing a fantastic job, well, I tried. Edith Hamilton has great style but was writing for adults interested in mythology, not for fourteen-year-olds, and anyway adopts kind of a Victorian approach to the myths. You don't want a really explicit version for fourteen-year-olds, anyway, but Hamilton polishes the rough edges so much that some of the stories are barely recognizable.
But what really got me was that she made no real attempt to present characters consistently from story to story. She also cut stories in odd ways, for example, having Jason appear before Pelias wearing only one sandal without explaining how he'd lost the sandal in the first place (which also explains why Hera took an interest in Jason). Students used to reading novels had to get through a lot of what amounted to disconnected stories.
Hamilton was also very ethnocentric, making it sound as if all other ancient people were wallowing in darkness until the ancient Greeks brought light into the world.
Sigh!
Finding a general study of Greek myths that was written for teenagers rather than scholars on one end or little kids on the other was tough. After retirement, I ended up writing my own. But that's a story for another time.
Ahhh fascinant, I love this comment thanks for telling me about Edith Hamilton and your own history. You've lived a fascinating life and done much good by recounting the Greek tales.
I myself always looked to Heracles, as a model of a proud defender of his fellow man and also a sinful man who suffers too much. I guess some of my views were modelled after Legendary Journeys, and also by those stories where he shows mercy and pity upon the likes of Prometheus and is humbled before Omphale.