The reception of ancient Greece and Rome in children’s literature: heroes and eagles 9789004298590, 9004298592, 9789004298606, 9004298606

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The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature

Metaforms Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity

Editors-in-Chief Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universität Berlin) Jon Solomon (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) John T. Hamilton (Harvard University) Editorial Board Kyriakos Demetriou (University of Cyprus) Constanze Guthenke (Princeton University) Miriam Leonard (University College London) Mira Seo (University of Michigan)

VOLUME 6

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/srca

The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Children’s Literature Heroes and Eagles Edited by

Lisa Maurice

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: Drawing by Shosh Hadad, © 2015. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The reception of ancient Greece and Rome in children’s literature : heroes and eagles / edited by Lisa Maurice.   pages cm -- (Metaforms ; volume 6)  ISBN 978-90-04-29859-0 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29860-6 (e-book)  1. Children’s literature--Classical influences. 2. Children’s literature--History and criticism. I. Maurice, Lisa, 1968- II. Series: Metaforms ; v. 6.  PN1009.A1R416 2015  809’.9335838--dc23 2015026054

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2212-9405 isbn 978-90-04-29859-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29860-6 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

In memory of my mother, Anne Lebetkin, who introduced me to the joy of books, and my grandmother, Trudie Matthews, in whose eyes I could do no wrong. filia in gremio ac sinu matris educabatur

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Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures x Notes on Contributors xi Children, Greece and Rome: Heroes and Eagles 1

Part 1 Classics and Ideology in Children’s Literature 1 Classics, Children’s Literature, and the Character of Childhood, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to The Enchanted Castle 17 Elizabeth Hale 2 ‘Time is only a mode of thought, you know’: Ancient History, Imagination and Empire in E. Nesbit’s Literature for Children 30 Joanna Paul 3 (De)constructing Arcadia: Polish Struggles with History and Differing Colours of Childhood in the Mirror of Classical Mythology  56 Katarzyna Marciniak

Part 2 Ancient Mythology, Modern Authors 4 The Metanarrative of Picture Books: ‘Reading’ Greek Myth for (and to) Children 85 Barbara Weinlich 5 Reading the Fiction of Video Games 105 Mary McMenomy 6 From Chiron to Foaly: The Centaur in Classical Mythology and Fantasy Literature 139 Lisa Maurice

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Classical Memories in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia 169 Niall W. Slater

Part 3 Classical Mythology for Children 8

Men into Pigs: Circe’s Transformations in Versions of The Odyssey for Children 195 Sheila Murnaghan

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Chasing Odysseus in Twenty-First-Century Children’s Fiction 213 Geoffrey Miles

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The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Retellings of Myth for Children 233 Deborah H. Roberts

Part 4 Ancient Rome for Children 11

The “Grand Tour” as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion 259 Catherine Butler

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“Wulf the Briton”: Resisting Rome in a 1950s British Boys’ Adventure Strip 280 Tony Keen

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Bridging the Gap between Generations: Astérix between Child and Adult, Classical and Modern  291 Eran Almagor

Bibliography 309 Index 336

Acknowledgements This book first started as a result of growing interest in two passions and interests of mine, children’s literature and the ancient world. For the latter I must thank my teachers, both at school and later as an undergraduate at Cambridge University and then a graduate student, at Bar-Ilan University. I have been privileged to be taught by a group of people whose erudition is matched only by their kindness and generosity of spirit. While many fall into this category, Paul Collins, Gillian Hylson-Smith, Julian Morgan, Nick Denyer, Neil Hopkinson, David Schaps and Ranon Katzoff deserve to be singled out for honourable mention, and I owe each of them a debt of grateful thanks. With regard to children’s literature, gratitude goes to my mother, who introduced me to so many books with endless patience and encouragement as a child – the trips to the travelling library were a highlight of my week from my earliest years - and to my motherin-law, Hilary Maurice, who shares my love of such works, and with whom I have been able to indulge my passion for these books over the past quarter century. For the inspiration of the combined threads of children’s literature and classics, I will be forever thankful to Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt, whose fantastic Asterix and Obelisks conference provided so many contacts and happy memories, and opened the doors to so much further research. On the more practical production side I must thank the anonymous reviewers of this volume, who did so much to improve it, and also the wonderful team at Brill, who worked so hard to produce this book. Tessel Jonquière was patient and friendly at all times, and generous above and beyond the call of duty (as well as providing excellent Amsterdam sightseeing tips), and Debbie de Witt did a painstaking and professional job as production editor, and remained a pleasure to work with throughout. The same must be said of the wonderful contributors to this book, who worked to deadlines, responded to emails, and remained co-operative to the end, making the venture an unusually enjoyable one to co-ordinate. Finally I am truly lucky to be blessed with an amazing family, who took on this project as a collaborative event. My children showed an interest in it at every stage, and even drew and digitally enhanced the cover illustration, while my husband followed my excitement at the progress of the book with pride and tolerant admiration. Their support makes my life and my work so much more rewarding. Thank you to them, and to everyone who helped with the production of this book; any faults that remain are mine, and mine alone.

List of Figures 4.1 From MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli 89 4.2 From GREECE! ROME! MONSTERS! By John Harris 90 4.3 From GREECE! ROME! MONSTERS! by John Harris 96 4.4 From MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli 97 4.5 From GREECE! ROME! MONSTERS! by John Harris 101 4.6 From MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli 102 6.1 Vase depicting a clothed Chiron, together with Achilles, sixth century bce 140 6.2 Screenshot of Chiron (Pierce Brosnan) and Percy (Logan Lerman) from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (20th Century Fox 2010) 153 8.1 Milo Winter, cover illustration for Tanglewood Tales 206 10.1 “Echo and Narcissus” Nicola Ann Sissons, Myths and Legends of the Greeks 249 10.2 “The Boy Who Saw Himself in the Water”, John Raymond Crawford, Greek Tales for Tiny Tots 251 11.1 Henry Ford, ‘The Landing of the Romans’, from A History of England (17) 270

Notes on Contributors Eran Almagor is the author of papers and articles on ancient ethnography and historiography, the image of ancient Persia in Greek literature, Greek Imperial literature, Josephus, Lucian, Strabo, Plutarch (in particular the Lives) and the reception of antiquity in popular culture. He is the co-editor of Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (Bloomsbury 2013). Catherine Butler is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cardiff. Her research interests include children’s literature, the representation of history, gender identity and pedagogy. She is the author (with Hallie O’Donovan) of Reading History in Children’s Books (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and the editor (with Kimberley Reynolds) of Modern Children’s Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She has published articles on place in literature, fantasy, and hypnosis, and on writers such as Diana Wynne Jones, J.R.R. Tolkien and Alan Garner. Her current project is on ‘blind spots’ in academic English practice. Elizabeth Hale is Senior Lecturer in English and Writing, at the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia. She has published widely on topics in children’s and adults’ literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, and classical reception in Australasian literature and theatre. Most recently she is the editor of Maurice Gee: A Literary Companion. The Fiction for Young Readers (Otago University Press, 2014). Her current projects include a monograph on depictions of talent and character in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s literature, and an investigation of the ways Australasian children’s culture engages with classical myth. Tony Keen is a Research Affiliate and Associate Lecturer at the Open University, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame London Global Gateway. His research interests include Classical Reception in Science Fiction and in Cinema. He is the author of Dynastic Lycia (Brill 1998) and the co-editor of The Unsilent Library (sf Foundation 2011). He has published articles on Reception in Ray Harryhausen, Doctor Who and H.G. Wells. His current project is on Roman Britain on screen.

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Katarzyna Marciniak is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition (obta) at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw. Winner of the Prime Minister of Poland Prize for her dissertation, supervised by Prof. Jerzy Axer, on Cicero’s translations from Greek.Ambassador Scientist of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Recipient of the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant for the project Our Mythical Childhood… The Classics and Children’s Literature Between East & West (2012–2013), and the Humboldt Alumni Award for the project Chasing Mythical Beasts… The Reception of Creatures from Graeco-Roman Mythology in Children’s & Young Adults’ Culture as a Transformation Marker (2014–2017). She has published books and articles on Cicero and the reception of Classical Antiquity. In 2013 her adaptation of ancient myths for kids appeared in Poland’s oldest editorial house for young readers. Her current individual project is on Cicero’s reception in popular fiction. Lisa Maurice is Senior Lecturer at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her research interests centre on the reception of the ancient world in modern popular culture and on Roman comedy, particularly the structure of Plautine plays. She is the author of The Teacher in Ancient Rome: the Magister and his World (Lexington 2013), and in addition to the current volume is editor of a volume on the ancient world and modern popular fiction and co-editor, with Eran Almagor, of Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture: Beauty, Bravery, Blood and Glory (both forthcoming, Brill). She has published a range of articles, both on Plautus and on the reception of the ancient world on screen and stage. Mary McMenomy is a classicist turned consultant in interactive storytelling. Under the working name Emily Short, she researches procedural techniques for character and narrative modeling in video games and digital literature. She wrote or contributed to over two dozen games, including Galatea, an award-winning reworking of the Pygmalion myth. She has given papers on classical reception in the children’s stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and in the games of Terry Cavanagh. She is a recurring speaker about narrative and artificial intelligence at the Game Developer’s Conference and at academic conferences on computer-mediated storytelling. She contributed the article on Interactive Fiction for The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media (jhup 2014).

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Geoffrey Miles is Senior Lecturer in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where he teaches and researches early modern literature, classical receptions, and children’s literature (separately and in combination). He is the author of Shakespeare and the Constant Romans and editor of Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology. Most recently he has co-authored two books on New Zealand literature: The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Myth and A Made-Up Place: New Zealand in Young Adult Fiction. He is currently working on a study of the Pygmalion legend in English literature. Sheila Murnaghan is the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor of Greek at the University of  Pennsylvania. She works in the areas of Greek epic and tragedy, gender in  classical culture, and classical reception. Her books include Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (2nd. edition 2011) and Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (co-edited with Hunter S. Gardner, 2014). She is the co-author, with Deborah H. Roberts, of a forthcoming study of classics and childhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Current projects include an edition with commentary of Sophocles’ Ajax and a translation of Euripides’ Medea. Joanna Paul is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. Her research in the area of classical reception studies has focused primarily on reception in popular culture, especially the cinema. Her book, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and she has also published articles on a wide range of films, including Oliver Stone’s Alexander, the work of Fellini, andAgora. She is also the co-editor (with Shelley Hales) of Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today (Oxford University Press, 2011) and is currently working on a monograph on contemporary receptions of Pompeii. Deborah H. Roberts is William R. Kenan Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Apollo and his Oracle in Greek Tragedy (Göttingen 1984) and co-editor, with Francis Dunn and Don Fowler, of Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton 1997). She has published articles on Greek tragedy, Aristotle’s Poetics, and the reception and translation of ancient literature in the

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nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is the translator of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (Hackett 2012) and other Greek tragedies. She is currently completing a collaborative study (with Sheila Murnaghan) of classical reception in relation to childhood from 1850 to 1965. Niall W. Slater (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek, Emory University) focuses on the ancient theatre and its production conditions, prose fiction, and popular reception of classical literature. His books include Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (Penn 2002); Reading Petronius (jhup, 1990); and Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton, 1985; 2nd revised edition 2000), as well as translations for The Birth of Comedy (ed. J.R. Rusten, jhup, 2011) and the Bloomsbury Companion to Euripides’ Alcestis (2013). He is currently working on the fragments of Roman Republican drama as well as Harley Granville Barker’s Euripides productions. Barbara P. Weinlich is Visiting Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Montana. Her research interests include Roman Love Elegy, Latin Epigraphy, Literary Theory, and Reception Studies. She has published widely on Ovid and Propertius, and she is the author of several articles in Classical Reception Studies such as “‘Odyssey, Where Art Thou?’: Myth and Mythmaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Classical and Modern Literature 2005) and “A New Briseis in Troy.” In: M. Winkler ed. Return to Troy: New Essays on the Hollywood Epic. (Brill 2015). Her current book project is on Propertius’ Discourse of Liminality.

Children, Greece and Rome: Heroes and Eagles Greece and Rome have long featured in books for children and teens, whether through the genres of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery stories or mythological compendiums. The depictions and adaptations of the ancient world have varied at different times, however, in accordance with changes in societies and cultures. This book aims to consider those varying receptions of the classical world in children’s literature. The title of this volume, Heroes and Eagles, reflects the two most common ways in which this reception appears, namely in the forms of the portrayal of the Greek heroic world of classical mythology on the one hand, and of the Roman imperial presence on the other. Ancient Greek mythology, both in terms of the myths themselves and of ancient fables, has for a long time been a source of texts for children, a fact that is perhaps rather surprising when their often far from morally uplifting ancient versions are taken into account.1 In more recent years, with the development of fantasy literature as a subgenre of children’s fiction,2 other works have appeared that are strongly influenced by classical elements. Most obvious of these is C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, but the trend continues to modern day, with authors such as J.K. Rowling and Diana Wynne Jones incorporating elements from classical mythology into their books. More recently, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books have adapted Greek myth for the twenty-first century, placing it a modern world setting. The other main form of reception of the ancient world in children’s l­ iterature is in the depiction of Rome as a setting for juvenile fiction. British his­torical fiction for children took a new direction, according to modern under­standing, with Geoffrey Trease’s writing in the 1930’s.3 From that time on, the historical novel for children grew in popularity, and in the 1950’s juvenile historical ­fiction expanded and became more varied in terms of intended audience, subject

1 Antoinette Brazouski and Mary J. Klatt, eds. Children’s Books on Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology: an Annotated Bibliography. No. 40. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994). 2 See Maria Nikolojeva, “The Development of Children’s Fantasy”, in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3 See e.g. Jackie C. Horne, ed., History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children’s Literature (London: Ashgate, 2011) 241; Fiona M. Collins and Judith Graham, eds. Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past (London: Routledge, 2001) 10–11.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_002

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matter and protagonists.4 Historical fiction fell from popularity in the 1960’s, and remained marginal for three decades,5 but over the last twenty years, a revival has taken place and a large quantity of children’s historical writing has appeared.6 The historical fiction set in ancient Rome fits into the wider backdrop of general historical juvenile fiction. Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel, The Eagle of the Ninth, set a new standard for children’s historical fiction and exposed large numbers of children to the world of ancient Rome.7 In the aftermath of Sutcliff’s Roman novels, other books appeared throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, as authors such as Henry Treece, Elizabeth Speare and Geoffrey Trease among others wrote their own Roman historical fiction for young people. The next three decades saw a drop in popularity of such novels. Since 1990, however there has been an, at first slow but then steadily increasing, number of children’s historical novels set in ancient Rome. Of 158 such books published between 1945 and 2013, more than half, eighty-four in number, have appeared since the year 2000, including of course the popular Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence, making this by far the most prolific period for juvenile fiction set in ancient Rome, indicating a revival of this genre in the twenty first century. The main focus of the work is prose fiction, but picture books, comics and comic books for children are also included. The importance of picture books as a sub-genre of children’s literature has long been documented,8 but to date little if any attention has been paid to the reception of the classical world in these works. As research in recent years has shown, comics have been drawing on material from Greek and Roman myth, literature and history since before the Second World War. Although children’s literature studies has traditionally  treated comics only superficially, the importance of comics as a global ­phenomenon associated with children has recently begun to have

4 Suzanne Rahn, “An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for Children”, The Lion and the Unicorn 15.1 (1991) 1. 5 Ibid. 21; Leon Garfield, “Historical Fiction for Our Global Times”, The Horn Book, November/ December, 1988. 6 Michael Cart, Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism (Chicago: American Library Association 2010) 105. 7 See Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 39–46. 8 Bernice E. Cullinan and Lee Galda, Literature and the Child (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 2013) 59–111 (Now in its eight edition, but originally published in 1994); Lawrence R. Sipe, “How picture books work: A semiotically framed theory of text-picture relationships”, Children’s Literature in Education 29.2 (1998) 97–108.

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been ­recognised.9 In keeping with this understanding, classical reception studies have also begun investigating the incorporation of stories featuring ancient Rome and Greece in comics, perhaps most notably in the extensive Astérix series. Historical fiction and retellings of myth are the two most common ways in which Greece and Rome feature in juvenile fiction, but receptions of the classical world in children’s literature are not restricted solely to direct retellings of texts or recreations of the ancient world. Other more subtle influences can also be found, with allusions to the classical past for specific purposes, and this aspect is also reflected in the title of this volume. The words “eagles” and “heroes” are value-laden non-neutral terms, a fact that hints at the idea that the ancient world is modified subjectively by works of juvenile fiction; the concept that the Greeks are ‘heroes’, and the Romans with their eagles, symbol of the military, are conquering soldiers, is an indication of how children’s literature uses Greek and Rome to further other agenda. In other words, the ancient cultures are presented in ways that (consciously or sub-consciously) present ideological viewpoints that the young reader is expected to absorb. The present book also investigates these manipulative receptions of the ancient world in children’s fiction.

Children’s Literature, Cultural History

Children’s literature, often the first meeting point with the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome, is arguably one of the most important experiences in forming perceptions of that culture. Many adults’ perceptions have been indelibly coloured by the ideas formed in their own childhoods through such literary encounters. Until recently, however, little comprehensive work had been done on the subject of the reception of the ancient world in children’s literature. This is despite the fact that, in the view of Seth Lerer at least, children’s literature can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, in the sense that in those societies texts were selected and adapted as educational tools employed in the creation and training of good citizens.10 While this is perhaps interpreting children’s literature in the widest possible sense, it does indicate the crucial point that the study of children’s literature is the study of “the literature of the entire

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George Kovacs and C.W. Marshall, eds. Classics and Comics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 17–34.

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culture.”11 Just as the study of children’s literature is also a study of the child within society, it is also therefore the study of that society and its culture in a wider sense. This has led to the development of children’s literature studies as a form of cultural studies, as Zipes pointed out a decade and a half ago, drawing attention to the fact that while earlier studies in the feel were “bland literary histories” with “positivist methods and a paternalizing ideology to match”, later studies “probed the ulterior motives of children’s literature and explored its socio-political and psychological ramifications.”12 These ulterior motives are highlighted by the very nature of children’s literature. Any book that is written for or given to children involves by definition an element of ideology. As Peter Hunt puts it, “It is arguably impossible for a children’s book…not to be educational or influential in some way; it cannot help but reflect an ideology and, by extension, didacticism…. Children’s writers are in a position of singular responsibility in transmitting cultural values.”13 Thus, in Lerer’s words, “the study of children’s literature is cultural studies,”14 and since that literature is a vital part of Western culture, its study is of importance in understanding that culture. Similarly, Classical Reception Studies argues that the study of the reception of the ancient world, a culture that played such a vital role in the formation of western civilisation and continues to influence society today, provides another tool for understanding western culture.

Classical Reception

The field of reception studies is a relatively new one, but one that has fast developed, not least in the branch of Classical Reception Studies, one of the fastest growing areas in Classics research and teaching. It is now accepted that reception is an integral part of classics itself. Classical reception effectively considers “the artistic or intellectual processes involved in selecting, imitating or adapting ancient works”,15 focusing on the two-way relationship between ante-text and receiving text. While Classical Reception follows the example of wider reception studies in its theoretical approaches and methodology, it also stands out as discrete from these studies, in that classical receptions almost 11 12 13 14 15

Peter Hunt, Introduction to Childen’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1994) 37. Jack Zipes, “Taking Political Stock: New Theoretical and Critical Approaches to AngloAmerican Children’s Literature in the 1980s”, The Lion and the Unicorn 14.1 (1990) 7. Hunt (1994) 3. Lerer (2008) 9. Lorna Hardwick, Reception Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 5.

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always focus upon a receiving text (employed in its wide sense as expounded by Barthes to mean not just written accounts, but any item to be studied), and how that text, as a product of its creator, has reinterpreted an aspect of the ancient world.16 From relatively simplistic beginnings in the early nineteen nineties, Classical Reception has developed a theoretical grounding over the last twenty years, heavily influenced by the Constance School, primarily Wolfgang Iser and HansRobert Jauss, with their emphasis on the theoretical reader and the dialectic process of production and reception. The theories of classical reception were to a great extent sparked by Charles Martindale in a number of publications published between 1992 to 2006, particularly his ground breaking Redeeming The Text, which challenged classicists to theorize reception.17 In Martindale’s own words, which echo those of Zipes’ quote above quite noticeably, this work “mounted an argument—against what are often, if not wholly satisfactorily, termed ‘positivistic’ modes of enquiry—about how classical texts mean and how they may most profitably be interpreted.”18 Redeeming The Text brought together two different interpretations of the reception, namely that by the audience, i.e. the reader’s reception of a text, and the broader idea of the reception of an earlier period of civilization by a later one. Martindale also stressed the transhistorical nature of classical reception in that it must always consider at least three viewpoints – the original Latin or Greek text, the later reception of that text, and our own reading of both.19 As Hardwick emphasised, Reception Studies “participate in the continuous dialogue between the past and the present and also require some ‘lateral’ dialogue in which crossing boundaries of place or language or genre is as important as crossing those of time.”20 16

See Nick Lowe, “What Classicists Do When They Do Reception”, Teaching Reception Studies, London, November 21 2007, Institute of Classical Studies. 17 Charles Martindale, “Redeeming the Text: the Validity of Comparisons of Classical and Post-Classical Literature. A View from Britain”, Arion (3rd series) 1.3 (1992) 45–75; Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993); “Reception”, in Simon Hornblower, and Anthony Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary. (3rd edn.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003) 1294–5; “Reception and the Classics of the Future”, Council of University Classics Departments Bulletin 34 (2005) available from (Accessed 10 December 2014); Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 2006). 18 Charles Martindale, “Reception—a New Humanism? Receptivity, Pedagogy, the Transhistorical”, Classical Receptions Journal 5.2 (2013) 169. 19 Ibid. 172. 20 Hardwick (2003) 4.

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Martindale therefore argued for a dialogue that addressed all these meeting points. Classical Reception regards all later uses of the classical worlds as instances of reception, so that the text itself is a receiver of the ancient tradition, and is an equally valid interpretation; a central point is that, as stated by Martindale, “Meaning is always realized at the point of reception.”21 Influenced by Kantian aesthetics, this approach validates the receptions as legitimate rather than derivative works. Thus, reception according to this understanding offers a replacement for the customary, positivistic attitude to classics, which seeks pure understanding of an ideal past. The Kantian aesthetics approach to Classical Reception was an important step forward in developing theory, but it also had limitations. Another tack has been suggested by scholars who felt that the Kantian approach takes too little account of the contexts in which texts were produced. The surrounding societies and cultures of both source text and reception text had an impact on both,  which the Kantian emphasis on the ‘disinterested’ nature of aesthetic response does not take into consideration. Here, the debates within Classics are mirrored by developing theories of reception in other disciplines, as reflected in Machor and Goldstein’s collection.22 In classical reception this trend is exemplified by Simon Goldhill, but also developed further most notably by Lorna Hardwick and Edith Hall, who argue for the idea of reception as a form of cultural history.23 Feeling that the Kantian approach privileges the individual author as the site of reception, while disregarding other aspects of reception, be they historical, political, social or religious, Goldhill, for example, argues that meaning is realized “in the process of reception” rather than “at the point of reception,” and suggests that reception

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Martindale (1993) 3. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, eds. Reception study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (NY: Psychology Press) 2001. Major works include Lorna Hardwick, Translating Words, Translating Cultures (London: Duckworth, 2000); Hardwick (2003); Lorna Hardwick, and Christopher Stray, A Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Edith Hall, “Putting the Class into Classical Reception”, in Hardwick and Stray, A Companion to Classical Receptions (Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World) (Oxford: Blackwell 2008) 386–97; Edith Hall, The Return of Ulysses: a Cultural History of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (London and NY: IB Tauris, 2008); Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice (London: Duckworth, 2010); Simon Goldhill, “Cultural History and Aesthetics: Why Kant is No Place to Start Reception Studies”, in Hall and Harrop (2010) 56–70.

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be viewed as “an event within cultural history.”24 Following along this cultural path, Edith Hall takes a new historicist, cultural materialist approach, interpreting receptions by exploring historical contexts and political implications.25 An recent attempt to reconcile the two schools of thought by emphasising dialogic aspect of the relationship between the classical sources and later receptions has been proposed by David Hopkins, who argued that the artists engaged in transhistorical conversation with the ancients, in which self-discovery and selftranscendence were as important as any simple ‘accommodation’ of ancient texts to modern tastes.26 Both emphasising the power of a reception to express a wider meaning than its original sources, and also arguing that the creator of that reception exists in a wider societal, historical and literary context, he considered receptions in terms of a dialogue that crosses time and culture. Thus he suggested that the consideration of reception should take into account not only how the ancient texts have been transformed, but also how our understanding of these receptions guide our understanding of the ancient world. Even this approach however, while maintaining its stress on aesthetics, sees the cultural context as paramount, and it is in this area that there is the most fruitful overlap between Classical Reception Studies and Children’s Literature Studies. The essays in this collection recognise this, and follow approaches that centre on cultural history interpretations, while still taking into account the model proposed by Martindale, recognising the works of children’s literature that are themselves receptions of the ancient world as valid and independent creations, but also as products of their own society.

Classical Reception and Children’s Literature

The growth of classical reception in recent years has led to works on a wide range of subjects. There have been studies of the reception of the ancient world in particular cultures or eras, such as the Arab world and the Victorian period.27 Interesting work has been done on the reception of ancient drama on 24 25 26 27

Goldhill ibid. 67. See especially Edith Hall, “Towards a Theory of Performance Reception”, in Hall and Harrop (2010) 10–28. David Hopkins, Conversing With Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope. Classical Presences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 1–14. Ahmed Etman, “Translation at the Intersection of Traditions: The Arab Reception of the  Classics” in Hardwick and Stray (2008) 141–152; Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Michael Liversidge, and Catharine Edwards, Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the

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stage at different times or places.28 One of the most prolific areas has been the reception of ancient Greece and Rome in modern popular culture, particularly film, and to a lesser extent television.29 Still others have investigated the reception of various aspects of the classical world in English literature.30 Yet children’s literature, despite its central place in the cultural history of the Western world, has yet to receive sustained attention, with only a very few works now beginning to appear on this subject. A conference held in Lampeter

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Nineteenth Century (London: Merrell, 1996); Rosemary Barrow, The Use of Classical Art and Literature by Victorian Painters, 1860–1912: Creating Continuity with the Traditions of High Art (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007); Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Karelisa Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theaters of the United States (1882–1994) (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1995); Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin, eds. Medea in Performance 1500–2000 (Oxford: Legenda 2000); Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley, Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kathleen Riley, The Reception and  Performance of Euripides’ Herakles: Reasoning Madness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Erin B. Mee and Helene P. Foley, ‘Antigone’ on the Contemporary World Stage. Classical Presences. (Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press, 2011). Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema, and History (London: Routledge, 1997); Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Martin Winkler, Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001); Gladiator : Film and History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); ed., Troy: From Homer’s Iliad to Hollywood Epic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007); Sandra Joshel, Margaret Malamud and Donald T. McGuire, eds., Imperial Projections : Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 2001); Monica Cyrino, Big Screen Rome (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005); ed., Rome, Season One: History Makes Television (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); ed., Screening Love and Sex in the Ancient World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Gideon Nisbet, Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2007); Arthur Pomeroy, “And Then it was Destroyed by the Volcano”: The Ancient World in Film and on Television (London: Duckworth, 2008). Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen Harrison ed., Living Classics: Greece and Rome in Contemporary Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Stuart Gillespie, English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History. Classical Receptions. (Chichester and Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); David Hopkins and Charles Martindale, The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 3 (1660– 1790) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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in July 2009 (Asterisks and Obelisks: Classical Receptions in Children’s Literature 6–10 July 2009), has resulted in a collection to be published by Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt,31 while another collection, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak, focusing on the reception of classical mythology, is also forthcoming.32 The time is therefore very ripe for such a volume, especially in light of the success of relevant children’s books and accompanying television shows and movies in recent years (Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries and the Horrible Histories to name but three). The vast scope of the subject, covering a wide geographical as well as historical area, and its, till now, unexplored nature, makes it especially suitable for a companion volume such as this which places the relevant questions on the agenda of classical reception scholarship and opens the field for further in depth research. Several such questions are raised by the chapters in this book. Firstly, the reception of the classical world in juvenile literature reflects wider social concerns. In the Victorian and Edwardian ages, this is connected to ideas about both the nature of the ancient world and of childhood itself. In particular at this time, often cited as the first golden age of children’s literature, ancient Greece and Rome occupied a central place. The Neoclassical movement had made the classical world – or more accurately a certain perception of the classical world – an ideal. In the words of Simon Goldhill, Victorian culture was obsessed with the classical past, as nineteenth century self-consciousness about its own moment in history combined with an idealism focussed on the glories of Greece and the splendour of Rome to make classical antiquity a deeply privileged and deeply contested arena for cultural (self-) expression.33 Nor was this obsession limited to adult experience, for it permeated the education system as well, where Classical Studies were the backbone, and often indeed the entire body, of the timetable. In Arnold’s Rugby, boys studied little except Greek and Latin.34 Similarly, a timetable from the Lower Sixth of 31

Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt, Changing the Greeks and Romans: Metamorphosing Antiquity for Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 32 Katarzyna Marciniak, Our Mythical Childhood (Metaforms: Studies in the Reception of Classical Antiquity) (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 33 Goldhill (2011) 1. 34 See Tom Brown’s Schooldays, passim, with David W. Sylvester Education Documents, England and Wales from 800 to 1816 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 204–6, and Maurice, “‘I’d break the slate and scream for joy if I did Latin like a boy!’: Studying and Teaching Classics in Girls’ and Boys’ Fiction”, in Hodkinson and Lovatt (forthcoming).

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Winchester college in 1898 shows that thirteen out of the twenty four lessons a week were still devoted to classical studies.35 Children were brought up on classics, which permeated not only school life but also literature designed for schoolboys and girls. Along with this idealization of Greece and Rome, this period also saw the rise of the glorification of the child as the pure model of innocence, probably as a result of the development of Romanticism. The two idealizations intertwined in the Victorian and Edwardian minds, permeating their concepts of childhood, and reflected in the literature that then began to be produced in increasing numbers for children. The coincidence of the two points, the centrality of classics and the ideas about childhood produced some fascinating pieces of reception within the genre of children’s literature, as the first chapter of this book, by Elizabeth Hale, reflects. Hale’s paper looks at various receptions of the classical world in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. In her chapter, “Classics, Children’s Literature and the Character of Childhood, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to The Enchanted Castle”, she considers both indirect receptions of classical tropes and allusions, in works as varied as Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows, and the direct use of the figure of Pan as symbolic spirit of nature, with which the child was believed to be particularly in tune. In her study, Hale investigates how classical motifs contribute to the construction of character in children’s literature, and in particular to the that of the ideal child, at this time. A growing social awareness and the development of social reform were also hallmarks of the later Victorian and Edwardian period, and this too is echoed in the literature of the time. In her chapter, “‘Time is only a mode of thought, you know’: Ancient History, Imagination and Empire in E. Nesbit’s Literature for Children”, Joanna Paul also examines this golden age of juvenile fiction, as she considers the works of the Edwardian writer, E. Nesbit, looking at how Nesbit, in her timetravelling stories, uses the ancient world as a means to critique her own, especially with regard to politics, social welfare and imperialism. She demonstrates how the author’s work reflects a number of ways in which the ancient world was perceived in the cultural imagination of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Such manipulations of the ancient world are not limited however to the these periods; different societies exploit or adapt the classical past in their ­juvenile literature according to contemporary concerns, as Katarzyna Marciniak ­demon­strates in her paper, which examines the reception of classical ­mythology 35

Christopher Stray, “Schoolboys and Gentlemen: Classical Pedagogy and Authority in the English Public School”, in Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone eds. Pedagogy and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 37.

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in Polish children’s literature. In her paper, “(De)constructing Arcadia. Polish Struggles with History and Differing Colours of Childhood in the Mirror of Classical Mythology”, she considers some crucial Polish works for children and young adults inspired by Greek mythology from three different times periods, the interwar period, that of the People’s Republic of Poland, and from the Transformation (1989) to present day. This survey demonstrates how the historical background influences the depiction of the mythical worlds created by writers for youngsters. The first paper of the second section, which deals with modern adaptations of classical mythological subjects and themes, continues the ideological approach found in the first section. Barbara Weinlich, starting from the premise set down by Stephens and McCallum that mythology is “the most ideologically charged area of retold stories” in children’s literature, examines how this ideology is manifested in picture books. Examining the depictions of the Sirens, the Minotaur, and Medusa in two different picture book texts of the  early twenty-first century (Harris and Brown’s, Greece! Rome! Monsters! and Fanelli’s Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece, both published in 2002) she demonstrates that the two books work with different modes of representation of the mythological monsters, which may be classified as ‘modern,’ and ‘post-modern’. Mary McMenomy’s chapter looks at the reception of mythology in another specific, but very different genre, that of video games. While video games might not be a traditional medium of children’s fiction, it cannot be doubted that they play a powerful role in children’s culture, and in the case of games based on classical mythology, both introduce young people to the subject matter and exploit their knowledge of this field. Through a number of case studies, McMenomy demonstrate several kinds of uses to which mythology can be put, and demonstrates that classical mythology is often employed as a consciously familiar framework in which to understand other aspects of the game’s mechanics and play. The paper goes on to examine evidence about how younger players build an understanding of the mythological material through their exposure via games. Receptions of a specific mythological figure, namely the centaur, are the focus of the third chapter in this section. In “From Chiron to Foaly: The Centaur in Classical Mythology and Fantasy Literature”, Lisa Maurice considers both ancient depictions and traditions regarding centaurs and their portrayal in a range of modern authors, namely C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Rick Riordan, Diana Wynne Jones, and Ellen Jensen Abbot. This paper demonstrates how the different aspects of the centaur tradition are adapted, emphasised and refigured in the hands of contemporary writers, and, by consideration of

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modern animal theory, how this figure is connected with human perceptions of animals. The final chapter in this part focuses on one modern, very influential author. Niall Slater, in his “Classical Memories in C.S. Lewis”, takes us on a tour of the seven Narnia books, examining the rich classical themes and mythological allusions en route. Following publication order of the volumes, Slater demonstrates how echoes and memories of the ancient world colour and fill the works, but with playful variations on their original sources. One of the ways in which the ancient world has been received by authors of children’s literature is in adaptations or transformations of mythological tales found in the classical world itself. The third section of the book focuses on such  reworkings. Sheila Murnaghan, in her chapter, “Men into Pigs: Circe’s Transformations in Versions of the Odyssey for Children”, considers the Circe story of Homer’s Odyssey in different versions of the tale from different periods: Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales (1852) and Paul Shipton’s The Pig Scrolls (2004) and The Pig Who Saved the World (2006). She demonstrates how each of these expands on the original account, responding to the challenges to conventional decorum, as well as to the opportunities for moralizing and playfulness, provided by a s­cenario in which humans are transformed into barnyard animals. Lamb’s account, for example, underscores the crucial distinction between humans and animals, which Ulysses’ determined action at both illustrates and preserves. Hawthorne, on the other hand, gives the tale a very different moralizing dimension, whereby the physical transformation reflects the men’s true natures. Shipton’s books, meanwhile, dating from the second millennium, are different again, emphasising the comical, in a contemporary reworking of the Odyssey. The Odyssey is also the focus of Geoffrey Miles’ chapter, “Chasing Odysseus in Twenty-First-Century Children’s Fiction”, in which he examines eight versions of the Odysseus myth from the twenty-first century, ranging from 2000 to 2013. These different versions vary widely in their portrayal of the Homeric characters, ranging from traditional and sympathetic presentations to a variety of post–modern interpretations, in which he is marginalised or even subjected to hostile or mocking critique. All of these adaptations of the Odysseus story for children reinterpret the character of Odysseus and the Homeric value system, as well as demonstrating a strong metafictional element, as they show clear consciousness of their own position as receptions of the ancient tale. This conscious awareness of their sources is in strong contrast to many cases of the reception of Ovid in children’s literature as Deborah H. Roberts highlights in her paper, “The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Anthologies of Myth for Children”. Concentrating on these anthologies, she demonstrates that although

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the major or sole source text for many of the tales that regularly feature in these collections (e.g. Arachne, Midas, Baucis and Philemon, Daedalus and Icarus, Echo and Narcissus), Ovid is often barely acknowledged as a source for the stories that are instead portrayed as unmediated expressions of the Greek spirit. Roberts explores the negative attitude towards Ovid and, focussing on the stories of Narcissus and of Arachne, shows how the treatment of Ovid in anthologies for children must also be read as a function of varying conceptions of childhood at different periods. The adaptations of classical myth are most commonly based on ancient Greece (albeit often in their Roman retellings by Ovid in particular), but as already discussed, Ancient Rome has also been a fertile source for children’s writers; the next section, featuring four papers on different aspects of the reception of Rome, illustrates this. Catherine Butler, in her chapter, “The ‘Grand Tour’ as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion” examines a number of novels, dating from Edwardian times to the present day, in which characters travel between Britain and the European mainland, and often even as far as Rome itself. Butler shows how such journeys are used to educate characters, and introduce them (and, vicariously, the books’ readers) to a variety of cultures and experiences; in some cases a “conversion” to a pro-Roman point of view occurs as a result of these travels. As such, these books, with their ideological perspective on ancient Rome, provide, in Butler’s words, “a useful prism through which to view the variety of ways in which British writers have attempted to make sense of empire, identity, and their own nation’s ambiguous relationship with both.” The final two papers in this section look at a particular sub-genre of children’s literature on ancient Rome, namely comics. Tony Keen’s chapter, “Wulf The Briton: Resisting Rome in a 1950s Boys’ Adventure Strip” first highlights the marginalization of the comic genre within the study of juvenile fiction, and then examines the Wulf the Briton series that ran in the Express Weekly comic from 1954 to 1960. He demonstrates how the series uses ancient Rome as a vehicle for investigating issues of imperialism, occupation, oppression and invasion. Similarly, Eran Almagor turns his attention to Gosciny and Uderzo’s Astérix series. Examining the series within the wider context of scholarship on children’s literature, he asks how far these the comic books are in fact for children and how far for adults, and considers how the works interplay with the ancient texts, showing how in both cases, the Astérix books form a bridge between two worlds. Clearly no study of this kind can be exhaustive; nor indeed is it intended to be. The issues raised by the papers in this book, however, are those central to the study of the reception of the ancient world in children’s literature. Covering

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different genres (historical fiction, fantasy, picture books, comics, computer games), and examining works spanning 120 years, its scope is wide, and many of the papers will be the starting points for further research in this area. It is to be hoped that they stimulate more explorations into the rewarding and important field of juvenile fiction, in which the ancient Greek and Roman worlds have spread, and continue to spread, such a wide influence.

part 1 Classics and Ideology in Children’s Literature

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chapter 1

Classics, Children’s Literature, and the Character of Childhood, from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to The Enchanted Castle1 Elizabeth Hale When Alice meets a mouse in Wonderland, she addresses it politely as ‘O  Mouse’, using the vocative case that she has learned from looking in her brother’s Latin grammar: ‘A mouse – of a mouse – to a mouse – a mouse – O mouse!’2 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mouse does not acknowledge Alice. In Wonderland, Latin grammar books may not provide much of a useful guide for starting conversations. Surface jokes aside, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is deeply classical, being a katabasis, a journey to and return from the underworld. (The term comes, of course, from the Greek word for ‘down’; a katabasis, then, is a journey ‘down’, frequently used to refer to journeys to the underworld; its opposite, anabasis, is a journey ‘up’, often used to refer to a journey inland – to the interior of a country, for example.) In falling down the rabbit hole to an underground otherworld, Alice travels an archetypal path, following in the footsteps of other travelers in the classical underworld such as Aeneas, Odysseus, Orpheus and Persephone. There is a difference: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is comic, satiric, and focuses on the adventures of a little girl, rather than an epic hero, a king, a poet or a princess. Nevertheless, in negotiating the curious and dangerous logic of Wonderland, in resisting the challenges to her intellect, sanity, and ultimately her life, Alice journeys successfully through a child’s version of Hades, returning safely to the sunny meadow where she drowses with her older sister. These two examples from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland show some different ways that classical influences and classical reception can operate in a work of children’s literature. ‘O mouse’ is an example of the social and the overt, or surface, role of classical reception, operating in terms of gender, class, and education. Alice, a girl, looks into the Latin books belonging to her brother, a boy, curious about a site of male learning and learnedness. In class terms, 1 Parts of this chapter were published as an article in the Journal of Classics Teaching 27 (May 2013) 58–63, under the title “Character and Childhood in Children’s Literature: Case Studies in Classical Reception.” 2 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000) 26. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_003

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it  critiques but also celebrates the abstruseness of middle-class male learning.  It makes a nod to the real Alice Liddell’s family – her lexicographer father, Henry Liddell, was co-author of A Greek-English Lexicon, still in use as a standard dictionary for students of Ancient Greek. Alice, as the youngest child in this family would be familiar with the discourse of learning, Latinity and Hellenism. Latin as a site of male knowledge and education and profession, of cultural capital that the fictional Alice may be excluded from as a girl, fails to work on the Wonderland Mouse, and Alice has to use her own intelligence and logic to proceed further. Latin cases, literally translated into English, sound ridiculous, particularly ‘O Mouse’ in the vocative case – a joke that most students of Latin would recognize and have made some version of. All these nuances are there for readers to recognize, consciously or unconsciously, or to encounter for the first time. Latinity is overtly referred to and rejected but still present in the text: an overt example of classicism in a minute way. In contrast to ‘O Mouse’, Alice’s katabasis is an example of the intertextual and the hidden version of classical influence. The book does not overtly refer to classical journeys, or make reference to Odysseus or Aeneas; it takes some work and knowledge to find classical parallels. But it is written in a structure that readers familiar with conventions of epic would recognize, and would therefore enjoy the parallels and variations on a classical theme. Some would see the idea of a small girl’s katabasis as a parody; others would see it as elevating childhood through epic; others still might see it as taking the experiences and worldview of childhood utterly seriously. I think it is all three simultaneously: Lewis Carroll is taking seriously the Liddell girls’ request for a story with a child as a hero by giving Alice heroic status, giving her intelligence and logic the dignity of a heroic journey, and also sending up epic conventions and parodying and satirizing life in Victorian Oxford. In terms of the connection between classical reception and character, we find in these two examples Alice’s character represented as intelligently curious: she looks in her brother’s Latin book, and applies its rules to an unfamiliar situation, but then rejects its rules when they fail to work and tries another approach. Alice also has the heroic status of an adventurer in a strange land, retaining her dignity and sanity in the nonsense world underground. Underscoring that heroic representation of Alice and reinforcing that she is  a logical and intelligent child, is a third classical precedent, namely the series  of Socratic dialogues she engages in with the animals of Wonderland, dialogues about the nature of the world and experience. Again, these are h ­ idden aspects that reflect Carroll’s classical training, and of course the overlap with his academic career as a mathematician and logician. Carroll’s i­ncorporation of

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overt, or easily recognizable classical material is of course largely comic: witness the Mock Turtle’s reference to the “old crab” who teaches classics, and “laughing and grief” (a play on words on Latin and Greek). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is lightly peppered with classical in-jokes of this kind, which emphasize the humourous intent of the story. These examples show some of the ways that classical ideas run through Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and indicate the value of a classical reception studies approach. Classical reception studies has been gaining momentum in recent years. It intersects a number of disciplines including classics, literature, education, history, art history and sociology, to consider the transmission and transformation of the culture, history, and ideas of classical ­antiquity – especially, but not exclusively, of ancient Greece and Rome. It overlaps with the study of the Classical Tradition, but instead of focusing on the transmission of particular classical texts, it is interested in the interaction between the classics and the texts, or people, receiving and transmitting them, and the multiple valences of meaning in receptions of classical material. It aims to understand the impact and applications of classical materials, and the ways in which they have been read or understood over the centuries, as well as what those ways of reading, interpreting, or transmission say about the period, text, or writer under consideration. It can take many forms, as for instance Yopie Prins’ Victorian Sappho (1999), an examination of the figure and poetry of Sappho and their influence on the fleshly school of Victorian poetry or Simon Goldhill’s Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (2012), exploring revolution and reformation in non-canonical Victorian works of art, music and theatre. Christopher Stray’s work on classical education in Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England 1830–1960 (1998) performs a sociological examination of the transmission of classical material to young minds. A growing body of scholarship is interested in exploring the resonances of classical reception in youth literature and culture, as for example Holly Blackford’s The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (2012), which explores the treatment of the Persephone myth in literature and culture directed towards girls and young women. Reception studies of this nature can be profoundly or lightly classical, can find classical ideas to be strong organizing principles behind particular works, and also to be part of the fabric of cultural engagement in a particular period, or genre, or area; a reception approach thus adds insight to the texts under consideration. In her article Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature in the Brill New Pauly, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer outlines four main ways the classical impulse can be seen in children’s literature: first, and most obviously, the transmission,

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translation, and adaptation of specific texts and authors, such as Aesop’s Fables. Next are recurring mythological figures, such as Hercules or Theseus or Persephone, whose stories translate well into children’s literature. Then there are particular historical events or figures, which appear either in educational formats, or as backgrounds to historical or didactic novels – for example, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), made up of stories set in different periods of history, including some written about Britain from the perspective of Roman soldiers. Last in her list is the conflation of an idealized version of childhood with the ideas, both of the shepherd deity Pan, and the puer aeternus, or eternal youth.3 As we shall see, this last idea is of particular interest when considering the representation of talented children in children’s (and adult) literature from the late Victorian and Edwardian period. As well as these overt versions of classicism, where myths or figures or stories are explicitly referred to, are the narrative structures and patterns, such as Alice’s katabasis, that run through children’s literature. As well, there are the social aspects of classicism, in which references to classical figures or words from classical languages, are part of a set of assumptions about shared knowledge, or educational practices, or class or cultural capital, that show the pervasiveness of classical knowledge as a shared point of reference – even for writers or readers whose actual classical education may be only minimal. My interest in this topic, then, is the way that classical motifs contribute to the construction of character in children’s literature, and also to the construction of the ideal child. In this essay, then, I examine some case studies which reveal how classics and character affect one another. And it is with the school stories that I begin, looking at Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) by Thomas Hughes. Here, the learning of classical subjects is strongly connected to the character development of child protagonists, in terms of their morals, grit, and polish. In other words, they do not merely need to acquire cultural capital or possessing abilities, but also to demonstrate honesty, diligence, and endurance. So, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this is how George Arthur, the intellectual boy Tom befriends, does his composition prep: He considered first what point in the character or event which was the subject could most neatly be brought out within the limits of a vulgus [a composition], trying always to get his idea in to the eight lines, but not binding himself to ten or even twelve lines if he couldn’t do this. He then 3 Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature. Brill Online: Brill’s New Pauly. (2012).

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set to work, as much as possible without Gradus or other help, to clothe his idea in appropriate Latin or Greek, and would not be satisfied till he had polished it well up with the aptest and most poetic words and phrases he could find.4 The artistic and sensitive Arthur is unusual among Tom’s cohort. In taking an honest approach to his Latin or Greek, he strongly contrasts with Tom and his friend Harry East, who have given into peer pressure, and are in the habit of cribbing and cheating. While Tom is a good influence on Arthur in helping him fit into the rough and tumble of ‘boy society’, Arthur influences him and Harry to take the honest, and scholarly approach – an important step in their moral education; being good scholars of Latin, in the sense of doing their work properly. They will never become professional scholars of the subject like Arthur, but the novel doesn’t require them to do that – it is part of the makeup of a gentleman to engage properly in all areas of his life; and being a good scholar is part of Tom’s progress towards becoming an adult. In contrast to the katabasis of Alice’s journey, Tom makes an upward journey (an anabasis of sorts). Though Hughes shows sympathy with boys forced to learn a subject they might be unsuited for, the learning of Latin is a moral as well as an intellectual exercise. Good scholars tend to be good boys, and will become good men. In stressing the difficulty of Latin, and its value in providing a moral testing ground, he emphasizes the rigour and strength required for the scholarly approach, situating intellectual rigour as equivalent to the growing cult of games and muscularity. More generally, in employing classical language, motifs and an atmosphere of learning and learnedness, Hughes suggests that the moral development of schoolboys should be seen as miniature epics. This is quite a different approach from the amorality of Lewis Carroll’s classical epic. However, one can see a shared emphasis on the underlying idea of epic and heroism. This approach can be seen in later domestic fiction for girls, in novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did (1872). In these novels, which engage with the ‘problem’ of what to do with an intelligent, passionate, and creative girl whose abilities clash with available conventional socialized roles for women, classical imagery and motifs appear in different ways. While Alice goes through a literal katabasis in her descent down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, these novels, using the language of psychological realism, engage in a metaphorical katabasis of the soul, by forcing creative girls such as Jo March and Katy Carr to experience pain, disability and grief, experiences that forge and temper their characters. Jo and 4 Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 262.

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Katy’s creative abilities are initially diffuse and uncontrolled; they learn, through their passage through dark times, to channel their talents in appropriate directions that transform and celebrate the home. Jo makes her katabatic journey when she copes with the death of her quietly domesticated sister, Beth; sharing her journey towards death, grieving with her as she passes, and writing poems that celebrate Beth’s particular contribution to the world. As she does this, she channels her grief and love into writing for her family rather than for herself. Her writing brings financial rewards and critical praise as well as the love and delight of her family. Holly Blackford draws attention to Jo’s sister Amy’s similar descent into, and return from, spiritual and artistic darkness. Amy and her eventual husband Laurie both reach an understanding that their artistic gifts are minor. Both channel their talents into patronage of other creators.5 Where Amy’s ascent from darkness results in her abandonment of own creative desires, Jo’s creativity is transformed, from selfish, dilettantish (and inappropriately masculine) outlets into serious and generous work with a domestic focus. Susan Coolidge’s Katy undergoes a literal katabasis, falling from an unsafe swing and twisting her spine. During the years of her adolescence, she is confined to bed and later a wheelchair, serving time in what Coolidge calls the ‘School of Pain.’ Like Jo, she learns to direct her creative energies towards her family, instead of towards doing something she vaguely specifies as great and heroic. Focusing her attention on domestic matters, using her creativity to write for her family and to make the house a happy home, she is rewarded by becoming the ‘heart of the house’.6 The forging processes of these katabaseis transform creative girls like Jo and Katy into tutelary deities of the household. I view their transformation into models of domestic feminine creativity less as becoming the “angel of the house”, the restrictive image of feminine servitude constructed by Coventry Patmore, but more positively, as becoming a genius of the place: a genius loci. As a genius loci the talented girl, restricted to home, generates her best creations from that home, and creates them in order to celebrate the home. Indeed, she transforms the home, anointing it with literary benisons. Jo March’s most successful novels are written to please the readers at home, but they also celebrate that home, and recreate it for other readers, and therefore pleases her reading public as well. Meanwhile Katy Carr transforms herself to become the creative “heart of the 5 Holly Blackford, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (New York: Routledge, 2011) 93–101. 6 Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did (1872) in What Katy Did, and What Katy Did at School (London & Ewell: The Studley Press, 1948) 100.

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house” that nurtures her family and makes it happy. Rather than being merely restrictive, these novels are practical and heartfelt narratives of the creative process, intertwined with the coming of age stories of their teenage protagonists. Classics and character thus meet and mingle in the underlying narrative structures of these novels of development. It is noticeable, however, that classical myths and learning are not explicitly expressed, and that we find a buried and implicit classicism in operation here. The novels so far discussed depict a model of childhood, where childhood is a progression towards adulthood, and in which the acquisition of abilities and knowledge and the rejection of negative traits are profoundly influenced by available social role models. However, the idealization of talented girls as tutelary deities, with the attendant suggestion that in being idealized girlhood might also become frozen in time, points us towards a third set of ideas about classical reception and character in children’s literature. That is, the invocation of Pan and the puer aeternus, a model that begins to appear in the 1870s and that takes hold of the representation of idealized childhood well into the first decade of the twentieth century. The puer aeternus, associated with Iacchus, a version of the god of the harvest, Dionysus (and incidentally, connected with the Eleusinian mysteries associated with the cult of Persephone), symbolizes eternal childhood. In late Victorian and Edwardian representations of idealized childhood, the puer aeternus symbolizes the separate, and superior, space and time of childhood, a childhood that rejects adulthood, does not want to grow up, and indeed sometimes refuses to grow up, as in the case of J M Barrie’s Peter Pan (1902–1911), refusing to move through time in the way that previous literary children do. This formulation, of course, sharply contrasts with the emphasis on coming of age, being educated, and childhood as a preparation for adulthood. Thus, Kenneth Grahame, in The Golden Age (1895), a nostalgic reflection on his own childhood, glorifies childhood as a pastoral idyll run according to its own rules and impenetrable to adults, who have lost the ability to perceive through intuition and imagination and who are instead bound by the rules of society rather than the laws of nature. His 1908 The Wind in the Willows leaves human society almost entirely behind, focusing on the adventures of English field and water animals who nevertheless have memorable encounters with matters classical. The gruff and wise old Badger lives in the ruins of an ancient Roman settlement, his fierceness suiting this location with its echoes of ancient battles and learning. And Ratty and Mole have a transformative experience when they meet the god Pan in the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.’ On a rescue mission for Portly, the lost baby of their friend Otter, they take to the river at night, coming eventually to an island where they find Portly curled up at the feet of the god himself: “then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him,

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an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground…it was an awe that smote and held him, and without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some August Presence was very, very near.”7 With Ratty he bows down and worships the god; in the morning they have no memory of what they have seen, though as Tess Cosslett points out, Pan’s entrance into the novel offers strong ‘hints of the numinous.’8 (177) The Wind in the Willows is not alone in invoking the image of Pan as a kindly but terrifying god of nature and protector of small animals, and also a god directly opposed to what we might think of as the urban, rule-bound, mostly Christian adult culture: in doing so, it is ‘of its time’ in a body of ‘neo-pagan texts.’ Pan is on the side of animals and also on the side of children and childhood, and more so than in the remainder of the book. The animal characters of The Wind in the Willows enable readers to envisage a world free from the trammels of adult life, at the same time as permitting an allegorical reading of their actions (the British class system is alive and well among the creatures of The Wind in the Willows). When Pan appears, however, he promises an idealised version of nature and of childhood: significantly, more than any other animal, he protects the baby otter, Portly. Pan appears in other guises. Frances Hodgson Burnett depicts the Yorkshire boy Dickon Sowerby in The Secret Garden (1911) as a wholesome pagan spirit of nature who teaches the protagonist Mary Lennox about the growth and cycle of the seasons, enabling her to heal herself, and later to heal her cousin Colin and the community of Misselthwaite Manor (both broken down in misery following the death of Colin’s mother). Dickon is explicitly a Pan-like figure, playing a wooden pipe and surrounded by animals: It was a very strange thing indeed. She quite caught her breath as she stopped to look at it. A boy was sitting under a tree, with his back against it, playing on a rough wooden pipe. He was a funny looking boy about twelve. He looked very clean and his nose turned up and his cheeks were as red as poppies and never had Mistress Mary seen such round and such blue eyes in any boy’s face. And on the trunk of the tree he leaned against, a brown squirrel was clinging and watching him, and from behind a bush nearby a cock pheasant was delicately stretching his neck to peep out, 7 Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows. 1908 (London: Methuen Children’s Books, 1979) 136. 8 Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 177.

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and quite near him were two rabbits sitting up and sniffing with tremulous noses – and actually it appeared as if they were all drawing near to watch him and listen to the strange low little call his pipe seemed to make. When he saw Mary he held up his hand and spoke to her in a voice almost as low as and rather like his piping. “Don’t tha’ move,” he said. “It’d flight ‘em.”9 This presentation, as well as the novel’s emphasis on nature, gardening, the seasons, the cycle of death and regrowth, emphasises a children’s Arcadia of a kind, in a novel that ranges widely, from Anglo-India to the Yorkshire moors, scrutinising aspects of colonial and British attitudes to childhood. It is not a saccharine Arcadia: Mary and Colin are bitter, neglected and occasionally uncanny or ‘queer,’ perhaps even pagan children who heal themselves through their encounters with Dickon, but also with the Secret Garden. That garden was locked away following the death of Colin’s mother, and the children’s efforts reviving it enable them to come to terms with the cycle of the seasons, and the cycle of life. They also, having healed themselves, heal the adults around them, in a move typical of Edwardian children’s fiction, whereby the child is right and adults must give way or be converted to the child’s correct way of doing things. James Barrie in Peter and Wendy (1911) shows Peter Pan as a sometimes menacing symbol of the delights and lawlessness of childhood, in Never-Neverland, a carnivalesque pastoral space, which parodies the nursery of socialized urban children. Through the image of a boy ‘Pan’, motherless and refusing to grow up, and the fantasy space of Never-Neverland, Peter Pan offers a nursery Arcadia with teeth. With its pirates and Indians and crocodiles and wild beasts, it is a wild and separate space from the constraints of middle-class, rule-bound Edwardian childhood, reinforcing the divide between children and adults. In these late-Victorian and Edwardian stories, childhood is divided from adulthood not because it is inferior to adulthood or because children need to be trained and educated in order to find appropriate roles, but because it is separate and superior, attuned to a pastoral and nostalgic spirit of nature presided over by pagan, rather than Christian gods. Here we find classical imagery used to symbolize the genius of childhood itself. To be truly a child is to be innately talented, to be at one with nature, to have access to the imagination and powers of creativity, and to look cynically at the follies of adult life. It is a rejection of Victorian mores, an expression of alienation and worry about the modern world, and a rejection of adulthood as 9 Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 97–98.

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the desirable end of childhood. Character development, in the terms in which Thomas Hughes or Susan Coolidge understand it, is irrelevant in this version of talented children, who possess, much in the way that Alice does in Wonderland, sufficient abilities to engage with the perils of fantasy. They also do not require training to reach adulthood. Perhaps the most intriguing example comes from Edith Nesbit’s 1907 novel, The Enchanted Castle. In this novel, three middle-class children, Kathleen, Jerry and Jimmy, are marooned at school during the holidays, owing to measles at home. They seek and find adventure when they explore a tunnel leading to a grand estate, which they dub the ‘Enchanted Castle.’ There they meet Mabel, the housekeeper’s niece, who finds an enchanted wishing ring. Through this ring, the children learn about the dangers of getting what you wish for. The story is a chaotic cornucopia of various kinds of enchantments, transformations, and adventures, some quite frightening. Again, the classical emerges: this time, in the form of statues and temples dotted around the castle grounds, including temples of Flora and Phoebus, statues of Eros, Psyche, Hebe, Ganymede and more. These statues are inspired by the Greek statue room at the British Museum which Nesbit enjoyed visiting as a child. When the girls are transformed into statues by the ring, they witness these classical statues coming to life and are invited by Phoebus Apollo to join the gods in a feast: ‘I thought it would feel stiff to be a statue, but it doesn’t’ says Mabel. ‘There is no stiffness about the immortals,’ laughed the Sun-god. ‘For tonight you are one of us.’10 And they join the gods at a picnic at the temple on the lake. They are a little frightened by the sudden coming to life of the statues, but recognize the different classical gods and goddesses – and enjoy the picnic. The scenes, as Nesbit depicts them, are a mixture of the marvellous and the uncanny, and the mundane and middle-class. For instance, the gods’ picnic is sanitized and wholesome, a nursery version of the Pantheon: On the further side of the pool was a large group, so white that it seemed to make a great white hole in the trees. Some twenty or thirty figures there were in the group all statues and all alive…Some were pelting each other with roses so sweet that the girls could smell them even across the pool. Others were holding hands and dancing in a ring, and two were sitting on the steps playing cat's-cradle which is a very ancient game indeed with a thread of white marble. 10

Edith Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle. (1907) (Harmondsworth: Puffin Classics, 1979) 201.

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As the new-comers advanced a shout of greeting and gay laughter went up. “Late again, Phoebus!” someone called out. And another: “Did one of your horses cast a shoe?” And yet another called out something about laurels.11 In recognizing the classical pantheon and calmly joining their picnic, the children show themselves to be educated middle-class children, not unduly fazed by this eruption of fantasy and enchantment. This shows them to be superior to the adults around them, some of whom are servants, some of whom are teachers, some of whom are aristocrats and all of whom are completely unable to cope with the effects of enchantment. In an odd concluding plot point, the children restore the wealth of the estate to the impoverished owner Lord Yalding, by revealing to him a cache of jewellery; they resolve his broken romance by bringing his lost love (their French teacher) to him. In celebration of the happy ending, the lovers and the children together revisit the statues, coming together to worship the moon: Afterwards none of them could ever remember at all what had happened. But they never forgot that they had been somewhere where everything was easy and beautiful. And people who can remember even that much are never quite the same again. And when they came to talk of it next day they found that to each some little part of that night's great enlightenment was left. All the stone creatures drew closer round the stone – the light where the moonbeam struck  it seemed to break away in spray such as water makes when it falls from a height. All the crowd was bathed in whiteness. A deep hush lay over the vast assembly. Then a wave of intention swept over the mighty crowd. All the faces, bird, beast, Greek statue, Babylonian monster, human child and human lover, turned upward, the radiant light illumined them and one word broke from all. “The light!” they cried, and the sound of their voice was like the sound of a great wave; “the light! the light – ”.12 This kind of ecstatic pagan moon-worship, however, is unsustainable for adults, particularly for Lord Yalding, who fears that he is losing his sanity. Accordingly, he and Mademoiselle deprive the ring of its magic powers, by 11 12

Ibid. 204. Ibid. 251.

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wishing its enchantments at an end. With the ring’s magic, magic leaves the enchanted castle, and the classical statues lose their vibrancy: “where Psyche's statue had been was a stone with something carved on it,” and Mabel comments sadly: “It is her grave.”13 The Enchanted Castle is a curious book which reinforces the divide between children and adults. The pastoral idyll of childhood can only be joined by lovers and only temporarily, and not without exacting a toll on them before the everyday socialized world reasserts itself. It does not do that, however, without regret. Psyche’s statue, no longer a mythological girl in living stone, becomes a ‘grave’; symbolic, perhaps, of what Nesbit (and other Edwardian writers) thinks adults can do to the child in themselves. Adults are not as willing to give themselves over to the spirit of nature. In The Secret Garden, it takes some doing for Mary, Colin and Dickon to bring Colin’s father back to emotional life. Even Ratty and Mole as adults (though they are animals) later have no memory of their encounter with Pan. It must be observed that Victorian and Edwardian ideals of childhood are quite different to what the Romans thought about children, and indeed the stories, images, motifs and allusions employed do not actually engage with Roman concepts of childhood. A Roman from the time of Augustus, for instance, might be surprised and amused by Thomas Hughes’ earnest application of epic motifs to a school story. For the most part the writers concerned refer to epic or myth, deploying them to support their own grapplings with post-Romantic conceptions of childhood, rather than to engage with any true or historically accurate approach to classical material. Further, it should be noted that Victorian and Edwardian writers do not generally engage with classical versions of childhood, focusing instead on the canonical myths and literature. Classical allusions are as much of an imposition on real childhood as any other representation of childhood by adult writers. All the same, changing ideas about childhood, and changing uses of classical material to connect with representations of childhood, are revealing. In this essay, I have touched upon Lewis Carroll’s sly erudition, Hughes’ solemn moralizing, Alcott and Coolidge’s embedding of classical and contemporary intertextuality and mythical structures, and the quasi-spiritualist pastiche of mysticism and nursery mythology seen in Grahame, Burnett and Nesbit. They reveal a wide range of ways that ideas about classical antiquity can be used in children’s literature – from the casual reference that reveals social class, or gender roles, or educational background, to the archetypal pattern that shapes narrative. Of course, this variety is reflective of the complexity and richness of classical culture, the texts, history, 13

Ibid. 252.

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and ideas of which permit and encourage multiple and shifting applications. It also reflects the richness and depth of the classical tradition, as a shared body of knowledge that pervades a wide variety of literatures and cultural contexts. What I hope is apparent is the way that understanding even in a small way the nuances and permutations of receptions and deployments of classical material helps understand other ideas: in this case, the connection to the representation of character and childhood in children’s literature. Broadly speaking, we can see classical references, allusions, ideas and narrative structures playing a significant part in the transition from a moralistic and developmental representation of childhood as a state of being that requires education, training, and improvement before the onset of adulthood, to a static almost anti-developmental version of idealized childhood that is superior to, or more powerful than, adulthood. I hope, too, that I have conveyed that the reverse is also true: that children’s literature offers a vibrant and vital place to see the changing receptions and engagements with classical material – not just in the literature itself, but in the formation of children’s sense of culture. For many young readers, either in the period in which these novels were published or in the decades since, classical moments in children’s literature will act as a confirmation and elaboration of material they may have been taught in the classical classroom. The novels examined here, of course, are not specifically classical in intent and purpose: they are not historical novels, set in Ancient Greece or Rome; they do not set out to teach classical material to child readers. That occurs in other genres. But in demonstrating the integration of classical material and classical knowledge into children’s novels, they may have offered many young readers an intriguing entry into the subject – leading them to take their own classical journeys later.

chapter 2

‘Time is only a mode of thought, you know’: Ancient History, Imagination and Empire in E. Nesbit’s Literature for Children1 Joanna Paul There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets and the like, almost anything may happen.2 Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle, 170

Edith Nesbit’s (1858–1924) reputation and lasting appeal as an author of children’s literature is, to a large extent, founded upon her inventive and vivid evocations of the ‘world of magic’ and its intrusions into the ‘real’ world. Publishing as E. Nesbit, she wrote dozens of books – novels, short stories, and poetry – for both children and adults, and while many concerned themselves firmly with reality, for example her well-known The Railway Children (1906), a considerable number of her novels for children invited readers to follow the young protagonists behind the curtain in order to explore new worlds, encounter strange creatures, and undergo marvellous transformations. Chief among these magical novels was the trilogy that began with Five Children and It (1902), in which the siblings meet a ‘sand-fairy’ – the psammead – who can grant wishes; it is the trilogy’s third novel, The Story of the Amulet (1906; henceforth The Amulet), which is our main focus here.3 (Two further novels by E. Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle (1907) and The Magic City (1910), offer additional episodes in which unexpected and magical connections with the classical past are made, and we will consider them briefly as well.) In The Story of the Amulet, first published in serial form in The Strand Magazine, the four children (Robert, Anthea, Cyril, and Jane; their baby brother is away with their mother), accompanied by the 1 I am grateful to Lisa Maurice, Helen King, Richard Alston, Bruce Routledge, and the audiences at seminars at the University of Liverpool and Royal Holloway, University of London, for their helpful comments and suggestions as this research progressed. 2 Page numbers refer to the Wordsworth Classics edition of The Enchanted Castle (1998). 3 The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) completes the trilogy.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_004

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psammead, travel through history in an attempt to find the lost half of an Egyptian amulet which, when reunited with the half that they possess, will grant them their hearts’ desire – the safe return of their parents.4 The ‘weak spots in the curtain’ take them, for the most part, deep into the ancient past, with episodes taking place in Egypt, Babylon, Tyre, Atlantis, and ancient Britain. In this chapter, we shall explore how Nesbit’s time-travelling device – quite original in children’s literature at that time – exploits the exotic and sometimes mystical appeal of antiquity, while also allowing important commentary on the present. In keeping with an authorial tone that is “informal, direct, that of a sensible child coolly commenting on the world”,5 Nesbit’s magic does not merely entertain or divert, but rather enables her to address a range of pressing contemporary issues, from socialism to imperialism, even the very “nature of the state”;6 in this respect, her status as a founder member of the socialist Fabian Society is particularly significant. Considering why ancient history should be the best vehicle for conveying these reflections to children will allow us to explore not only what antiquity might have meant for Nesbit herself, but also for audiences whose reception of the classical past has, to date, received less attention. Children’s literature is a powerfully formative portal for many people’s access to the past, but its significance as a vehicle of classical reception is only just beginning to attract attention.7 Likewise, while studies of the reception of antiquity in the Victorian era often encompass a view of the ‘long’ 19th century, it is important to remain alert to the special characteristics of the Edwardian period, whose particular anxieties and instabilities had a marked effect on its use of antiquity.8 This chapter therefore aims to advance 4 While their mother is in Madeira, recuperating from an illness, their father, a journalist, is in Manchuria covering the Russo-Japanese War. 5 Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1990) 103. 6 Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858–1924 (London: Penguin Books, 1987) 245. 7 Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt, eds. Changing the Greeks and Romans: Metamorphosing Antiquity for Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) is the first collection devoted to this topic. 8 The 19th century reception of antiquity is well represented in classical reception studies: see, for example, Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Recent works which include a more focused consideration of the Edwardian era include Mark Bradley, ed., Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sarah Butler, Britain

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our understanding of these under-explored areas, and our appreciation of classical reception in general. The novel’s leaps through time are facilitated by both literary and material culture, which offers intriguing and informative parallels for the real pathways that connect antiquity and modernity, further demonstrating how this child’s-eye reception of antiquity is relevant to our broader appreciation of the connections between past and present. Furthermore, this chapter will offer a new perspective on the life and works of Nesbit herself, by uncovering the full extent to which her reception of the ancient past was influenced by key figures in her personal and intellectual milieu.

History and Magic

When The Story of the Amulet opens, the amulet in question has recently been bought from a London bric-a-brac shop by Robert, Anthea, Cyril and Jane, on the suggestion of the psammead, whom they have also just purchased after stumbling across him in a pet shop. Though he can no longer grant their wish – that their parents should come back home – he directs them towards the mysterious artefact, which will ensure that their wish can be granted, if only they can track down its other half, in order to make it whole again. The lost half must be tracked through time and space: by uttering the ‘words of power’ inscribed in hieroglyphs on the amulet (and which the ‘learned gentleman’, a scholar who lives upstairs, is able to decipher), it acts as a portal into ‘the Past’, enabling the children to travel anywhere the other piece of the amulet has once been. They chase the lost half through Stone Age Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, Pharaonic Egypt, a future London, and Tyre – with an extra visit to ancient Britain, for good measure – before finally recovering the complete object from a prehistoric shrine, and returning to London just in time for their parents’ unexpected return. Before examining these episodes in detail, let us first say a few words about how and why Nesbit might have cast this novel with such a strong historical sense. With its string of magical adventures, its structure differs little from the first two books in the trilogy, but whereas Five Children and It plays out almost entirely in a domestic setting, and The Phoenix and the Carpet takes the children on exotic rides around the world, The Amulet is the first of Nesbit’s works to

and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome: The Reception of Rome in Socio-Political Debate 1850– 1920 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); and Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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explore the past to such an extent.9 Yet history provides the same, if not greater, opportunities for magical and mysterious encounters as do a travelling fair or an Indian bazaar in the other books;10 and since Nesbit’s works consistently privilege the imagination, and a sense of play and informality, it is not surprising that she might exploit ancient material in a quite different way to the stern, moralising writers of earlier children’s literature (and indeed literature for adults).11 Crucially, Nesbit shows that imagination is the primary tool by which we – or at least she and her readers – access the past. Although, as we will see, she consulted professionals for historical inspiration and information, Nesbit herself was no scholar:12 writing quickly (completing The Railway Children simultaneously with The Amulet) without time for exhaustive research, she had no desire to give her readers a dry history lesson for its own sake. Instead, Nesbit recognises that conjuring the feel of history resonates much more strongly with children than didacticism, as a passage in Five Children makes clear. In a brief incursion of the past into the present day, the children’s house becomes a castle besieged by knights, but when Robert encounters a soldier, the narrator observes that his armour and his weapons were all, I am almost sure, of quite different periods … [T]he whole appearance of camp, army, and leader might have been a shock to some. But Robert was dumb with admiration, and it all 9 10 11

12

Alongside the historical episodes in the other novels discussed in this chapter, Nesbit’s The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909) heavily feature time-travel into the past. On their first visit to the past, Robert remarks that “this really and truly is an adventure! Its being in the Past makes it quite different from the Phoenix and Carpet happenings.” (59). Kimberley Reynolds (Children’s Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 84) briefly outlines the decline, from the early 20th century, of this outmoded genre with its ‘pious children, conversions, missionaries, [and] good deaths for those who led holy lives’ (84). See also Royal W. Rhodes, The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995), esp. 296– 302; Goldhill (2011), esp. 211–214.; Kimberley Reynolds, “Rewarding Reads? Giving, Receiving and Resisting Evangelical Reward and Prize Books” in J. Briggs, D. Butts and M.O. Grenby, eds. Popuular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) 189–207. Nesbit’s formal classical education was likely minimal, as was the norm for Victorian girls (Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 52–99.). There is evidence that she knew a little Latin, based on an epigraph, adapted from the Aeneid, for a poem she wrote for George Bernard Shaw, which leads Briggs to suggest that “Edith herself may have learned a little Latin at school, or, like Maggie Tulliver, picked some up from her brothers’ Latin grammar books.” (Briggs (1987) 92).

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seemed to him perfectly correct, because he knew no more of heraldry or archaeology than the gifted artists who usually drew the pictures for the historical romances. The scene was indeed ‘exactly like a picture’. (128)13 The psammead’s magic summons not an historically accurate scene, but rather a past that seems authentic to Robert, based on his reading of “historical romances”. Here, Nesbit sets up an important theme which will recur throughout the novels, and in the rest of this chapter: she explores how, in the present day, the written word and the vividly depicted image combine to shape our view of the past, and how the imaginative power of their creators – who revel in the fact that “time is only a mode of thought”, as the psammead has it (The Amulet, 210) – can transport us there.14 This investment in imagination as the key to history gains even fuller expression in Nesbit’s use of magic, and helps us understand why ancient Egypt should be the most important location in The Amulet, original home of the artefact in question, and visited twice by the children (three times if we count their very brief mission to reclaim the entire amulet at the novel’s end.) The learned gentleman might declare, upon first seeing the amulet and hearing that the children wish “to make it do things” that “the days of magic are over” (40), but a good many of Nesbit’s contemporaries would have thought, or at least hoped, that that was not so. As David Gange’s account of Egyptology in the Victorian and Edwardian eras demonstrates, the turn of the century saw public fascination with ancient Egypt become closely intertwined with interests in spiritualism and the occult (contrasting with the Biblical criticism and archaeology that had shaped Egyptology in earlier decades).15 This inevitably coloured popular representations, especially in fiction by authors such as H. Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli which, as David Gange describes, gradually threw off its biblical moorings after the turn of the century. The stock ancient Egyptian imagery of the grotesque and barbaric, which had 13 14

15

Page numbers refer to the 2004 Puffin Books edition. In our first instance of Nesbit’s susceptibility to the influence of friends, it is close confidant Oswald Barron, a scholar of heraldry and genealogy, who is credited with teaching her “to feel the imaginative appeal of history, the mysterious glamour of what is continuously changing and being lost, and to try to understand it from the inside.” (Briggs (1987) 182). David Gange, Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion 1822–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 262–9. Haggard was a professed admirer of Nesbit’s early work (Briggs (1987) 129).

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spent several decades subdued by a more homely, civilised and biblical Egypt, re-emerged emphatically.16 Nesbit’s fiction participated in this re-emergence, perhaps partially under the influence of acquaintances like Annie Besant, a one-time Fabian member who, in the 1890s, diverted her allegiance to the Theosophical Society, an esoteric organisation which initially developed around occult readings of Egyptian antiquity.17 While Nesbit skirted what Gange calls the more “grotesque and barbaric” elements of the material, she nevertheless exploited the magical and mysterious possibilities of the Egyptian past to the full in The Amulet – and indeed drew explicit attention to it near the end of the novel, by including a trip to Maskelyne and Cooke’s magic show which, until 1905, had taken place in Piccadilly’s “Egyptian Hall, England’s Home of Mystery.” (270)18 Once the amulet has worked its magic and transported the children into the past, their experience of ancient civilisation continues to be shaped by a sense of the mystery and otherness of antiquity, both for its own sake, and on account of its different rituals and customs. Though similarities between past and present are sometimes observed (“they’re playing conkers, just like the kids in Kentish Town Road!” (170), remarks Robert in Atlantis), difference tends to be foregrounded, through a pattern that broadly repeats itself with each visit: after arrival, a tour introduces the siblings to key aspects of ‘daily life’, before they encounter some kind of mysterious rite or sacred ceremony, typically the context for the amulet that they are seeking. Thwarted in their attempts to seize the amulet, the children are then often subjected to an attack or imprisonment, from which they must again summon up the magic of the amulet, or the psammead, to escape, so that they might return to their own time. A brief consideration of their visits to Stone Age and Pharaonic Egypt, Babylon, and 16 17

18

Gange (2013) 41.; see also 215–19 for more detail on Haggard’s and Corelli’s treatment of Egypt. A key work by a Theosophical Society founder, Helena Blavatsky, was entitled Isis Unveiled (1877). Blavatsky, Besant, and many other Theosophists soon turned their attention to religious belief further east, however, particularly India. For the relationship between theosophy and other occult beliefs, and socialism, see Matthew Beaumont, The Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siecle (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012) 175–195. Suzanne Rahn suggests that the power of the goddess Isis – the divine mother – underpins the amulet’s magic, though Nesbit does not explicitly refer to her. (“News from E. Nesbit: The Story of the Amulet and The Socialist Utopia,” in Raymond E. Jones, ed., E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, Maryland: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006) 208).

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Tyre will show this pattern in action; episodes set in Atlantis, London, and ancient Britain will be considered in detail in following sections. The first journey sees the children arrive on the banks of the Nile, 8,000 years ago. A young girl (whom they can easily understand through a trick of magic which Nesbit purposefully avoids explaining) shows them around her village, where they marvel at their flint tools and fish-traps, before encountering the “secret sacred place” (66), an enclosure in the middle of the village which mystifies even the Egyptian girl; it turns out to hold the amulet. The children then escape a band of attackers who are besieging the settlement, by the skin of their teeth. This close shave puts them off any further historical adventures for a while, but when they hear the learned gentleman describe Babylon as a great city that may once also have housed the amulet, they decide to travel there.19 Again, they marvel at a place “all so wonderfully different from anything you have ever seen” (101), an idyllic garden city, its people beautifully dressed and its markets “brighter than you would think anything could be” (102). The mysterious rites that they witness this time are inside the great palace: they see the Queen dispensing justice and attend a banquet with the King, where they watch “conjurers and jugglers and snake-charmers” (119) and sing ‘Men of Harlech’ for the court, before being thrown into a dungeon from which the eagle-headed god Nisroch, summoned by the amulet, rescues them. Later in the novel, they return to a much later (though unspecified) period in Egyptian history. After landing amidst a crowd of common men, and observing once more how they dress, and what their markets are like, they encounter a priest of the Temple of Amen Rā, a man named Rekh-Marā. Again, in search of the amulet half, they gain access to Pharaoh’s court, though this time it is the children who apparently perform magic – at least in the eyes of the Egyptians – by lighting matches and displaying other 20th century items that they have brought with them; again, they end up in prison. This reversal neatly undermines the stereotype of 19

The details of Nesbit’s Babylon continue the fluid approach to historical authenticity discussed above. We might guess that the children are visiting the city under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar ii (c.605–562 bce), the figure associated with the great Ishtar Gate and the legendary Hanging Gardens; the reference to them “living in London, about 2,500 years later” (112) supports this. The use of the name Ritti-Marduk for one of the court attendants must derive from a cuneiform inscription that Nesbit could have seen in the British Museum (me 90858), but this is dated to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, some 500 years earlier. Cyril later states that their father is “5,000 or more years away” (125) – such inconsistencies are not entirely uncommon in Nesbit’s work, an indication of the speed at which she wrote (though of course Cyril is not necessarily to be trusted as a reliable narrator); ultimately, though, dating slips and anachronistic details are irrelevant to Nesbit’s wider purpose, which is creating the feel of history.

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Egyptian magic, but also calls attention to the difference between past and present, once more; both the Edwardian children and the ancient peoples that they meet see strangeness in the objects and customs that the other displays. Towards the end of The Amulet, Rekh-Marā is encountered again, this time as a sailor on a Phoenician boat fishing for shells to make dyes. It transpires that he possesses the other half of the amulet, and, like the children, has been tracking the missing half. When the captain of the boat steals his amulet, he joins forces with the children to chase after it, narrowly escaping a shipwreck. Before that, the children enjoy a short stay in Tyre, where they again marvel at the beauty of “such a ripping place” (260).

Politics and Utopias

The young time-travellers – and the readers of their adventures – are clearly meant to revel in the exotic excitement of these ancient cities. Even as these cities harbour threats to the children, the magic amulet can always whisk them out of danger and back home to present-day London. But there is more to the portrayal of these ancient times than thrill-seeking, for Nesbit interweaves brief but incisive commentary on her own society into the novel. Nesbit and her first husband, Hubert Bland, were founder members of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation which campaigned on a range of issues, including workers’ rights and public health.20 Though Nesbit’s involvement with the Society gradually lessened, her commitment to socialist principles persisted throughout her literary career, and it suffuses The Amulet.21 The children’s second visit to Egypt, as we have seen, begins among a crowd of workers who are listening to a speaker declaim in purely socialist terms. “Comrades and fellow workers, how long are we to endure the tyranny of our masters, who live in idleness and luxury on the fruit of our toil?” (205), he begins, before leading the crowd to petition the Pharaoh directly. Importantly, though, while this episode suggests that social injustice has ancient roots, the general thrust of The Amulet is to critique Nesbit’s own time, comparing it unfavourably (though not straightforwardly) to the past through a series of significant episodes.

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The Society, founded in 1884, was named after Fabius Cunctator (‘Fabius the Delayer’), a 3rd century bce Roman general famed for his battle tactics of attrition; the Fabians believed that this kind of dogged persistence would bring the social change they all sought. Rahn (2006) 185–213.

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The first of these occurs after the children have returned from Babylon, where the Queen had expressed a wish to visit their country. Since the wish was uttered in the psammead’s presence, it is bound to come true, and a few days later, she appears in 1900s London. The well-mannered Anthea promises to “take you and show you anything you’d like to see” (142), but the Queen is unimpressed by their “hideous city” (141; “Buckingham Palace she thought uninteresting”, for example, 149). As they journey down the Mile End Road, she wonders at the people she sees: [H]ow badly you keep your slaves. How wretched and poor and neglected they seem … Why don’t their masters see that they’re better fed and better clothed? (149) Her visit then reaches an anti-capitalist climax in a bloodthirsty episode at the Bank of England which sees a group of stockbrokers cut down by the Queen’s Babylonian Guards.22 The slaughter is quickly magicked away as “just a dream”, allowing the narrator to end the episode with the sarcastic comment that “such dreadful things as hungry people getting dinners [the Queen earlier conjured up lavish provisions for the workers of Mile End Road], and the destruction of the Stock Exchange” should be regarded as simply “mad dreams” (155). By channelling criticisms of her society through the Queen of Babylon, Nesbit gives them extra bite, for if London comes off worse by comparison with the ancient city that, in the eyes of many, is synonymous with immorality and evil, then it really must be very bad.23 Indeed, the psammead has already initiated the comparison, early in the novel, when he says that he has been told that London is the “Modern Babylon” (23); “it’s not a bit like the old Babylon”, he continues, though we might not yet realise that Nesbit means to suggest that it is actually worse. Nesbit’s critique is expanded in the second episode that takes place in the city. This time it is not the children’s present day, but rather a future London. They think that if they can track the other half of the amulet into the future, to a time when it is complete again, they will be able to “remember how we found it. And then we can go back and do the finding really” (228); their leap into an unspecified, though evidently distant, future lands them in the British Museum, where the whole amulet is on display, labelled as belonging to the collection of 22

23

Nesbit’s representation of the bankers according to the Jewish stereotypes that prevailed at this time lends this episode a troubling anti-Semitic flavour; see Briggs (1987) 292 on Nesbit’s depiction of Jewish characters. Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, 2nd. rev. edn. (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2005) 224.

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the learned gentleman.24 Upon leaving the Museum, they find themselves in a breathtakingly utopian London. It appears to be the ultimate ‘Garden City’ (an urban planning movement that was in its very early stages at the time Nesbit was writing), with “trees and flowers and smooth green lawns” (231), arbours, fountains and lanterns. The people are all beautiful, simply dressed, and calmlooking; “men, as well as women, seemed to be in charge of the babies” (231), and noiseless motor cars travel the streets. When the siblings meet a young boy, who takes them home to his mother, they learn that his future schooling contains lessons in Citizenship, and that his minimalist house comes equipped with its own soft-play room in which children cannot hurt themselves. In short, this future London realises the socialist utopia that Nesbit and her contemporaries dreamed of, at a time when the question of how to make urban landscapes fit for their people – and fit for the imperial project – was being most energetically debated, not least by the Fabian Society.25 It was one of the more famous Society members, H.G. Wells (for a time a very close friend of the Bland family), who doubtless influenced Nesbit’s future vision, for his own novel, A Modern Utopia, was published in 1905; Nesbit acknowledges his influence by naming the young boy ‘Wells’, “after the great reformer”, explains his mother (239).26 The journey to a future London helps us to understand an earlier journey made by The Amulet’s children, to Atlantis. The visit to a legendary destination seems incongruous, when all of the others have been real, historical places; but of course Atlantis is a famous utopia, and so its appearance in the Amulet 24

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The children, it turns out, cannot magically ‘remember’ how they found the other half, but they realise that next time, they must track it to the nearer future, which does turn out to be pivotal in helping them track down the lost half. Nesbit underscores contemporary London’s shortcomings by allowing the boy’s mother to visit briefly, and to declare it “a hateful, dark, ugly place” where the people are ill, unhappy and wicked (240), much as the Queen of Babylon did. See Sarah Butler (2012) 133–68, for discussion of Edwardian debates over urban planning, and their frequent references to ancient precedents, such as Augustus’ remodelling of Rome. Richard Alston, “Class Cities: Classics, Utopianism and Urban Planning in Early Twentieth-Century Britain”, Journal of Historical Geography 38:3 (2012) 263–272, provides further detail on the shifting and unstable influence of the classical tradition on urban theorists at this time. See also M.H.  Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London 1850–1915 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995) 19–25. For the wider context in which Nesbit was writing, see Beaumont (2012). Briggs (1987) 252–3. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) also surely influenced Nesbit, with its combination of time-travel and socialist beliefs (Rahn (2006) 188–189).

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a­ rguably prefigures the future London episode, and emphasises Nesbit’s social critique. The execution is rather subtle, for no explicit comparison between ancient and modern is made, as it was between Babylon and London, but it is clear that Atlantis represents, in some sense, the pinnacle of civilisation, “the most beautiful sight any of them had ever seen – or even dreamed of” (162). According to the learned gentleman, who has travelled with them, it displays “a far higher level of civilization than the Egyptian or Babylonish” (170). The only connection between past and present comes in Anthea’s comment, “don’t you think this all seems much more like now than Babylon or Egypt-?” (170), which is somewhat curious, given Nesbit’s critique of London elsewhere, but it perhaps indicates the relative closeness between her present and the classical Greco-Roman past, compared to the civilisations of the Near East. Nesbit’s Atlantis is primarily the Atlantis of Plato, whose Timaeus and Critias dialogues describe it as an ideal polis, meant as a moral fable for 5th century bce Athens. Urban features such as its layout in concentric circles, and its use of the unusual metal, oricalchum, come directly from the dialogues, helping Nesbit to furnish the episode with the same kinds of ‘daily life’ details that characterise the other visits. As before, the tour of the city leads the children to witness an unusual rite – the ten Kings sacrificing bulls in the Temple of Poseidon – before they narrowly escape certain disaster, this time the very destruction of Atlantis as its volcano erupts and tsunamis engulf the city. The story of Atlantis’ destruction further illuminates Nesbit’s decision to send her time-travellers there. It was towards the end of the 19th century that connections were first proposed between Plato’s myth and the excavations on the Aegean island of Thera, which were uncovering evidence of a colossal volcanic eruption which appeared to have destroyed significant settlements. The search for Atlantis was finally leading, it seemed, to tantalising archaeological and geological data which could redefine the city as more history than myth, and if Nesbit was aware of these debates, it would suggest that she included Atlantis at least partly because it now had better claims to be historical, rather than simply mythical, subject matter. As it happens, the first publication of these ideas in English was in 1909, too late for The Amulet, but it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that Nesbit – or her scholarly acquaintances, such as Oswald Barron – could have picked up on them in informal circulation.27 27

K.T. Frost, a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, wrote an anonymous piece entitled ‘The Lost Continent’ in The Times in January 1909, connecting Atlantis with the Minoan civilization that was currently being excavated on Crete – a neighbouring island of Santorini/Thera – by Sir Arthur Evans. However, the theory had circulated in France some decades earlier, following the French-led excavations on Thera in the 1860s and 70s; see

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Ultimately, though, the historical credentials of Atlantis are less important for Nesbit than its role as a utopia, and its equally well-established associations with magic and mystery. It made frequent appearances in late Victorian and Edwardian literature, from proto-science-fiction novels like Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870), to Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), which established Atlantis as the superior and originary world civilisation (and connected it to the Biblical Great Flood). Donnelly’s work was very influential, not least on the theosophists, who coopted Atlantis to their occult beliefs – as they had done Egypt – through Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), a foundational theosophical text which claimed the Atlanteans as the great ‘Fourth Race’, preceding the Aryan ‘Fifth Race’.28 Atlantis, then, like Babylon, Tyre, and Egypt, offered just the right blend of exotic appeal and political significance to suit Nesbit’s purposes, regardless of its historicity. The Amulet takes one more pass at the question of the ideal society with its description of the children’s only journey not made through the amulet – their visit to ancient Britain. After encountering a dishevelled and distressed little girl named Imogen, in St James’ Park, and learning that she is recently orphaned and destined for the workhouse, they take her home with them. The learned gentleman expresses his wish that “we could find a home where they would be glad to have her” (184–5), and since they are in the company of the psammead, who is bound to grant the gentleman’s wishes, they all find themselves in a forest clearing in “damp and foggy Ancient Britain” (187). The psammead informs them that it is the year 55 bce. A group of children are dancing and singing, watched by a “sad-eyed woman” (189) who, upon seeing Imogen, cries out and calls her by name; Imogen, recognising her as her mother, rushes towards her.29 This sentimental ‘reunion’ is sealed by the psammead, who

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Walter L. Friedrich, Fire in the Sea – The Santorini Volcano: Natural History and the Legend of Atlantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 97–102, 147–57; Pierre VidalNaquet, L’Atlantide: Petite Histoire D’un Mythe Platonicien (Paris: Les Belles Lettres , 2005) 187–95; Richard Ellis, Imagining Atlantis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) 139–40. Ellis (1998) 205–9 (on Verne), 39–43 (on Donnelly), 70 (on Blavatsky). This mother and child reunion scene plays on the recurrent theme of parental absence, not only in The Story of the Amulet itself (where the children’s wish to be reunited with their parents drives the quest for the amulet), but also Nesbit’s other works (perhaps most famously The Railway Children, with the young Bobbie’s memorable cry ‘Oh! My Daddy, my Daddy!’ when her father returns by train). As Briggs (1987) 1 explains at the very beginning of her biography of Nesbit, it was the death of Edith’s own father, when she was just three, that accounts for her frequent ‘fantasies of wish fulfilment’ in which children desire the return of far-away parents. Not that this trope of children’s l­iterature is peculiar to

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ensures that Imogen will be able to stay with this Celtic tribe – of whom the sad-eyed woman is Queen, it turns out – for this is the fulfilment of the wish that she could be somewhere she is wanted. Once again, Edwardian London comes off badly in its comparison with ancient societies, for there, says the psammead, “You’ve got your country into such a mess that there’s no room for half your children – and no one to want them” (187). By suggesting that Celtic Britain was a more humane society than that of the early 20th century, Nesbit touches on debates over British identity and racial origins that had been unfolding since the late 18th century. Modern Britons could follow a number of different paths into their distant past in the search for the ancestors that would best account for their current world-leading status, and provide the most acceptable templates or models for their future. Earlier Romantic affinities with the indigenous Celts were largely overwritten, in the 19th century, by the belief that the invading Anglo-Saxons, or Teutons, were the true ancestors of the British – strong, noble, Christian upholders of law and liberty (and crucially deemed to be racially superior) who were far more acceptable than conquered Celts or the decadent Romans. But these views could be countered, particularly at the turn of the century, when fears of national and imperial decline were forcing a reappraisal of identity and origin, and a sense of Britain’s mixed racial origins strengthened.30 By celebrating Celtic resistance to Roman rule – primarily through the figures of Boudica and Caractacus31 – unease over Britain’s past as an imperial subject could be partly mitigated, and Celtic identity could be reclaimed by proposing a RomanoCeltic biological inheritance that persisted after the Anglo-Saxon invasion

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Nesbit. As Maria Nikolajeva (“Children’s Literature,” in Paula Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013)) remarks, “an actual or symbolically abandoned child is the most prominent protagonist in childrens’ literature … [T]he function of parental figures is to be absent, physically or emotionally, allowing the protagonists to test their independence in a safe mode and the readers to have a vicarious experience of freedom” (321–22). Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2000); Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) (Yale University Press, 1994); Butler (2012) 69–95. See especially Carolyn D. Williams, Boudica and Her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior Queen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010); Richard Hingley and Christina Unwin, Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); and Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013) 25–39.

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throughout the British Isles, not only on its peripheries.32 While Nesbit’s account of pre-invasion Britain is brief, her apparent valorisation of the welcoming Celts aligns her with this renewed enthusiasm for Britain’s Celtic past, while perhaps also revealing a socialist sympathy for the underdog – for the Roman conquest is just around the corner and, as Cyril observes, “Julius Caesar may happen at any moment” (191).

Caesar and Imperialism

It might have suited some to assert that British history only began with the Anglo-Saxon invasion: Thomas Arnold, for example, remarked that “nationally speaking, the history of Caesar’s invasion has no more to do with us, than the natural history of the animals which then inhabited our forests.”33 But most meditations on Britain, her past, and her (imperial) destiny had to try to make sense of the centuries of Roman rule – though it was rarely an easy task. The Amulet offers some sense of imperial Britain’s fragmented, ambivalent, and conflicted view of Rome, particularly in the episode in which the children encounter Julius Caesar. Here, offering readers a fantasy glimpse of a Britain which was never conquered by Rome, the invasion is very nearly called off.34 After leaving Imogen with her mother, Cyril notes that, since the date is 55 bce, they should try to get home before the fighting begins, but before they know it, the learned gentleman has expressed a wish to see Caesar, and the psammead must grant that wish. In an audience with Caesar, in his camp on the coast of Gaul, the children decide to dissuade him from invading what they call a “savage sort of island” (194): “Do go straight home, dear Caesar, and let poor little Britain alone”, says Anthea (197). Unfortunately for them – for Caesar says he had already nearly decided not to bother – he is left alone with Jane, who fills him with wondrous tales of British transport, electricity, and weaponry, such that he decides that invasion “is very much worth while” (194), after all.

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Edward Elgar’s cantata, Caractacus, was first performed in 1898, while the prominent statue of Boudica on Westminster Bridge was installed in 1902. Richard Hingley (2006) 76–85. Introductory Lectures on Modern History (1842), quoted in Butler (2012) 71. Julius Caesar’s first invasion, in 55 bce, is therefore treated as the pivotal event that ushers in Britain’s future as a Roman province – even though conquest proper was not achieved until the 43 ce invasion, under the emperor Claudius.

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Nesbit’s characterization of Caesar is worthy of comment. Though he is only briefly described, he is clearly a heroic figure: a “great man… [with] a voice that thrilled like music” (193); “when Caesar said a thing that thing was so, and there was an end to it.” (193) We can surmise that this characterization of Caesar was influenced by another key figure in Nesbit’s circle: the playwright George Bernard Shaw. We have already observed the possible influence of friends and acquaintances Oswald Barron, Annie Besant, and H.G. Wells, but her ties to Shaw run deeper still. After establishing a friendship with the fellow Fabian in 1885, by late 1886, Nesbit and Shaw were involved in a brief but intense love affair;35 though it soon fizzled out, they remained on good terms for many years. It is unlikely that they met regularly by the time that Nesbit was writing The Amulet (Shaw married in 1898), but it is not hard to detect Shaw’s influence on the novel, in the similarity between Nesbit’s heroic Caesar, and the version offered by his play Caesar and Cleopatra. Though not performed in London until 1907, it had been written in 1898, and published in 1901, and so Nesbit surely knew it and was, I suggest, influenced by it.36 Shaw’s Caesar is also a great man  – “a genius who exercises power objectively, without vengeance”37 – intended to correct (and undermine) the mythologized, romantic Shakespearean version.38 Depicted as a man of action, and supreme confidence (“having virtue, he has no need of goodness”),39 he prefigures the Shavian ‘Superman’ that would emerge in later works. We can, I believe, detect a buried acknowledgement of Shaw’s influence over The Amulet in the fact that the children are living on Fitzroy Street (not far from the British Museum), for Shaw had lived on the same street in the early 1880s, and then returned to live on the adjacent Fitzroy Square soon after his affair with Nesbit.40 Nesbit and Shaw were not alone in 35 36 37 38

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Briggs (1987) 78–105 reconstructs the relationship as far as the evidence allows. Niall W. Slater, “Shaw’s Caesars,” in Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 228–243. Maria Wyke, Caesar: A Life in Western Culture (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008) 112. Robin Loong Seong Yun, “Rewriting Shakespeare and Englishness: George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra,” in Andrew Benjamin, Tony Davies, and Robbie B.H. Goh, eds., Postcolonial Cultures and Literatures: Modernity and the (Un)Commonwealth (New York: Peter Lang, 2002) 227–243. Shaw’s notes to Caesar and Cleopatra, quoted by Slater (2006) 230. The emotional importance that Nesbit attached to these addresses, long into the 1900s, is confirmed by the autobiographical novel which she wrote in 1909, which fictionalizes her relationship with Shaw under the title Daphne in Fitzroy Street.

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lionizing Caesar so, it must be said: the sympathetic portrait of Julius Caesar in Theodor Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte (1854–6), which emphasized his “creative genius”, sets the tone for a number of subsequent accounts, such that by the end of the 19th century, as Vance describes it, “it was still possible to dislike Caesar, but this was to swim against the tide.”41 Shaw’s play offers a critique of imperialism and presents a “Caesar [who] is what the Englishman should be”.42 Nesbit’s Caesar is too briefly treated, in The Amulet, to carry such a prescriptive message, but the novel as a whole does use its ancient escapades to address the question of imperialism, its conduct, and its shortcomings, albeit in a less cogent and strident way than its commentary on socialism. Domestic politics were, of course, inseparable from Britain’s role as the head of a world empire which had, by this time, essentially reached its peak, and now stood facing an uncertain future. The urge to compare the modern imperial project with its ancient predecessors had already found many outlets in both intellectual and popular discourse of the 18th and 19th centuries – as much recent scholarship has shown43 – but as the new Edwardian era confronted imperial upheavals such as the Second Boer War (1899–1902), and strengthening nationalist movements in many colonies, the turn to ancient models intensified.44 Rome, the primary exemplum in these comparisons, offered both achievements to emulate and disasters to avoid, and so, as Norman Vance puts it, “the British were never quite sure whether they liked the Romans and their empire or not”.45 The “rich, unstable ambiguity of the Roman model” fed not only arguments for and against imperialism itself, but also – and ­perhaps more commonly – fuelled debates over the nature of imperial conquest and rule, particularly over 41 Vance (1997) 78; Slater (2006) 241; Wyke (2008) 164–168. The children’s writer Charlotte Yonge, in her Aunt Charlotte’s Stories of Roman History (1877), also prefigured Nesbit by describing Caesar as “one of the greatest men the world has ever produced” (quoted in Butler (2012) 39). 42 Loong Seong Yun (2002) 241. His depiction of the dishonourable Britannus, Caesar’s slavesecretary, is meant as a further comment on the shortcomings of the English. 43 The contributions to Mark Bradley, ed., (2010) offer a valuable and comprehensive account of the key issues. See also Butler (2012) Barbara Goff, ed., Classics and Colonialism (London: Duckworth, 2005); Phiroze Vasunia, The Classics and Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 119–155. 44 Eric Adler, “Late Victorian and Edwardian Views of Rome and the Nature of ‘Defensive Imperialism’,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (2009) 196–208; Thomas Harrison, “Ancient and Modern Imperialism,” Greece and Rome 55. 1 (2008). 45 Norman Vance, “Anxieties of Empire and the Moral Tradition: Rome and Britain,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18. 2 (2011) 246.

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whether defensive or aggressive strategies should be employed (a dispute that can be “drastically oversimplified as Cicero versus (Julius) Caesar and the later Caesars”).46 Nesbit’s take on imperialism in The Amulet follows a similarly ambiguous line.47 Certain aspects of British imperial identity are critiqued, particularly, it has been argued, the masculine conventions of the empire’s heroic code. Anthea is marked as perhaps the most capable of the children, able to mollify difficult situations with her ‘feminine’ qualities of nurturing and communicating,48 whereas the boys, particularly Cyril, are used to mock, if gently, a certain kind of jingoistic posturing. On their first arrival in Egypt, he announces that “we come from the world where the sun never sets”, which the narrator pointedly glosses as coming from some dim remembrance of a dreadful day when he had had to wait in an outer office while his father interviewed a solicitor, and there had been nothing to read but the Daily Telegraph. (61) This announcement, or a variation of it, comes at the start of each new expedition.49 In the novel’s final chapter, the children attend a lecture on the war in South Africa, in which “every boy in this room” is urged to “grow up to be noble and brave and unselfish, worthy citizens of this great Empire” (270), prompting the girls to comment that they already have those qualities “because of our beautiful natures. It’s only boys that have to be made brave by magic.” (270) But  Nesbit’s championing of literary girls did not extend to support for the women’s suffrage movement,50 and her challenging of imperial ideology was 46 47

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Vance (1997) 223, 253. “If Nesbit appears at one level to be an enthusiastic agent of the empire-builders, at another level she seems to be meditating on the inevitable end of empire” (Mavis Reimer, “The Beginning of the End: Writing Empire in E. Nesbit’s Psammead Books,” in Raymond E. Jones, ed., E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, Maryland: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006) 48). Michelle Smith, “E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: Reconfiguring Time, Nation, and Gender,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 52, no. 3 (2009). See also Claudia Nelson, “The ‘It’ Girl (and Boy): Ideologies of Gender in the Psammead Trilogy,” in Raymond E. Jones, ed., E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, Maryland: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006). Eitan Bar-Yosef, “E . Nesbit and the Fantasy of Reverse Colonization: How Many Miles to Modern Babylon ?,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 46, no. 1 (2003) 13. Briggs (1987) 124.

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likewise selective in its targets. Although we have already seen how harshly Nesbit judged the iniquities of contemporary domestic society, elsewhere in The Amulet she balances this with suggestions of British superiority, as an industrial power at least. Her children are given plenty of opportunity to boast of the marvels of the modern world. The most notable instance comes in their encounter with Caesar, when, as noted above, Jane’s tales of “railways, electric lights, balloons, men-of-war, cannons, and dynamite” (194) are what convince the Roman that he should invade Britain, after all. The intriguing counterfactual scenario of this episode, which nearly saw Caesar restrict his empire’s boundaries to the coast of Gaul, offers a glimpse of an alternate reality in which Britain never has to worry about being an imperial subject, before neatly overturning the usual justification for what might be perceived as acquiescence to Roman imperialism.51 No longer a question of “what did the Romans do for us?”, the episode instead provides an opportunity to restate what the Britons (thought they) were doing for the rest of the world. And most strikingly, it allows the British Empire, as represented by Nesbit’s time-travellers, to assert its own superiority to Rome: Caesar’s belief that “Britain was not worth the bother of invading” (194) is shown to be misguided, and through this message from the future, it is the British Empire’s achievements that effectively conquer Rome, by making the great general change his mind. As he embarks on the invasion, he remarks that, if what Jane has told him is true, then “even a hundred legions will not suffice” to conquer “this three-cornered island.” (197) Let us end this examination of Nesbit’s Julius Caesar by considering the brief, but pivotal, role that he plays in her later novel, The Magic City. Here, the main protagonist, Philip, finds himself inside a city which he has built from toys, books, and household objects;52 as its ‘Deliverer’, he must perform seven ‘Great Deeds’ and free the city from its ‘Destroyer’, before returning to his normal life. Many of the city’s inhabitants step, quite literally, from the pages of the books used to build the city, and since a copy of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (The Gallic Wars) has been used to build the Hall of Justice, the ‘Destroyer’ – named the ‘Pretenderette’, in something of a sly dig at the Suffragette movement53 – has men from Gallic tribes, the Sequani and the Aedui, guarding the city. In his final task, Philip defeats the Pretenderette by summoning Julius Caesar directly 51

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On the implications of counterfactual history, particularly in an ancient context, see Duncan F. Kennedy, Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: A Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Literature (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013) 120–137. This miniature city has been read as a “figure of Utopia” which continues to owe a considerable debt to H.G. Wells (Briggs (1987) 324–325.) Ibid. 333–334.

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from the pages of the book, and asking him to drive the “barbarians” away once more. Caesar’s legions duly obey, driving the Gauls back into the book, before neatly and submissively lining up to hail their leader and marching back into the pages themselves. As in The Amulet, we have a powerful image of Caesar the Great Man: “Each [soldier] as he passed the mighty conqueror saluted him with proud mute reverence”, and Lucy (Philip’s stepsister and companion on his adventures) simpers “I must speak to him; I must…I must. Oh, what a darling he is!” (200).54 Besides reinforcing The Amulet’s hero-worship of Caesar, The Magic City also allows Nesbit to expand on how we come to know the past, and its Great Men, in the first place. For her, a written account of history bears enormous significance (in keeping with “her continuous awareness of the power of books, apparent in everything she wrote”),55 and Caesar becomes an important avatar of that power: not only a historical figure who is preserved in literature, he is the writer of his own greatness, the “teller rather than the subject of a narrative” which “with its artful rhetoric of third-person authority,…has guided so much of later generations’ responses”.56 Completely avoiding any reference to his assassination (which would remind us that not everyone endorsed his Great Man status), Nesbit instead concentrates on presenting Caesar as a guarantee of the written word’s authority to shape and transmit the past – reality itself, even – thereby underpinning her own authorial powers to create worlds too. Though it may not be an easy task, the writer – ancient or modern – is able to fix and transmit a narrative of events, and determine how history plays out (whenever its narrative is retold and relived, at least, if not in ‘reality’). He or she has the final word, as when The Magic City’s Caesar instructs his general, Titus Labienus, to “drive them [the Gauls] back into that book wherein I set them more than nineteen hundred years ago, and from which they have dared to escape.” (196)57 What is more, although Nesbit generally privileges the ­far-reaching powers of the imagination, she also underscores the authority of 54 55 56 57

Page numbers refer to the Chronicle Books edition (2000). Briggs (1987) 220. Briggs sees this as Nesbit’s further “endorsement of the power of imagination in life”. Christopher Pelling, “Judging Julius Caesar,” in Maria Wyke, ed., Julius Caesar in Western Culture (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2006) 15. Pelling notes the analogy between Caesar’s military authority and his written texts: “the writer shapes and controls the narrative as firmly as the commander shaped and controlled events” (Ibid. 15). Despite her valorization of books, Nesbit does playfully acknowledge the difficulties her readers may face in trying to access ancient history in the original Latin: Caesar tells Philip, “You have often tried to master Caesar and always failed. Now you shall be no more ashamed of that failure, for you shall see Caesar’s power” (195).

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written history by implying that what is written cannot easily be undone. The Amulet may posit a counterfactual scenario in which Britain is never invaded, but in the end, events play out as they have been (or will be, for Caesar) written. Likewise, in The Magic City, Caesar explains that none of his soldiers were hurt: “You see it was necessary to get every man back into the book just as he left it, or what would the schoolmasters have done?” (200).

Texts and Objects

Though Nesbit may shrink from altering the course of events in The Amulet and The Magic City, her time-travelling children are free to roam throughout history, back into the deep past and forward into the future (while no time at all passes by in their own present).58 Let us examine in more detail how this time-travel is facilitated, then, in order to better understand how Nesbit and her contemporaries access and relate to the ancient past. In one sense, the time-travel depends only on Nesbit’s (and by extension, her characters’) imaginative powers. As the psammead and other characters repeatedly insist, “time is only a mode of thought, you know” (132), as if the children can simply will themselves back into the past;59 the amulet’s magic, on this reading, is a metaphor for the imagination.60 But Nesbit knows that our imagination needs fuel, and shows us, in The Amulet and elsewhere, where it can be found. As we have just seen, the written word is a particularly powerful means of accessing the past. Indeed, as recent critics have shown, Nesbit’s fiction consistently privileges literature as a way of shaping and confronting reality; her characters are “hyperliterate…promiscuous readers par excellence,”61 and Nesbit herself is At the end of the episode, Philip promises to “swot up my Latin like anything next term, so as to read about you” (200). 58 Though The Amulet does not allow the mechanics of time-travel to become too complicated, Nesbit’s later works in this vein are more ambitious; see Prickett (2005) 228. For a full account of Nesbit’s time-travel device, and its influence on later authors, see Julia Briggs, “The Amulet and Other Stories of Time,” in Raymond E. Jones, ed., E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, Maryland: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006). 59 The psammead first tells the children that “Time and space are only forms of thought” (46); his words are repeated verbatim by Cyril (161) and Rekh-Marā (210), and later garbled by Cyril as “time’s only a thingummy of whatsitsname” (228). 60 Briggs (1987) 401; Lurie (1990) 111. 61 Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (New York: oup usa, 2010) 129.

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part of a web of complex intertextual relationships with other authors. But literature by itself is insufficient to allow full, imaginative access to the ancient past. Even if a sizeable corpus of texts survives – as it does for ancient Rome – their riches may not easily be mined, certainly not by children and especially not by girls – in the Edwardian era, at least. No mention is made of Jane or Anthea reading Latin, and Cyril tells us that, as far as his progress goes, he is “only in Caesar” (38). For civilisations such as Egypt, its texts are still more obscure; only the learned gentleman can read the hieroglyphs on the amulet. However, it is the amulet itself that symbolises a parallel and complementary route by which the children – and by extension, us as Nesbit’s readers – might access the ancient past. This artefact is, literally, the portal through which the children travel, and it stands for the broader material culture which facilitates the children’s access to antiquity in a more far-reaching, and even more productive way, than that offered by the texts of Caesar.62 While learning Latin is academic slog, ancient art furnishes the children with fun and games, as we learn of how Cyril and Robert in tight white underclothing had spent a pleasant hour in reproducing the attitudes of statues seen either in the British Museum or in Father’s big photograph book. (157) – one is the Venus de Milo, the other the Discobolos. If George Bernard Shaw is a likely influence on Nesbit’s fascination with and characterisation of Julius Caesar, another intimate personal relationship was still more significant in shaping her appreciation of ancient material culture. In 1903, Nesbit knocked on the door of the Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, looking for inspiration.63 The keeper, Wallis Budge, furnished her with stories of Egyptian antiquity, and she began writing The Amulet straight away; before long, a love affair had begun.64 Budge’s influence on The Amulet was a good deal more extensive, and concrete, than Shaw’s: he apparently gave her the ‘words of power’ for the amulet’s inscription, Ur Hekau Setcheh, and suggested the type of amulet itself, and the name Rekh-Marā, alongside

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Suzanne Rahn (2006) 188 points out that Nesbit may also have been influenced by H.G. Wells in this, since his novella The Time Machine (1895) was innovative in using a physical object to effect time travel, rather than dreams or other psychological devices. Briggs (1987) 245–8. Ibid. 248–50.

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many other details of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquity;65 he also read drafts of the novel. It is no surprise, then, that the novel should be dedicated “To Dr Wallis Budge of the British Museum as a small token of gratitude for his unfailing kindness and help in the making of it.” It was not only Budge’s expertise in the minutiae of ancient material (and indeed literary) culture that shaped The Amulet: we can also detect the presence of his theories of racial origins and hierarchies in  Egypt, a matter of hot debate in the Edwardian era, and one which pitted Budge – who believed that Pharaonic culture was derived from indigenous African peoples – against his fellow eminent Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, who attributed it to an invading Caucasian race.66 Nesbit does not explore this topic in any detail, but Budge surely influenced the events of the children’s first visit to Egypt, when the primitive village of fair-skinned people is attacked and overrun by men whose “faces were darkened, and their hair black as night.” (72) The significance of the British Museum for Nesbit’s view of antiquity goes beyond the inspiration she gained from Budge. By making it a setting for key events in The Amulet, Nesbit underlines the importance of the museum as an institution with considerable power to shape Britain’s own imperial identity, and to dictate a certain view of the past.67 During the Queen of Babylon’s visit to London, she goes to the British Museum and, upon viewing the exhibits, she “kicked up the most frightful shine… Said those necklaces and earrings and things in the glass cases were all hers”. (144) After failing to break them out of the cases, she compels the psammead to grant her wish, at which a crowd of artefacts, led by a great stone bull, magically processes out of the museum.68 65

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The illustration of the amulet is a close match for a red jasper knot-style amulet in the British Museum (ea 20639).The inspiration for Rekh-Marā must come from the renowned painted tomb of a Theban governor by that name. Kevin M. McGeough and Elizabeth Galway, “‘Working Egyptians of the World Unite!’ How Edith Nesbit Used Near Eastern Archaeology and Children’s Literature to Argue for Social Change,” in Beth Alpert Nakhai, ed., The World of Women in the Ancient and Classical Near East (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) 185–7 assess Budge’s contribution to The Amulet, though rather downplay the nature of his relationship with Nesbit. Karen Sands-O’Connor, “Impertinent Miracles at the British Museum,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 19. 2 (2009); Gange (2013) 239–243, 276–303. On Nesbit’s participation in a contemporary ‘museum gothic’ genre, which “endows objects with the power to trigger imaginative flights on the part of the viewer”, see Ruth Hoberman, “In Quest of a Museal Aura: Turn of the Century Narratives About MuseumDisplayed Objects,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31. 2 (2003); quotation from 477. The stone bull can be identified with the giant statues excavated from Nineveh by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s (perhaps most likely a statue from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal ii, bm me118872). Deborah Thomas points out how Nesbit conflates Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities here (“Assyrian Monsters and Domestic Chimeras,” sel Studies in

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But the episode ends with the Queen placating the furious psammead by wishing that “all the things were back in their places” (147), ensuring that the museum’s collection survives intact. Nesbit thereby reinforces a central principle of the British Museum – one that still affects how we view it today – that is, its powerful expression of British hegemony over contemporary European claims to ownership of the classical past, as well as the currency of ancient artefacts for representing the cornucopia of the British Empire.69 Though The Amulet’s children, and its readers, delight in the unrivalled opportunities to visit these distant cities and civilisations, to converse with their people and see their artefacts and architecture in its original contexts, still Nesbit’s focus on the British Museum reminds us that imperial conquest has allowed Britain to bring the ancient past home, to own and even domesticate it.70 Nor is the British Empire’s right to do so challenged: the Queen of Babylon’s possessions will not be repatriated, and the British Museum as “Imperial Archive” withstands time, becoming the portal through which the children enter the future utopian London.71 One final aspect of Nesbit’s engagement with ancient material culture requires brief consideration. As noted above, The Amulet’s children imitate Greek statues in their games, and this fascination with sculpture, particularly classical, recurs elsewhere in Nesbit’s work. For her, such artefacts are far from being mute, inanimate objects, but can effect powerful, if not magical, encounters with the past. Nor does this magic or imaginative potential seem to be

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English Literature 1500–1900 48. 4 (2008).) In another indication of the extent to which theosophy loomed large in Nesbit’s social and intellectual circle, The Amulet has the Queen of Babylon mistaken for Annie Besant, with newspapers reporting the scenes at the British Museum as an “impertinent miracle” performed by Mrs Besant (147). See also McGeough and Galway (2008) 188–9. Mark Bradley, “Introduction: Approaches to Classics and Imperialism,” in Mark Bradley, ed., Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) 9. See Barbara J. Black, “An Empire’s Great Expectations: Museums in Imperialist Boy Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 21. 2 (January 1999). Bar-Yosef (2003) 21. The British Museum also appears intact in another influential utopian text, William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890). (Morris was also an early member of the Fabian society – though later to break away from it – and influenced Nesbit considerably; Briggs (1987) 63). By contrast, H.G. Wells’ Time Traveller visits the ruined ‘Palace of Green Porcelain’ (The Time Machine (1895), Chapter 8), which is often taken to be an amalgamation of the British Museum along with the museums of South Kensington, such as the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert. See Rahn (2006) 201.

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inhibited, for Nesbit at least, if the statue in question is a cast or other reproduction, rather than an authentic original; indeed, we might say that the act of reproducing – a common enough activity in the Victorian and Edwardian eras – is itself simply the first step in the imaginative flight of fancy that Nesbit develops.72 We know from Nesbit’s recollections of her early life that her fondness for the British Museum was exceeded only by her love of the exhibitions of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, where she saw casts of many of the most famous classical statues in the Greek Court.73 These youthful experiences seem to have influenced a later novel, The Enchanted Castle (1907). Following the familiar pattern, the three children here experience a range of magical episodes centred around the castle of the title. In one, having learned that the statues of the Olympian gods in the castle’s garden come alive at night, they join in with their midnight feasting, becoming statues themselves so that they might swim, and float, and dive – and with the ladies of Olympus spread the nightly feast, eat of the food of the gods, drink their cup, listen to the song that is undying, and catch the laughter of immortal lips. (191) Nesbit depicts their revels with the “most awfully polite and nice” (189) gods as an innocent Arcadian idyll, one which offers a magical encounter with a deep antiquity – this time in its mythical, rather than historical form – and, as with the amulet, using the material remains or manifestations of that antiquity as the launchpad for accessing the past. As Phoebus Apollo sings a song after the feast, the narrator tells us that those who listened forgot time and space, and how to be sad, and how to be naughty, and it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in  the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful. (200) While the classical statues in The Enchanted Castle evoke an atmosphere of “unbearable beauty”, it is worth noting that, elsewhere, Nesbit focuses on the uncanny, often threatening, potential of ancient bodies in this, or similar, 72

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Kate Nichols’ detailed examination of the casts at the Crystal Palace (where distinctions between original and copy were often blurred) provides valuable context for contemporary views of ancient sculpture and its reproduction: Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain 1854–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Briggs (1987) 8, 263.

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forms. As a young girl, she was taken to see mummified bodies in a church crypt in Bordeaux, which she later described as the “crowning horror of my childish life”; it certainly affected her far more than her encounters with the Egyptian mummies, their “cousins at home, in the British Museum”, which did not seem so terrifying.74 These fears emerge most strongly in a ghost story written for adults, ‘Man-Size in Marble’ (published in an 1893 collection, Grim Tales), in which a funerary monument in a church comes to life and rapes a young woman. The malign intent of this story is very different to The Enchanted Castle’s statues, but the basic “fetishistic desire for statues and images” remains the same, and surely owes much to the late 19th and early 20th century trend of ‘Pygmalionism’, which saw numerous artistic treatments of the famous classical myth in which a sculpture comes to life.75 Conclusion This study of Nesbit’s use of antiquity in The Story of the Amulet, alongside The Magic City and The Enchanted Castle has, I hope, shown something of the different ways in which the ancient world reverberated in the cultural imagination at this uncertain time. Critics have often remarked on the Janus-like view of the world that marked Nesbit’s life and works – how she bridges the Victorian and modern worlds, straddles the divide between realism and fantasy, and can appear both conventional and radical, for example76 – and it is notable that she turns to antiquity not in order to seek refuge in a distant past, as a way of shoring up the increasingly unstable world in which she lived (and certainly not in order to make it safe for children), but rather to exploit its potential for helping her comment on those difficulties, particularly when they drew on her socialist principles. Though the past is often used to cast the present day in a bad light, The Amulet certainly does not offer a Golden Age view of antiquity, for only the future London is presented as a truly harmonious, peaceful time.77 True, the ancient world offers enough magic, mystery and excitement to keep 74 75 76 77

Ibid. 8. Nesbit’s description of the London mummies offers a striking example of how the British Museum could ‘domesticate’ its collections, as discussed above. Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography and Film Around 1900 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008) 58–68. Gubar (2010) 130. As Kimberley Reynolds (2011) 103 points out, The Story of the Amulet’s excitement about a better future is rarely found in children’s literature of today which “invariably assume[s] that life will become more difficult and more restricted than it is today”.

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her readers entertained, but it is also important that Nesbit takes the time to explore the role that magic and imagination play in children’s minds – both her characters and her readers – showing us in detail how our access to the past depends on our use and interpretation of antiquity’s remains, both textual and material.

Chapter 3

(De)constructing Arcadia: Polish Struggles with History and Differing Colours of Childhood in the Mirror of Classical Mythology1 Katarzyna Marciniak To Professor Alicja Szastyńska-Siemion who ever preserves the haven of Antiquity, with my utmost gratitude Once upon a time, though not so long ago, Western civilization began perceiving children not as “short adults,” but as distinct beings who deserved to be addressed with specially drafted works intended to teach them, by means of the charm of literature, how to become good people.2 And yet just as that shift was taking hold, the eminent representative of Western thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – with the same aim in mind – pleaded in his famous treatise Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762) to keep kids as far as possible away from that civilization. He also rejected literary works (except for Robinson Crusoe), among them the Aesopian/La Fontaine fables we commonly associate with a children’s audience, even though, as the Philosopher observed, they were suited to adults.3 However, Rousseau did reach to the heritage of Antiquity, mainly for the myth of Arcadia as a safe shelter where the innocents might be protected. Arcadia was en vogue in Rousseau’s times. Nonetheless, the Philosopher stood out from his contemporaries by his constructive programme to transform 1 In my work on this paper I made use of the experiences I gained carrying out the research projects within the framework of the Harvard University Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant, the Mobility Plus programme of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the “Artes Liberales” Institute Foundation. I thank Prof. Jerzy Axer and Prof. Jan Kieniewicz from the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw for their support, Prof. Deborah H. Roberts from the Department of Classics, Haverford College for her kind recommendation, the anonymous reviewer for her/his time and careful reading, and – last but not least – Dr. Lisa Maurice for inviting me to contribute to the present volume. 2 See Carolyn L. Burke, Joby G. Copenhaver, “Animals as People in Children’s Literature,” Language Arts 81 (2004) 208. 3 See Tyson E. Lewis, “Rousseau and the Fable: Rethinking the Fabulous Nature of Educational Philosophy,” Educational Theory 62 (2012) 323–341.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_005

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the dress parties and “recreational fancies for the privileged,” preserved in the paintings by Watteau and Boucher, into an “ontology for everyman.”4 The fervent discussion in regard to the bringing up youths, which he catalyzed, has yet to be closed – and may never will be. However, despite not having come to unanimous conclusions, we usually agree on one premise: childhood is a blessed time and it should be carefree and brightly colourful – indeed Arcadian, as we might say, evoking one of the most famous topoi of Western civilization. Nonetheless, all too often childhood is anything but a bright time, despite the titanic efforts of parents, guardians, and pro-kids organizations. We are sadly aware of this fact. Sometimes we even feel we have failed in our adult roles. Moreover, the experiences of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms along with the current reports from different regions of the world have lent to a shattering of our faith in a harmonious Arcadia, and caused us to hear many Arcadian notes as sounding false and off-key. There is no ideal shelter for us to offer to youngsters and the myth of a peaceful and colourful childhood turns out to be only a myth, nothing more.

The Boy Who (Probably) Did Not Live

One of the most famous Polish contemporary writers, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), recalls a scene from occupied Warsaw – an evening in June of 1942 or 1943, so beautiful and full of life that Iwaszkiewicz thinks for a moment that the city is free. But for a moment only. He quickly remembers that the rush in the streets is because of the necessity to get back home before curfew. And what happens next will haunt his memories forever. Iwaszkiewicz notices a boy immersed in a book, on the tram stop nearby the monument of Adam Mickiewicz – the greatest poet of Polish Romanticism: He was fifteen, at most sixteen. While reading, he now and then shook the yellow shag of hair which was falling on his forehead. The boy had one book sticking out of his side-pocket and he held the other in front of the eyes, apparently unable to pull himself away from reading it. He had probably gained the book a moment earlier from a friend or a secret 4 Tony Seaton, Tourism and Romantic Myth of Nature. The Evolution of a Discursive Relationship, in Andrew Holden, David Fennell, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2013) 102 (accessed via google books). See also J.B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932; repr. Auckland, nz: Floating Press, 2009) 224–226 (accessed via google books).

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library and, without waiting to get back home, he wanted to discover its content at once, there in the street.5 The boy stepped in front of an oncoming car, which stopped with a shriek of tyres. The writer recalls further: Terrified, I noticed it was a Gestapo ambulance. The youth with the book tried to walk past it. But at that very moment the door in the back of the ambulance opened and two individuals in helmets with skulls jumped out onto the street. They materialized next to the boy. One of them was shouting in a guttural voice, the other, with an oblique gesture of his hand, invited him tauntingly inside. I can still see the youth standing at the door of the ambulance, embarrassed, simply ashamed… He tries to object with a naive shrug of his head, like a child who is promising not to do it again…“I didn’t do ­anything” – he seems to keep saying. – “I just…” He indicates the book as the reason for his lack of attention. As if it were possible to explain anything here. His hesitation to enter the ambulance is the last reflex of a life leaking away. The gendarme demands the boy’s documents, and then tears up his Kennkarte and pushes the boy brutally inside. The other soldier helps him, the boy gets in, followed by the Gestapo-men, the door is slammed shut and the ambulance, racing off, quickly turns into Szucha Avenue…6 On Szucha Avenue was the infamous headquarters of the Gestapo: to be imprisoned there in fact meant to be sentenced to death. Iwaszkiewicz expected this would be also the fate of Michaś, as he called the boy. The author, however, imposed on this Polish diminutive of Michał (Michael) one more name which gave the title to this short-story: Icarus. “Icarus is drowning,” he comments on the boy’s tragedy, referring to the famous painting by Bruegel, in which no one sees the fall of the young hero. No one helps him. Similarly in Warsaw under Nazi occupation, Michaś-Icarus plunged unnoticed, the people around heading about their business, “Mickiewicz standing on his plinth,” and only at the boy’s home his parents would be waiting for his return, never to discover how he had died. Iwaszkiewicz is haunted by the cruelty of this death – not in battle, where one could find some consolation in people giving up their life for a bigger case:

5 Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Ikar, in idem, Ikar. Staroświecki sklep. Wiewiórka [Icarus. An Oldfashioned Shop. A Squirrel] (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1971; Ikar was written in 1945) 7 (transl. K.M.). 6 Ibid. 8 (transl. K.M.).

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“how numerous were those like my Icarus who drowned in the sea of oblivion for a reason cruel in its senselessness.”7 But the death of Michaś-Icarus described in the short-story, which is popular reading in the second class of Polish middle school, is given a higher meaning by Iwaszkiewicz’s literary talent. The writer, perhaps haunted also by the thought that he saw what was happening and did nothing, even if nothing could have been done, immortalized the boy as a martyr of literature. We do not know what book he was reading – maybe even a schoolbook for underground lessons (regular education was forbidden by the Nazis in Poland), but on that June evening the power of literature manifested itself in full strength. The boy probably died, but Iwaszkiewicz’s gift of words did not let his death sink in the sea of oblivion. On the contrary, a clear reference to Greek mythology universalized the story and made it reverberate with a moral obligation for us – the readers – that we should do all in our power lest there be more such Icari in any part of the world. In the West, the value of the obligations based on Classical Antiquity was put in question in the 1960s, by the new, post-war generation. Iwaszkiewicz, at that time the President of the Polish Writers’ Union, was obviously aware of these transformations. The marble construct of the Arcadian Hellas cracked. À bas le latin!, ancient tradition did not protect us from evil, some said. Others even claimed it had compromised itself, for so many of those who had concocted hell on Earth for children and adults had had – during their own childhoods – an excellent classical education, one imbued with virtus, pietas, clementia, the Platonic idea of goodness, and the Ciceronian concept of the ethical precedence of honestum over utile.8 However, like T.S. Eliot, though on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Iwaszkiewicz believed it was not ancient culture and its values that had failed, but rather the people who had abused this marvellous heritage – still a precious tool to reveal and conquer the Tartarean side of the human soul.9 Further, in Central-Eastern Europe there was no rebellion against ancient culture like in the 1960s in the West, because it has always played in this region an even more special role. By means of references to Classical Antiquity, Central-Eastern European authors confirm access to the Mediterraneum understood as a spiritual community exceeding geographical borders.10 Poland 7 8 9 10

Ibid. 9 (transl. K.M.). See also the recent discussion on the novel Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). See T.S. Eliot, What is a Classic? An Address Delivered Before the Virgil Society on the 16th of October, 1944 (London: Faber, 1945). See Jerzy Axer, ed., Łacina jako język elit [Latin as a Language of the Élites] (Warszawa: OBTA–DiG, 2004).

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has long appealed to these ideas in various struggles with History, and has thereby constructed its unique national identity. During the times of partition (1772–1918) even our Romantic poets, at first sight usually antagonistic in regard to Classicism, were engaged in secret societies inspired by Antiquity. Present in one of them – the Philomaths – was the young Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the future author of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz [Sir Thaddeus], the very same figure whom Iwaszkiewicz made a monumental witness to the fall of Michaś-Icarus. In Oda do młodości [Ode to Youth, 1820], the manifesto of the new generation, Mickiewicz predicted for his new hero splendid acts of bravery, the first one while still in the cradle: Who, as a child, detached foul Hydra’s head, In Youth, shall strangle Centaurs even […].11 The child might be braver than anyone before (“accelerated” heroism: confrontation in childhood not with snakes, but with the Hydra, etc.), though Mickiewicz understood that the future hero, if he wanted to be truly great, needed to build his cv on Hercules’ deeds. The Philomath Society was discovered and disbanded by the tsarist authorities (its members convicted, Mickiewicz included), but its name returned circa a century later thanks to professor Ryszard Gansiniec (1888–1958), a classicist educated at the best German universities. After wwi and Poland’s regaining of independence, in the aim of shaping youngsters in the spirit of classical values, he set up a journal for school children and youth dedicated to various aspects of the Graeco-Roman world – Filomata [Philomath, 1929–1996], today reborn as Nowy Filomata [New Philomath, since 1997].12 Thus, the presence of Classical Antiquity in Polish literature for youngsters is no surprise.13 From among the overwhelming number of examples, I would 11 12 13

Transl. Jarek Zawadzki, in Selected Masterpieces of Polish Poetry (BookSurge: Shenzhen, 2007) 51. See the journal’s website (consulted July 5, 2015). Within the framework of the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Grant (2012–2013) which I received for the project Our Mythical Childhood…The Classics and Children’s Literature Between East & West, supported also by the “Artes Liberales” Institute Foundation and the University of Warsaw Fund for Research, a unique seminar for the students of the University of Warsaw was set up which resulted in the publication of the compilation of ancient motifs in Polish literature for young readers: Katarzyna Marciniak, Elżbieta Olechowska, Joanna Kłos, Michał Kucharski, eds., Polish Literature for Children & Young Adults Inspired by Classical Antiquity. A Catalogue (Warsaw: Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, 2013), online version available at: .

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like to adduce here some crucial works for children and young adults inspired by ancient myths from three time spans of Polish history: from the interwar period (1918–1939), with the strongest impact on Polish culture to this day; from the People’s Republic of Poland; and from the most recent times after the Transformation (1989–). Special focus will be placed on the historical background influencing the colours of the mythical worlds created by writers for youngsters.

The Two Titans

Jan Parandowski (1895–1978) and Tadeusz Zieliński (1859–1944) – Titans of Polish culture, great personalities – respected each other and shared the strong conviction that young people should be made acquainted with Classical Antiquity. The first one, though an academic (in the years 1945–1948 professor at the Catholic University in Lublin), is known mainly as an essayist, the other carried out a popularization mission, but he acquired the reputation of an eminent scholar of world renommée: Michael von Albrecht wrote a poem in his memory and in Wilfried Stroh’s view he was far ahead of his and even our epoch.14 Parandowski shaped (and is still shaping) generations of Polish readers. Zieliński – sentenced by the pro-Soviet authorities to damnatio memoriae – shaped only a few. However, those who had contact with his works remained marked by them forever. Both wrote mythologies for young people: Parandowski’s volume appeared in 1924, Zieliński’s book in 1922–1923, though it entered into Polish literature not until 1930 – that is why I shall present Parandowski’s work first. The shape and message of both mythological elaborations were influenced by the formation and historical experiences of the authors. Parandowski was born in Lviv, to a Polish family of strong patriotic traditions. He was raised by his grandmother, who had helped the insurgents in both the November Uprising (1830–1831) and the January Uprising (1863–1864). His middle-school teachers spoke ancient languages fluently. The necessity to repeat a failed exam on Homer determined his life’s path. In time, he won the reputation of a classicist par excellence and became one of the greatest stylists 14

See Michael von Albrecht, Thaddei Zielinski monumentum Schondorfiense, in Tadeusz Zieliński, Autobiografia. Dziennik 1939–1944 [Autobiography. Diary 1939–1944], ed. Hanna Geremek, Piotr Mitzner (Warszawa: OBTA–DiG, 2005) 398–399. For the list of Zieliński’s works see Valentina Garulli, “Bibliografia di Tadeusz Stefan Zieliński,” Eikasmos 17 (2006) 429–458.

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of Polish language, even an “Alchemist of the Word,” and a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, an acquaintance of Jean Cocteau and James Joyce.15 Parandowski’s passion for Classical Antiquity was greatly ignited during his studies at the University in Lviv, i.a., by Professor Gansiniec – the future founder of the journal Filomata. wwi interrupted his education. Parandowski spent the years 1915–1918 as a civilian captive in Russia. Thereafter he earned a master’s in Classics and Archaeology. When wwii broke out, Parandowski took refuge with his wife in the countryside (his flat in Warsaw was burnt to ash). There they witnessed brutal fights between the Germans and Russians: constant shooting, bodies everywhere, months of skulking in the basement.16 Those experiences only reinforced Parandowski in his mission to popularize ancient culture in order to support peace among nations and to heal hatred. It is significant that Parandowski’s first essay (he published it at the age of seventeen; the editor was convinced the author was an adult – the text was delivered to the office by a servant17) focused on none other than Rousseau. Parandowski shared his opinion that “everything happened in our childhood,” and he paid special attention to youngsters.18 His Mitologia. Wierzenia i podania Greków i Rzymian [Mythology. Beliefs and Legends of the Greeks and Romans], published in 1924, to this very day is popular school reading at the elementary level (fifth class), in middle school (first class), and at high school (first class). It secured Parandowski a prominent place in the pantheon of Polish writers. One may even venture to say that there is no more formative book – apart from the Bible and Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz – for Polish culture, though Parandowski was sceptical towards his achievement, apparently regretting that his work did not fulfill the criteria he meant for professional scholarship: “Here the time span between the first year of the University and the completion of studies after the war carried out a metamorphosis: from the future professor and scholar to the writer.”19 15

16 17 18 19

The biographical data referred to in the present paper derive from: Władysław Studencki, Alchemik słowa. Rzecz o Janie Parandowskim [Alchemist of the Word. A Study on Jan Parandowski], voll. i–ii (Opole: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna, 1972–1974). The title of the study alludes to Parandowski’s book Alchemia słowa [The Alchemy of the Word] (Warszawa, 1951). Some Parandowski’s works are discussed in Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 275–286 (entries by Joanna Grzeszczuk, Paulina Kłóś, Joanna Kozioł, Agata Więcławska). See Studencki (1972–4) 24. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 30. Parandowski described the initiation of a boy into adulthood in the novel Niebo w płomieniach [Heaven in Flames] (Warszawa: Towarzystwo Wydawnicze „Rój,” 1936). Quoted after Studencki (1972–4) 40 (transl. K.M.).

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Parandowski revised his Mythology after wwii and this (sixth) edition of 1953 (20,000 copies sold) became the base for subsequent reprints.20 His work coincided in time with the lectures he delivered all over the world as the President of the Polish pen Club (from 1933, and later, from 1962, also as the Vice-President of the International pen). In 1949 in Venice he spoke about the martyrdom of the Jews, “the people who suffered the most and bore the greatest sacrifices.” In 1954 in Amsterdam he referred to “the children in concentration camps, sent to torments and death.” Iwaszkiewicz recalled that Parandowski had made a huge impression with his speech on “the insufficiency of Western literature in facing political events and the evolution of capitalistic societies in Europe, Asia, and America.”21 However, in none of those presentations was his aim to condemn or to judge, but rather to help understand and overcome the tensions and post-war anxieties for the sake of future generations. Disillusioned with the world he lived in, Parandowski searched for Arcadia in ancient culture. Like Eliot, he was convinced that the departure from its universal heritage was calamitous, especially after “the terrible devastation”22 which had marked the twentieth century. Parandowski, nonetheless, looked at this universal heritage through the prism of Poland and its youth. In France, he held a lecture Poland Is Situated on the Mediterranean Sea. In Poland herself, he was calling to keep Latin in Polish schools, claiming that its elimination would cause a regress in proficiency with the mother tongue (even though Polish is a Slavic, not a Romance language) and an emigration from European culture.23 Despite Parandowski’s appeals, Latin and ancient culture were nearly eradicated from Polish schools (contemporary changes are sealing this process), however, his Mythology never let such emigration happen, at least in the realm of culture. The composition of the book was traditional. Parandowski followed, to a certain degree, the elaborations by the Lviv professor Albert Zipper (1855– 1936).24 After some preliminary remarks on the nature of myth and various ancient approaches to mythology, the “Greek part” followed with the chapters dedicated to the birth of the world, the Olympian gods, the gods of Light and Air, and the Earth, the Kingdom of the Sea, the Kingdom of Hell, the Gods of 20 21

See Studencki (1972–4) 39–40. Ibid. 22–25. The speeches were shaped by Parandowski’s experiences during wwii and later, behind the Iron Curtain. 22 See Studencki (1972–4) 32. 23 Ibid. 22 and 29. 24 See Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 429–432 (entry by Maryana Shan).

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Fate and human matters, the heroes, and the Trojan War. In the second, “Roman part” Parandowski discussed the character of Roman religion, the cult of the dead and the home deities, the main gods, the gods of Earth, Fields, Woods, and Wells, personifications, the influx of foreign beliefs, the cult of Caesars, and Roman legends.25 In so doing he applied a particular method to prove the connection between Classical Antiquity and Polish culture: he interlaced the mythical stories with quotations from Polish literature, at one and the same time making the children and youth feel strong ties to the ancient heritage and allowing them easy acquaintance with the most important Polish texts from various literary epochs (the quotations were short and approachable, at least for the twentieth-century public). For example, while describing the ritual of Eiresione, he cited the song performed during the ceremonies in a Polish version by Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin, one of the much appreciated representatives of Polish sentimentalism in the Enlightenment,26 and as a comment on Icarus’ death he quoted two verses from the poem Flis [Lighterage] by Sebastian Fabian Klonowic, the Polish and Neolatin poet (known as Acernus) from the sixteenth century: Icarus made you aware with his testament Not to play with an alien element.27 Moreover, Parandowski exceeded the purely literary framework in referring also to the most famous Polish iconography, which he made correspond to ancient masterpieces. For example, in a passage on the Satyrs, he mentioned their numerous portrayals in sculptures, on bas-reliefs, and paintings along with the ironic poem Satyr, albo dziki mąż [Satyr, or a Feral Man], written in 1563 by the greatest poet of the Polish Renaissance, Jan Kochanowski, and with the paintings by Jacek Malczewski, the father of Polish symbolism at the turn of the twentieth century – Parandowski’s own period. Thus, he interwove various epochs, from Antiquity up to the most present times, into a universal mythological chronotope, where the divisions into historical eras have no raison d’être and where readers experience a surprisingly high level of affinity with the past, as certain motifs sound alarmingly valid even today, like the 25

26 27

The data are based on the following edition: Jan Parandowski, Mitologia. Wierzenia i podania Greków i Rzymian [Mythology. Beliefs and Legends of the Greeks and Romans] (Lwów: Księgarnia Wydawnicza H. Altenberga, 1924; revised and re-ed. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1989). Ibid. 54–55. Ibid. 158–159 (transl. K.M.).

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s­ixteenth-century “ecological” accusations pronounced by Kochanowski’s ancient creature – a vital lesson for youth: They [Satyrs] are dear to us as much as ages ago. Often in the woodlands we seem to be about to listen the hairy little feet of the wild bogey cantering on the mosses, and any moment now it will materialize in front of us as if it had fled from one of Jacek Malczewski’s paintings. And we are by no means surprised that Kochanowski introduced [to his poem] this divine creature “of not quite a beautiful face,” and through its mouth criticized the reckless destruction of forests in Poland and people’s stupid chasing after money.28 Additionally, for the sake of his youthful readers, the Mythology is free not only of homoerotic motifs, still controversial at the threshold of the twentieth century,29 but also from any erotic references at all, although Parandowski observed with disappointment the paradox typical for our contemporary culture, too: kids in fact are not protected from violent scenes in books or movies, while even quite innocent references to the beauty of love are permitted only from the age of eighteen.30 Despite the traditional form and the respect for conservative standards, Parandowski created a highly original work, which fact is attested by its enormous success. He enriched the myths with erudite anecdotes from ancient sources (for example, in the history of Daedalus and Icarus he mentioned the laugh of Parmeniscus of Metapontum at the sight of an old statue31). He reached for modern interpretations to bring the myths closer to his readers (King Minos did not want to let Daedalus go because of his knowledge of state secrets, which made him a possible danger when abroad32). He included the  newest archaeological discoveries to explain the origins of given myths (e.g., the excavations on Crete in the context of the Labyrinth33). He did not 28 29 30

31 32 33

Ibid. 97 (transl. K.M.). See for example the process of Oscar Wilde. Parandowski had no problems with showing the whole scope of sundry feelings. Immediately after Mythology he published, for older readers, a collection Eros na Olimpie [Eros on the Olympus] (Lwów: Księgarnia Wydawnicza H. Altenberga, 1924). Among his works there is a biography of Oscar Wilde – Król życia [The King of Life] (Lwów: Księgarnia Wydawnicza H. Altenberga, 1930); he also set up a correspondence with Wilde’s son Vyvyan with the aim of publishing the Polish translations of Wilde’s works at that time still prohibited in England; see also Studencki (1972–4) 8–9, spec. n. 2. See Parandowski, Mitologia, 158. See also Athen. 14.614a. See Parandowski, Mitologia, 158. Ibid. 159.

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avoid even the most difficult terms (the Amphidromia) and he recalled many an etiological tale, explaining to his readers such names as “laureate” (in reference to Apollo and the Daphne myth) or the Icarian Sea (in regard to the story of Daedalus’ son). The sophisticated elements resonate along with the intense, highly poetic descriptions in modernistic style. For example, Olympus is presented as “a mountain chain, built of enormous rocks, similar to human heads covered with the hoariness of snow, and of immense abysses of caverns, where the springs are born that stream in hasty brooks, down from steep hills with a green bristle of forests grown into them.”34 If we wished to indicate Parandowski’s ancient model, Ovid would be the best choice here. Indeed, it seems that the Polish writer donned in his prose the vesture of a poeta doctus, aware of Alexandrian stylistics and focused on the typically Roman reconciliation of the supernatural with reason in his perpetuum carmen. In fact, it should be observed that in Parandowski’s poetic prose, the individual myths flow one from the other, similarly to the technique traceable in the Metamorphoses: we assist in the birth of Apollo, only to move on to witness his duel with Marsyas, to discover Midas’ painful secret, to hear of Apollo’s love for Daphne and Hyacinthus, to come to know the Muses, leaving finally the Sun-god (after an additional mention of his similarities to Christ in late interpretations) to meet his sister Artemis/Diana, and so on. Furthermore, Parandowski closed his mythological Bible nearly with the same motif as Ovid had – with a hint at the apotheoses of Roman rulers: the cult of Caesars and, going back in time, of Aeneas’ descendant Romulus. However, Parandowski’s scholarly mind also made him mention briefly the other six kings of Rome, ones whom he pitied deeply as, in a certain sense, “orphans,” for they had belonged neither to the realm of myth nor of history. And we bear no doubts as to which of the two realms Parandowski himself would see his place. In spite of numerous attempts to explain rationally the background of ancient myths, he constantly stressed their power as resulting from the experience of the marvellous which they offer to recipients of culture. Moreover, his greatest innovation consisted in giving myths a magical charm – in presenting mythology as a children’s fairy-tale narration (the fisherman, the shepherd, and the farmer – though with the strict Ovidian proveniences and filtered through Bruegel’s lens – thought Daedalus and Icarus to be sorcerers35). Parandowski deeply felt the desires of his young audience marked with difficult, often ­critical experiences. The Alchemist of the Word, when he published his first edition of the Mythology, was only twenty-nine years old. 34 35

Ibid. 38 (transl. K.M.). Ibid. 158.

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However, the Arcadian world of Parandowski was harmonious and charmingly colourful only at first sight. One of his readers admitted in a popular women’s magazine, recalling her readings in childhood, that Parandowski “had kept bringing tempests and turbulences to innocent hearts,” awaking inquisitiveness and broadening horizons.36 In fact, the writer’s relatives also remember his anxiety attacks, periods of dejection – in other words, his desperate desire to reconstruct Arcadia with the sad awareness it had never existed, to regain the Paradise lost, the mythical land of childhood, in which to hide from contemporary reality. That is why the Mythology, despite growing difficulties with the reception of the aesthetics of the 1920s, has never ceased to speak to us. Zieliński also came from the Eastern Borderlands.37 He was born in today’s Ukraine, to a Polish family. After his mother’s death the father married the governess of Zieliński and his younger brother, a Russian woman and the daughter of an orthodox priest, for which reason the new family was rejected both by their Russian and Polish relatives. The stepmother, however, broke all the stereotypes. She took care of the boys with great application. Indeed, in the aim of making them acquainted with Polish traditions she risked her own safety, smuggling from Paris Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz – a work forbidden under ­tsarist occupation. Along with such lessons of courage, tolerance, and openmindedness Zieliński also brought from home a fluency in Russian and French, along with knowledge of ancient culture (his favourite book in childhood was Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque) and Latin, which he was taught by his father. Because of the anti-Polish moods in Russian schools after the January Uprising, Zieliński was sent to a German middle school in Petersburg. There he added German to his linguistic competences. Zieliński’s father died when he was fourteen years old. After that he had to provide for himself as he turned 36 37

Quoted after Studencki (1972–4) 57, see also 20. The main sources for Zieliński’s biography used in the present paper are: Tadeusz Zieliński, Autobiografia. Dziennik 1939–1944 [Autobiography. Diary 1939–1944], ed. Hanna Geremek, Piotr Mitzner (Warszawa: OBTA–DiG, 2005); Aleksander Krawczuk, Przedmowa [Foreword], in Tadeusz Zieliński, Starożytność bajeczna [The Fabulous Antiquity] (re-ed. Zagreb: Wydawnictwo „Śląsk,” 1988) 7–23; Marian Plezia, Tadeusz Stefan Zieliński 1859– 1944, in Iza Bieżuńska-Małowist, ed., W kręgu wielkich humanistów. Kultura antyczna w Uniwersytecie Warszawskim po I wojnie światowej [In the Circle of Eminent Humanists. Ancient Culture at the University of Warsaw after wwi] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1991) 38–53; Marian Plezia, Z dziejów filologii klasycznej w Polsce [From the History of Classical Philology in Poland] (Warszawa: Polskie Towarzystwo Filologiczne, 1993), chapters: Z młodzieńczych lat Tadeusza Zielińskiego [From the Years of Tadeusz Zieliński’s Youth] 168–180 (first published in Meander in 1982), and “Dziecię niedoli”. Ostatnie dzieło Tadeusza Zielińskiego [“Child of Misery.” The Last Work of Tadeusz Zieliński] 181–235 (first publised in Analecta Cracoviensia in 1983).

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down his uncle’s support, which was offered on the condition that he choose technical education. Zieliński studied Classics at the best German universities with splendid achievements. Later he returned to Russia and became professor at the University in Petersburg. He gained respect there, too, for his involvement in liberal reforms, something surprising for those who associated a classical background with conservative views. After wwi, however, the situation of the Poles in Russia was extremely difficult. In 1920 (the year of the famous Battle of Warsaw in the Polish-Bolshevik War) Zieliński accepted a professorship at the University of Warsaw. He was welcomed to his position with the words: Habemus papam.38 And this was only half in jest, for the track of his achievements was truly spectacular, his charisma unforgettable. He gathered crowds at his lectures and he was admired even by the eccentric artists from the interwar period’s Bohème. In Warsaw he continued work on the series he held for his opus magnum: Religie świata antycznego [Religions of the Ancient World]. He finished the fifth volume of this controversial study just as wwii broke out. During the siege of Warsaw in September 1939 a missile struck his flat. Zieliński was hastily evacuated from the flames. He managed to take his daughter and a cage with canaries. The manuscripts left behind were consumed by the fire. A scholar who saw him that day could not believe he was the same man who a few months earlier was applauded after his lecture in Bucharest. Often compared to Zeus, after his rescue from the flames Zieliński was lying paralyzed, covered with rags in a provisory chamber with broken windows, like a toppled statue of the ancient god.39 He was eighty years old and he took the decision which settled his fate after his death. He took his daughter, the cage with the canaries, and a copy of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, and set off to Bavaria, to his son from his German wife (she had died in 1923). There he reconstructed the burnt fifth volume of Religions…(after all, manuscripts don’t burn, as Mikhail Bulgakov observed) and started writing the final, sixth volume. Zieliński was fighting both his daughter’s illness – he lost, she died in 1942 – and against time. Yet here he won: he finished the series40 and died in 1944. However, his departure to Germany was treated as treason by Poland’s communist authorities. He was excluded from memory, although the environment 38 39 40

See Plezia (1991) (Zieliński accepted the invitation to Warsaw already in 1919, however, for political reasons he was able to take up his chair there in 1920). See Krawczuk (1988) 17–18. See Plezia (1993) 181–235. The only existing post-war publication of the series (Toruń, 1999–2001) is no comprehensive critical edition.

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where he had taken refuge in Germany was anti-fascist and it offered a kind of asylum free of the Nazi ideology.41 Moreover, to the end of his life Zieliński added to his signature: “Professor of the University of Józef Piłsudski in Warsaw,”42 and he maintained warm correspondence contacts with Polish scholars who remained in the country.43 An exceptional mind, marked by difficult historical experiences, Zieliński met with critical remarks from the mediocre and praise from the best. His dissertation defended in Leipzig was recognized as outstanding by Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903). The future Nobel Prize winner understood both his scholarly potential and literary talent. Aleksander Krawczuk (b. 1922), the famous popularizer of Classical Antiquity in Polish culture (among both young and adult readers), in complimenting Zieliński’s felicitous writing even made an analogy between his prose and Plato’s dialogues. This is a very apt remark, nonetheless not everybody was open-minded enough to think so, all the more so as Zieliński audaciously experimented in literature. In his Autobiografia [Autobiography] he bitterly remarked: “A professor who dabbles in fiction has poor reviews as a rule: they call him a bungler.”44 He referred to his collection for a wide target of readers Irezyona. Klechdy attyckie [Eiresione. Attic Tales] (1922), on the origins of the cults and traditions in Athens before Pandion. It also gave Zieliński an opportunity to associate Polish culture with the Mediterraneum (for example, in the introduction to the tale Królowa Wichur [Queen of the Wind Maidens] Boreas arrives to Oreithyia from a “northern country of frozen rivers, impenetrable forests,” and waving grainfields – a clear allusion to Poland45) and to complement the Religions… by completing a brilliant synthesis of scholarship and art. Indeed, it was so brilliant that his name was among the candidates to the Nobel Prize for Literature. 41

See Hanna Geremek, Dziennik 1939–1944. Wstęp [Diary 1939–1944. Introduction], in Tadeusz Zieliński (2005) 201–244. 42 See Plezia (1991) 51–53. 43 See Dodatek. Listy T. Zielińskiego pisane z Schondorf [Addendum. T. Zieliński’s Letters from Schondorf], in Plezia (1993) 213–235; Tadeusz Zieliński, Listy do Stefana Srebrnego [Letters to Stefan Srebrny], ed. Grażyna Golik-Szarawarska (Warszawa: OBTA, 1997). 44 Tadeusz Zieliński (2005) 181, quoted in the translation by Elżbieta Olechowska in Tadeusz Zieliński, Queen of the Wind Maidens. Prologue, introduction Michał Mizera, translation from the Russian original Katarzyna Tomaszuk, English translation and textual notes Elżbieta Olechowska (Warsaw: Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, 2013) 7. The tale, published within the framework of the project Our Mythical Childhood… The Classics and Children’s Literature Between East & West, is also available online at: . 45 See Michał Mizera, Introduction, in Zieliński (2013) 10 and 38.

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Zieliński’s scholarly interests also resulted in a unique literary series for young people. “It is understandable that as a long-time researcher on matters regarding ancient religions […] I cannot remain indifferent to education” – he stated in the journal Kwartalnik Klasyczny [Classical Quarterly], attesting his sense of responsibility for the new generation.46 He realized this mission with the tetralogy Świat antyczny [The Ancient World].47 He got the idea for this work in the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution. He wrote the first three parts – Starożytność bajeczna [The Fabulous Antiquity], Grecja niepodległa [Independent Greece], Rzeczpospolita rzymska [Republican Rome] – in Russian, the forth part – Cesarstwo rzymskie [Imperial Rome] – in Polish. The Fabulous Antiquity appeared in three issues (1922–1923) in Petersburg at Sabashnikov’s, the rest could not be published for political reasons until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.48 From the beginning Zieliński’s dream was to publish the whole tetralogy in Polish. He received help from the writer Julia Wieleżyńska and the classicist Gabriela Piankówna, who translated The Fabulous Antiquity. That work appeared in a single volume in 1930.49 Zieliński was the proudest precisely of this volume. He wrote it with his grandchildren in mind and apparently succeeded in reaching this demanding readership. He recalled their compliment with pleasure: “Grandpa’s stories are striking.”50 Zieliński was convinced that The Fabulous Antiquity deserved to be translated into Western-European languages. There was no place for false modesty in his life. He sincerely appreciated Parandowski’s Mythology. However, Zieliński simply knew what an original work he had created: “Of course, there are things of this kind in Western Europe, but mine is special” – he declared,51 and we can only agree with him despite so many years having passed. The originality of the volume resulted from Zieliński’s passion, which he always followed. As far as elaborations of ancient mythology were 46

See Tadeusz Zieliński, “Religja antyczna w szkole” [Ancient Religion at School], Kwartalnik Klasyczny 7 (1933) 261 (transl. K.M.). 47 Zieliński saw Parandowski’s Mythology and his own religious studies preceding The Ancient World mainly as an aid for teachers who would then choose the parts most suitable for their pupils, see Zieliński (1933) 261. 48 See Tadeusz Zieliński, Posłowie [Afterword], in his Starożytność bajeczna [The Fabulous Antiquity] (Warszawa–Kraków: Wydawnictwo J. Mortkowicza; re-ed. Zagreb: Wydawnictwo „Śląsk,” 1988) 453. 49 See Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 419–428 (entries by Paulina Kłóś, Tomasz Królak, Maria Kruhlak, Elżbieta Olechowska). 50 Zieliński (1933) 262. 51 See Zieliński’s scholarly “last will” (as Krawczuk calls the document) in German dedicated to the series The Ancient World, quoted after Krawczuk (1988) 21 (transl. K.M.).

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concerned, he felt bored with the schematic descriptions of Olympus that preceded the adventures of the heroes: In popular elaborations such division leads to the situation wherein before the enchanting garden of heroic tales there is a mountain of boredom in the form of the teaching about the gods, which not everybody is able to dig through.52 This is why Zieliński takes his readers in medias res, to Europe’s rapture, characterizing the gods as they appear in the context of human matters. He presents only those myths he presumes beautiful. And what is most important, he breaks with the criterion that the most popular version of a given myth is the natural choice in mythologies for youngsters. For Zieliński the natural choice was the version from the period of the greatest blossoming of mythology – Greek tragedies. As Ovid could be indicated in Parandowski’s case as his reference point, we might observe that Zieliński decided to gather “the crumbs from Homer’s table,” performing both functions – that of an aoidos and a coryphaeus of the revival of ancient theatre mysteries. Owing to this, Zieliński builds a sense of community with his audience, strengthened by the narration aimed directly at the readers: “Now I need to make you know better Pallas Athene’s town,” is how he introduces the myth of the Erechthides. Moreover, he manages to present the youths with a broad panorama of the mythical world with its multilayered relations and nexuses, as when he mentions the marriage of King Aegeus with Medea, hinting at her life before her arrival to Athens (she had appeared earlier in the chapter The Argonauts): She is your acquaintance, the very same who, having run away from Corinthus, according to Aegeus’ promise, found refuge at his court: Medea. A wise woman, she knew how to evoke respect for herself, but not love… There was nothing to be done in this matter: a past like hers could not be erased from memory.53 Zieliński’s tragic background is visible also in numerous impressive fragments written in powerfully visual language and marked with traits of psychological prose. The scholar amply applies here the most recent discoveries of his times: he was extremely interested in and followed the birth of the social sciences, with his profound knowledge of the ancient drama making him particularly 52 53

Ibid. (transl. K.M.). Zieliński (1988) 273 (transl. K.M.).

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sensitive to character studies and the technique of inner monologues. To grasp the stunning effect of Zieliński’s narration in this respect, it is enough to quote a fragment from the description of Aegeus’ state of mind, as the king awaits Theseus’ return from Crete: The Sun overflows Aegina, the borderline emerges anew, and this time there is a little dot. A ship! The heart is ready to leap out of [the king’s] chest. A dot and nothing more! You need to wait. The dot is growing. A ship beyond any doubt, but it is still impossible to see the sail. Better spare the eyes, do not strain them too much. Let them rest on the black rock of Hymettus. They did rest. They slide down on its dark grey, burned slope, almost furtively they crawl to the right, along its wavy hills, to the Cape of Pasa, to the sea. The ship – and the sail is already visible. Is it white? Yes, definitely white. Or does it seem so only to him? And what would a black sail look like? Probably the same. No, it is too early to say, you have to rest a little again. Nothing is known so far. He closes his eyes. Truth, a sinister voice whispers: if it were white, you would have known that by now. He keeps his eyes closed. One moment of patience more, and then he will open them unexpectedly and he will see that the sail is white, undeniably white. He caught his heart with his hand. Be quiet, be quiet! Open them? Yes, you can do so now. He thus opened them. Black – definitely black. A black sail. And a black sea. And a black abyss. And everything around him became black.54 In sum, the decision to base the narration on ancient tragedies had a very positive impact on the dynamic of the text, its structure and dialogic character (the dialogues often faithfully follow the preserved dramas, like in the conversation between Creon and Antigone), and the attractiveness for young readers, along with the fascinating and educative at the same time concepts (as in the story of the punishment of King Minos, where Zieliński refers to the notion of hybris). This also helped the scholar to build an extremely coherent and logical composition, where one human or divine act generates certain consequences, like the link between the Cretan Bull brought to the mainland by Hercules, the death of Androgeos, his father Minos’ revenge, and Theseus’ deeds that close this dramatic course of events. Zieliński treated his young audience seriously and hence his focus on many details, omitted in most elaborations of mythology targeted at children, but meticulously extracted and gathered by the 54

Ibid. 292 (transl. K.M.).

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scholar from ancient sources to make his readers really understand the tragic sinews of the (not only) mythical world. And again this literary activity was strictly connected with Zieliński’s research work, as the necessary condition to complete The Fabulous Antiquity was to reconstruct the lost tragedies (the existing ones did not offer enough material to cover the whole of mythology). Thus, it is not a coincidence that in 1925, after the Russian and before the Polish editions of the volume, he published the book appreciated and consulted by specialists in Greek theatre to this day: Tragodumenon libri tres.55 In result, thanks to The Fabulous Antiquity kids have a kind of contact with scholarly work. They receive, as Krawczuk observes, an opportunity unique in world literature to look at mythology through the eyes of the Athenians of the fifth century b.c.56 Such content may seem not to correspond to the title. Instead of The Fabulous Antiquity Krawczuk proposes the title Grecja herosów [The Greece of the Heroes],57 because, indeed, we enter in medias res, travelling through mythology with Cadmus and the Cadmeans, Perseus, the Argonauts, Hercules, the Labdakides, arriving in Athens and, finally, in Troy, to witness the Trojan War. On the way we come to know particular myths linked with the main cycles: for example, the tale of Athens is interwoven with the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Like Parandowski, Zieliński attended to the education of his young audience: for example, describing Icarus’ funeral he brought and explained the term centonaph.58 Like Parandowski, Zieliński took care of the children’s morality. However, instead of softening certain interpretations, he chose a different way – namely, he clearly acknowledged the exclusion of some (unsuitable) parts. Such an approach would – in my opinion – suggest to his readers the complexity and even more of the colours of the mythical world, worthy of further exploration, when one becomes mature enough to face their sinister shades. Finally, like Parandowski, Zieliński referred to the readers’ reality: “Here for you, mortal people, an example and an impulse, a source of creative desire. Quite a few centuries will pass, quite a number of courageous Icari will die, before the sky paths will be open for you!”59 These references, however, do not extend from the ancient world to the readers, as with Parandowski, but just the opposite: they draw the readers into Antiquity. In this sense the title of the 55

As Krawczuk remarks (1988, 19–23), the great Human Studies are timeless. See Thaddaeus Zieliński, Tragodumenon libri tres (Cracoviae: Sumptibus Polonicae Academiae Litterarum, 1925). 56 See Krawczuk (1988) 23. 57 Ibid. 58 Zieliński (1988) 280. 59 Ibid. (transl. K.M.).

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volume suits perfectly. Thanks to this book we immerse ourselves in the fabulous world of heroes, where everything is possible. When Zieliński describes the enormous wings made by Daedalus, he observes that “people then were not such weaklings as today”60 – and by “today” he means both our times and those of the fifth-century Athenians as well, who were looking with admiration on the bones of the giant Theseus discovered by Cimon in 475 b.c.61 The last chapter of The Fabulous Antiquity is entitled Koniec Królestwa Baśni [The End of the Kingdom of Fairy Tales], which in a certain sense brings the circle of narration back to the first chapter, dedicated to the “fable” of Princess Europe, Prince-Knight Cadmus, and a dragon-guardian of an ominous treasure (the fairy-tale character of such parts is a common element with Parandowski’s Mythology, too). In this last chapter, Zieliński presents Odysseus’ death and his son’s departure to the Islands of the Blessed and he moves on to the subsequent volumes: “[…] the mortal people who remained had before them poverty, victories, and miseries – in short, they had to face this fate we will consider in the next parts of The Ancient World.”62 Zieliński also faced different shades of fate, never ceasing to construct – both for himself and for the youngest generation he felt responsible for – a vibrant Arcadia between East and West. While writing The Fabulous Antiquity during the Bolshevik Revolution he felt a terrible isolation, as he recalled in the Afterword to the Polish edition,63 which made him see with heightened clarity the pressing need to preserve the heritage of ancient culture – a multidimensional heritage, for along with the values of the brave and honest heroes fighting for the sake of weak people there were places like Crete, where the violence of the strongest dominated the weaker ones.64 Thus, Zieliński all the more stressed the worth of true heroism, but he did not idealize the realm of ancient mythology, and therefore he could open it anew as the most timely reference point for his readers who – though young – needed to understand what was happening in the world around them. Zieliński thought globally long before the invention of this term and he practiced Reception Studies long before the theses of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss. Zieliński and Parandowski shared a fascination with the marvellousness of ancient myths, but they had two different visions for their conveyance to youngsters. Parandowski won and he has been shaping generations of 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid. (transl. K.M.). See Plut. Thes. 36.1–2 and Cim. 8.5–6. Zieliński (1988) 451 (transl. K.M.). Ibid. 453. Ibid. 276.

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Polish kids in the spirit of mild harmony, albeit one with a concealed tension. However, those who open up to Zieliński will go through a katharsis and they will never again look at the world, not only the ancient one, as they did before.

An Odyssey Through the People’s Republic of Poland

In the times of the People’s Republic of Poland, Parandowski, if we do not count the Polish translation of the Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne,65 had no rivals. He was both praised for the promotion of “just” personal patterns “in accordance with the ethos of modern and advanced civilization,” based on “the criticism, fight against superstitions, and scientific approach” (Prometheus who opposes the gods, Daedalus who breaks the laws of Nature, etc.)66 and reprimanded for insufficient ideological engagement.67 Indeed, though he lived in communist Poland, he did not fight for the new system, but for the millennia-old civilization he believed in. This faith had propelled him to further activity on behalf of youngsters back in the interwar period. Shortly after the publication of the Mythology, Parandowski wrote two small booklets: Wojna trojańska [The Trojan War, 1927] and Przygody Odyseusza [Odysseus’ Adventures, 1935]. They entered to the post-war school canon as well, introducing the smallest kids to the beauty of the Homeric world.68 Polish culture also owes to Parandowski the marvellous translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which remains the most willingly chosen one by young readers thanks to its accessible and attractive form (it is in prose and resembles a modern adventure novel). No wonder that his impact on the Polish literary scene is so strong that it manifests itself via other books for the young public, for example the series by Anna M. Komornicka (b. 1920) – probably the most original retelling of ancient myths for kids of the 1980s.69 65 66 67 68

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Hawthorne’s mythology is beloved by generations of Polish children. It continues to be reissued up to present day, incl. audiobooks recorded by famous Polish actors. See Studencki (1972–4) 47. Ibid. 49. What merits special attention, Parandowski included in these prose books quotations from both poems in Polish translation from the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, making kids acquainted with Homeric verses. See also the two-volume series by Adam Bahdaj (1918–1985) Telemach w dżinsach [Telemachus in Jeans, 1979] and Gdzie twój dom, Telemachu? [Where Is Your Home, Telemachus?, 1982, ibby Honor List 1984]. The protagonist is fifteen-year-old Maciek, who sets off in search of his father, who left the family when the boy was small. Maciek travels through Poland, his steady companion is The Trojan War by Parandowski and he identifies

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Like Parandowski and Zieliński, Komornicka continues the tradition of scholarly writing for youngsters. She is a classical philologist, from a family with strong Roman Catholic and patriotic values, in the years 1994–2005 ­editor-in-chief of the journal Meander, established after wwii to restore classical values to a Poland mutilated by war. Historie nie z tej ziemi [Stories Not from This World, 1987] with funny illustrations by the famous graphic artist Jerzy Flisak is the first volume in the series Dziedzictwo antyku [The Legacy of Antiquity]. Komornicka applied here an autobiographic filter. The Mom – a PhD in Classics – retells ancient myths to her children: Krzyś (Chris), Elżbietka (Betty), and Stefanek (Stevie). They are of different ages, which is beneficial from the perspective of the target audience – a wide circle of young readers will find in the book something interesting and tailored to their differentiated needs. The kids, who bear the real names of Komornicka’s children, start to notice figures and creatures from mythology in their surroundings. The imagination of the little protagonists is nurtured by Parandowski’s Mythology, which Krzyś (the eldest one) receives from the Mom. The boy is so delighted with the book that he fakes an illness to skip school and to finish it. However, he is paid a visit by a doctor and his assistant who discover the trick and recommend him to stop feigning sick. It would be nothing out of ordinary if the visitors were not the Greek god of medicine Asclepius and his daughter Hygieia. However, this is only the beginning of the adventures of the siblings there, where the world of ancient myths meets and colours the reality of the People’s Republic of Poland. For example, in the story Gwiazdka Ikara [Icarus’ Star] the children transfer to a school in Mielec – a Polish town famous for its aircraft industry, where the Father is offered a half-year contract. Krzyś’ new class is also joined by a mysterious boy whose name is Icarus. He arouses jealousy in Krzyś, for he displays a great knowledge of Greece and ancient myths (until then Krzyś thought himself a “specialist”). One evening the children follow Icarus and they discover that the boy is building a plane. Krzyś accuses him of spying, with a tension typical for the Cold War times: Whom are you giving the stolen materials? Who are you serving? You snoop from overseas! Oh, you’ve made a mistake, because a Pole will

himself with Telemachus. The works in question are analyzed by Joanna Kłos within the framework of the Our Mythical Childhood… project. See also Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 29–34 (entries by Ilona Szewczyk).

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gladly give his life for his country and he knows how to stop the one who is conniving something against it.70 Soon, however, it turns out that Icarus is a hero from Greek mythology. He escaped from the Realm of Hades and the plane he is constructing with the help from the Little Star is to enable him to finally fly to the very heavens. The children help Icarus in the fulfillment of his dream and on the way, they learn (along with the readers) many details regarding the myth. Indeed, Komornicka combines the contemporary story with references to ancient sources she knows very well thanks to her classical background. For example, in Icarus’ tale about a farmer and a fisherman who took him and Daedalus for gods, again the echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses reverberate. What is more, Komornicka uses this occasion to make her young readers acquainted with the ancient poem, quoting a fragment in the translation by Bruno Kiciński (1797– 1844), one of the most important promoters of Classical Antiquity of nineteenth-century Poland (not existing then on the world’s map). The brevity and character of the quotation (Komornicka chose the most attractive and accessible verses) contributes to a gentle introduction of youngsters into Latin and old/Polish literature.71 The adventures of the siblings, their relatives, and friends constitute a narrative axis also in the second part in the series Nić Ariadny, czyli po nitce do kłębka [The Thread of Ariadne, or Finding Your Way, 1989].72 This volume, however, has a different, less novelistic character. The book resulted from the Polish Radio programme Otwarta Szkatułka [An Open Casket]: Komornicka and the editorial team asked the kids a range of questions, explaining in the process various problems, expressions, etc. They also answered the questions sent in by listeners. For example, one girl, reluctant to bother her bumptious brother, wanted to know what the expression “Achilles’ heel” means. This prompted Komornicka to gather the fifty most popular mythological expressions, so that the kids could learn them on their own. The book constitutes a precious supplement to the classical elaborations of mythology for young readers and the author is aware of her originality, recalling in the introduction: “But I would not want to imitate the existing, perfect Mythologies by such 70 71 72

See Anna M. Komornicka, Historie nie z tej ziemi [Stories Not from This World] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Radia i Telewizji, 1987) 90 (transl. K.M.). Ibid. 79. See also Parandowski’s practice, above, n. 68. Komornicka continued this in the third volume, published six years later by another editorial house. For the bibliographical data see Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 127–134 (entries by Olga Grabarek, Elżbieta Olechowska).

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e­minent experts on Antiquity as Tadeusz Zieliński, Jan Parandowski, and Robert Graves.”73 Indeed, Komornicka provides readers with the sources of the  expressions and she shows how to use them, creating stories that refer to the siblings known from the first volume. The stories are differentiated in structure: scenes, descriptions, dialogues, quotations from literature, the press. They also contain many references to the cultural life in Poland of the 1980s. For example, the expression “Homeric laugh” appears in regard to the reaction of the viewers of the Muppet Show – a programme adored in Poland (we had only two channels at that time and each foreign production was welcomed with enthusiasm; of course the Muppets fully merited such admiration). There are also many references to Polish history in the stories: from the old times to the contemporary reality of the siblings. The expression “Wheel of Fortune” appears in the context of an anecdote from the Deluge (i.e., the Swedish invasion of the mid-seventeenth century). Namely, when King Charles X Gustav temporarily seized Cracow in 1655, expressing his pride from that victory – in his opinion, permanent – a canon priest gave him the admonishment: Fortuna variabilis, Deus mirabilis (Komornicka reports these words in Latin with the Polish translation).74 The expression “Faithful Penelope” denotes the wife of a relative of the siblings who waited (in vain) on the return of her husband from the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.75 Similarly, when the kids quarrel, whether the “Labour of the Danaids” was in fact such a terrible punishment, their Grandpa joins the conversation. He adduces an example from his captivity in the concentration camp, where he was a prisoner for three years. The children are startled, because he had never talked about this experience before. The Grandpa recalls how on a chilly November morning he was forced to go with other prisoners to a field (those who slowed down the group were attacked by dogs and beaten with a whip) where they had to dig a ditch for the whole day. They were then ordered to fill it back up in the evening. This torture went on for nine days in a row and the people did not know whether they were digging a grave for themselves or fortifications. The most painful for them was the lost labour: The people were on the edge of their endurance, some were crying from powerless despair. Interesting thing. After this work we were less tired in 73

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Anna M. Komornicka, Nić Ariadny, czyli po nitce do kłębka [The Thread of Ariadne, or Finding Your Way] (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Radia i Telewizji, 1989) 6 (transl. K.M.). Nota bene Robert Graves was and still is very popular in Poland. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 115–116.

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the evening than after work in the quarry, or than by building a road or by grubbing the forest in winter, when huge tree-trunks had to be hauled on trucks and then placed with our bare hands on the wagons. But each of us preferred that to our lost labour.76 In the context of the post-war transformations the expression “odyssey” is used. The family meets their relative who – after military service in the Polish army in Hungary, Norway, France, and Great Britain during wwii – emigrated to the United States.77 The emigration for financial reasons at the end of the 1980s is connected with the expression “journey for the Golden Fleece.” Krzyś’ cousin Janek goes to England for three months of his student holidays with the intention to come back with a bag of money. His adventures are quite similar to these of some unprepared contemporary emigrants who dream about the Golden Fleece. Janek’s English knowledge turns out to be insufficient. Firstly, he is a dishwasher working at half rate. Next he renovates a flat, but he quarrels with the owner. Finally he gets a job in a garage. Working illegally, he is caught and pays a fee. In result, he does not have enough money to buy a ticket home and has to wait to find another way to return.78 Thanks to the filtration of the scenes through the children’s perspective and the references to their friends and relatives, the mythological expressions are not abstract. Komornicka teaches the readers not only mythology, but she also enriches their vocabulary in their mother tongue along with their knowledge of history. Above all, she passes down to them (without moralizing and judging others) the system of classical values, based on truth, friendship, and respect. The myth and history complement each other to create a colourful space, where the kids can build their identity and prepare for the initiation into adulthood. What is more, Komornicka follows Parandowski in showing the closeness between Polish literature and ancient culture by means of literary quotations. When the kids start feeling inspired by mythology to perform great deeds and Krzyś expresses some doubts on whether he will manage to succeed as a child, his Mom answers him with verses from Mickiewicz’s Ode to Youth: Move on, Thou Clod! Leave the foundations of the world! We’ll make Thee roll where Thou hast never rolled.79

76 77 78 79

Ibid. 72–73 (transl. K.M.). Ibid. 93–96. Ibid. 141–142. See Komornicka (1987) 9. The verses transl. by Jarek Zawadzki (see above, n. 11).

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Classical Antiquity and new paths – there is no contradiction here, just the opposite: the children, learning from History, are provided with a chance to create a better future based on ancient values.

The Girl Who (Probably) Lived

Today the memory of Zieliński is being revived, albeit in scholarly milieu,80 while Parandowski still dominates in the wide circles of readers: on the popular Internet platform lubimyczytac.pl (corresponding to the website goodreads. com) there appear ever new comments, mostly enthusiastic, on his Mythology. People come back to this book as adults – one reader observes that the matter with Parandowski is like with tiramisu: “you shouldn’t eat everything in five seconds, but rather savour it to enjoy the true taste.”81 Still, even if Parandowski is second to none, recently he has had growing company, mainly in regard to the youngest readers – preschool and elementary school kids, for whom the stylistics of the 1920s has become too remote to fully enjoy. New approaches to mythology appear. While during partition times, the World Wars, and in communist Poland Classical Antiquity was nearly the sacrum – a treasure of precious values to be treated with seriousness, now of great popularity are mythological short-stories in humorous or even mocking tone by Grzegorz Kasdepke (b. 1972), who calls his texts “myths for naughty kids.” The parents who feel a wave of nostalgia for their childhood in the People’s Republic of Poland, spent watching the famous cartoon about two brothers – Bolek and Lolek – can choose for their children the book by Iwona Czarkowska (b. 1970) Bolek i Lolek w świecie mitów greckich [Bolek and Lolek in the World of Greek Myths, 2009]. We also observe the birth of the “museum literature” – the books that complement children’s visits at galleries and collections of art, like Monika Rekowska’s (b. 1967) Dzień w museum [A Day at the Museum, 2011] – a booklet that may accompany one’s visit to the classicist palace complex in Nieborów (a village southwest of Warsaw) called – nomen omen – Arkadia. Furthermore, a particular blooming characterizes time-travel novels and transportations to the world of myths, like in the book Franek, Helena, Bobas i koń trojański [Frank, Helen, Baby, and the Trojan Horse, 2008] by Eliza Piotrowska (b. 1976). Helen, who enters a strange world under the cupboard in the living-room, becomes the girlfriend of Paris and they both fall victim to a dangerous virus called the 80 See the initiatives of the Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw. 81 See (transl. K.M.; consulted July 5, 2015).

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“Trojan Horse,” the antidote for which is the pure love of family and friends.82 Such mixture of the past and the present permits the kids to gladly take in a lesson through mythology on how to be a good man – that has not changed since Parandowski’s and Zieliński’s times, and, in fact, since the times of Cicero and Plato, who were reaching for myths as tools in the teaching of values. And these lessons are often very difficult, especially in the context of the struggles with History, which, fortunately, are long behind us, but which we must remember not only out of respect for their victims, but also for the sake of the future, so we know to treasure the value of peace. Classical mythology offers the most neutral platform to talk about such matters – matters where other communication codes are not enough. This can be shown on the example of the novel Bezsenność Jutki [Jutka’s Insomnia, 2012] by Dorota Combrzyńska-Nogala (b. 1962) with intriguing illustrations by Joanna Rusinek.83 The protagonist, Jutka Cwancygier lives in the Ghetto in Łódź (Litzmannstadt). The Grandpa helps the girl to overcome the atrocities they face, telling her mythical stories. The girl perceives myths as scary, but she likes them all the same, because they seem less scary than the Ghetto reality. Jutka adapts the myths to this terrible world, for example comparing an SS-man to the Minotaur, only to arrive at the conclusion that the SS-men are much worse than the mythical monster. While hearing about the flight of Daedalus and Icarus, the girl assumes the boy fell because he was shot by a guard and she suggests that her Grandpa should build similar wings for them and aunt Estera. The Grandpa expects some dreadful action by the Nazis and he teaches Jutka and her friends how to hide quickly, playing hide and seek with them and pretending to be the Minotaur. As a result, when the Aktion Gehsperre begins with the aim of rounding up all the Ghetto inhabitants presumed “useless” (children, the sick, and the elderly) and deport them to the death camps, the Grandpa saves Jutka, hiding her in a basement with a ball of wool. She is terrified, but she remembers the games based on the myth of Theseus in the Labyrinth and she conquers the fear just as the hero did. She also manages to leave the Ghetto, thanks to the help of a Polish woman, the mother of little Basia, with whom Jutka makes a kind of friendship, as much as the conditions permit: the girls see each other from their windows on either side of the Ghetto. One day Basia visits Jutka, and she is nearly shot by a Nazi guard, 82

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For details regarding these works see Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) s.vv. (entries by Marta Adamska, Dorota Bazylczyk, Maria Karpińska, Katarzyna Sendecka, Anna Ślezińska, Ewa Wziętek, Karolina Zieleniewska). See also Marciniak, Olechowska, Kłos, and Kucharski (2013) 49–52 (entry by Maciej Skowera, to whom I am grateful for turning my attention to this novel).

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though Jutka begs him to spare the girl and he shows mercy. This scene proves that the author avoids stereotypes and simplifications in presenting Germans. Similarly, she avoids them in describing the Poles. While Basia’s Grandmother, in fear of the consequences, is strongly against the girls’ friendship, her Mom risks the lives of the family and in contact with Jutka’s Grandpa she arranges false documents for Jutka and her aunt. The women leave the Ghetto. The Grandpa stays and probably dies. The girl probably survives the war. The world is not black-and-white and Combrzyńska-Nogala makes her young readers aware of this. And nothing serves such aim better than ancient myths. *** We cannot lock children up in Arcadia, as Rousseau sought to do. For it has never been an ideal space: even in Vergil’s poetry it was an asylum only for the chosen ones and the right to choose those who would survive was – not for the first, nor for the last time – in the hands of the victorious generals. Et in Arcadia ego – frequently declared Death, talking through the works of the artists.84 Indeed, History deconstructed Arcadia. Nonetheless, we still dream of a safe and peaceful haven. It is significant that despite the demise of the idea of the classical canon we are observing a growing interest in mythological motifs in children’s and young adults’ literature. With the help both of the authors – people often marked by difficult struggles with History or by the mission to overcome them in the spirit of reconciliation – and of the parents or guardians who introduce the kids into the marvellous realm of literature, we try to construct for youngsters a mythical land, where they could draw strength from as they move into adulthood. Thanks to that they become able to conduct dialogue and resolve difficult issues, when everyday language is not enough, to tame bad experiences and to preserve the good ones – preserve all the colours of childhood. We may not believe in Arcadia, but we need to have faith in children and in their abilities to shape the world for the better in the future. With the power of literature, we increase these abilities. The books inspired by Classical Antiquity teach us the important lesson that there is no ideal realm, but that there can be good people even in terrible places. The myth of joyful childhood may be only a myth, but this myth is everything.

84

See also Katarzyna Marciniak, “The Ancient Tradition in the 21st Century – Cui Bono?” in Katarzyna Marciniak, ed., Antiquity and We (Warsaw: Faculty of “Artes Liberales,” University of Warsaw, 2013) 209–281.

Part 2 Ancient Mythology, Modern Authors

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chapter 4

The Metanarrative of Picture Books: ‘Reading’ Greek Myth for (and to) Children1 Barbara Weinlich Whether conveyed for preserving our cultural heritage or repurposed for educating young minds about ethics and the human condition, Classical mythology is, as Stephens and McCallum note, “the most ideologically charged area of retold stories” in children’s literature, because of the complex of significances which may be evoked.2 But how exactly does this circumstance manifest itself in word and image in a picture book? Taking this question as a departure, I will have a closer look at the ways in which the Sirens, the Minotaur, and Medusa, that is, three creatures of Greek myth, have been re-imagined and re-presented in two different ‘picturebook texts’ of the early twenty-first century.3 Both Greece! Rome! Monsters! by Harris and Brown and Fanelli’s Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece date in the year 2002, and both claim roughly the same age group as their target readership.4 Fanelli’s book is meant for readers of age seven and up, Harris and Brown’s for those who are age nine and older. Moreover, both books focus, as their respective titles indicate, on one and the same aspect of classical mythology, namely, monsters. The one important difference between the two, however, consists in the mode of (re-)presentation of mythological monsters. While Harris and Brown chose a word-image combination that may be subsumed under the category ‘modern,’ Fanelli opted for a style that is not so much modern, but simply different. 1 This chapter is based on a paper delivered at the conference entitled “Asterisks and Obelisks: Classical Receptions in Children’s Literature” at Lampeter, July 2009. I thank my fellow participants for their comments and their company and Lisa Maurice as well as the anonymous reader for their helpful feedback. 2 John Stephens and Robyn McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) 88. 3 In using the term ‘picturebook text,’ I adopt the working vocabulary proposed by David Lewis, Reading Contemporary Picturebooks: Picturing Text (London and New York: Routledge / Falmer, 2001) xiv. According to Lewis, the term denotes “the combination of words and images working together in a picturebook” (ibid.). 4 John Harris and Calef Brown, Greece! Rome! Monsters! (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002). Sara Fanelli, Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece (Cambridge ma: Candlewick Press, 2002).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_006

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In view of the opening statement, the subsequent comparative study of three pairs of re-imagined and represented monsters will pursue a threefold goal. First and foremost, it aims at exploring how each book’s ‘picturebook text’ positions itself toward the already existing reception(s) of classical myth. In other words, my analysis of the six representations will be guided in part by the question whether there is any indication that the respective books want to comply with an established reception of classical myth (e.g., evaluating or moralizing), or, on the contrary, whether they aim at transcending it. Associated with this exploration of the meta-commentary on cultural practices is the second goal of analyzing the metanarrative of each monster’s re-imagination and representation in a broader sense. This part of the comparative study will be concerned with exploring the educational agenda of each picturebook text. That is to say, it will aim at identifying the values that each word-image combination aims at communicating directly or indirectly, wittingly or unwittingly. This analysis is based on the common assumption that children’s literature in general, and the retelling of myths in particular, pursues a primarily educational purpose.5 It is supported, among others, by Nodelman’s observation that “animal and human, wilderness and civilization are central pairs of the binary opposites characteristic of texts for children.”6 Naturally, these two goals invite to be joined by a third one, namely, the urge to challenge, or at least to differentiate, the position that Stephens and McCallum take toward retelling classical mythology, as they state that “the urge to maintain traditional knowledge and a sense of the past, and to foster understanding of the modes of signification used in texts of the past, conflicts with the desire to reconstruct cultural formations, especially with regard to gender.”7 By probing the validity of this verdict, the subsequent comparative study will ultimately also assess some established scholarly practices in the still relatively young field of Classical Reception Studies. For, based on the observation that Greece! Rome! Monsters! produces a much more patrifocal metanarrative than Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece,8 this paper will argue that Fanelli’s re-imagination and representation of the Sirens, the Minotaur, and Medusa is indeed able to reconstruct or, perhaps better, ­deconstruct 5 This assumption is explicitly stated by Perry Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 320. The educational agenda of retellings of myths in particular is pointed out by Stephens and McCallum (2013) 62, who state that the adults who produce them “generally further assume that myths also perform important literary and social functions.” 6 Nodelman (2008) 324. For further discussion of the binaries and a comprehensive list of binaries prevalent in children’s literature, see Nodelman ibid. 227–232. 7 Stephens and McCallum (2013) 88. 8 I borrow the term ‘patrifocal metanarrative’ from Stephens and McCallum (2013) 83.

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cultural formations based on Greek myth – to a degree that is of yet hard to grasp. My approach to the three pairs of metanarratives is first and foremost informed by the notion of the interdependency of word and image.9 Both collaborate in creating the picturebook text in such a way that they create a unit comparable to a textile, which is fabricated by means of two interweaving threads.10 The word-image combination, however, acquires meaning only through the involvement of a third party, that is, the reader, who interacts with it. That is to say, the process of meaning-making depends on the reader, who connects the word with the image and vice versa. Meek describes this as a twoway activity of ‘reading,’ as an interanimation of word and image, during which a significant amount of learning and understanding takes place that has nothing to do with the information provided in words.11 By interanimating word and image, the young reader, regardless of his or her abilities, discovers (and with each new reading revises) a metanarrative that teaches him or her, as Meek points out, not only how a narrative is produced but also what value system prevails both in his or her culture and in the text and, moreover, how the narrative handles these values.12 According to Meek, all children’s stories include “cultural features which locate them in a tradition.”13 This observation is both confirmed and narrowed down by Steven and McCallum, according to whom all retellings of myth articulate some sort of a justice metanarrative.14 In order to explore the traditional cultural features communicated in the metanarratives of Harris and Brown, on the one hand, and Fanelli, on the other, I base my approach primarily on the grammar of visual design established by Kress and van Leeuwen.15 This means that I adopt an approach to communication that starts, as Kress and van Leeuwen put it, “from a social 9

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11 12 13 14 15

The text-image interdependency is discussed at length, among others, in Perry Nodelman, Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1988) 193–221; see also Lewis (2001) 31–45. The metaphor of ‘interweaving word and pictures’ has been forged by Allan Ahlberg and is cited in Elaine Moss, “A certain particularity: An interview with Janet and Allen Ahlberg,” Signal 61, no. 108 (1990) 98–119. 20. Margaret Meek, “Children reading – now,” in Morag Styles et al. (eds.), After Alice: Exploring Children’s Literature (London: Cassell, 1992) 176, 177. Margaret Meek, How Texts Teach What Readers Learn (Lockwood: The Thimble Press, 1988) 29. Ibid. 13. Stephens and McCallum (2013) 71. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

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base.” According to Kress and van Leeuwen, “meanings expressed by speakers, writers, printmakers, photographers, designers, painters and sculptors are first and foremost social meanings.”16 They belong to, are structured by, and are subject to the changes of a society’s cultures.17 In drawing attention to an image’s visual code, that is, to its culturally produced regularity, Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar is particularly helpful for my comparative analysis, as it illuminates the visual codes not only of images but also of compositions. Thus insights, such as the information value of right and left, can be applied to the design of both a picturebook’s image and its double-page spreads. How well Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic theory of representation meshes with discussions of aesthetic aspects of representations, may be illuminated by Doonan’s statement that “every mark displayed in a picture is a potential carrier of meaning.”18 Her concept of ‘looking at pictures and picturebooks’ will thus provide the complementary working vocabulary for the close looking at images from an ‘aesthetic base.’ Corresponding to the outlined analysis of the three pairs of monster representations, the subsequent discussion will be structured in three sections, ­followed by a series of concluding thoughts. Although the metanarrative of each picturebook text is made up of the same components, each section will focus only on one, and each time a different, component, in the attempt to illustrate in some detail how the grand narrative of each ‘picturebook text’ comes into being.

Extreme Encounters: The Visual Grammar of the Sirens

According to Doonan, an image is made up by two basic modes of signifying or, as she puts it, of “referring to things outside themselves.”19 The mode that represents an object is termed denotation. The act of denoting an object is direct, even when the object is represented by a symbol. The other mode is called exemplification and endows an object with qualities or properties that are associated with notions, ideas, or the like. The mode of exemplification is thus operating in an indirect way. The meanings that the act of exemplifying attributes to an image thus have to be unpacked. They may be recognized, as Doonan explains, “through qualities or properties which the pictures literally 16 17 18 19

Ibid. 20. Ibid. 19. Jane Doonan, Looking at Pictures in Picturebooks (Lockwood: The Thimble Press, 1993) 12. Doonan (1993) 15.

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or metaphorically display.”20 Exemplification, too, can use symbols. Yet, ­com­pared to those used for denotation, the symbols of exemplification are of  an open nature. They invite the reader to come up with his or her own interpretation. Looking at the double-spread page in Greece! Rome! Monsters! 21 and the single page in Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece,22 respectively, the beholder thus realizes instantly that in each image the larger figures denote the Sirens, although the denotations themselves are realized in vastly different ways.

Figure 4.1  F rom MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli. © 2002 Sara Fanelli Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ.

20 Ibid. 21 Harris and Brown (2002) no page number. 22 Fanelli (2002) 12.

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Figure 4.2 From GREECE! ROME! MONSTERS! By John Harris, Illustrations By Calef Brown. Text © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust, Illustrations © 2002 Calef Brown. Reproduced With Permission.

The illustrator of Greece! Rome! Monsters! chose simple forms for a painting that reduces each part of the composition to its main characteristics and shapes. Stylized as singing women, the Sirens are placed in the left part of the image and depicted in varying hues of blue against a yellow sky. Two of the three wear long dresses and shoes with high heels. Likewise, two of them wear necklaces. Lastly, all three Sirens have their arms covered with long sleeves and sport feminine haircuts. Yet the disproportionately long arms and large hands of the two women in the back and the overdone make-up of the woman in the front make this trio appear also grotesque, and this is a feature that they share with their counterpart in Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece. Set against a background composed of thin red lines, Fanelli’s collage combines the small body of a bird with a heart-shaped ‘head-piece.’ It can be identified as a woman’s face most notably on account of the pasted eyes with sculpted eyebrows and the rouge added under them to the right and left. The three arms to the right and the four to the left, arranged in bundles, may, together with the added ‘tail-pieces’ and the stylized strands of hair, remind the beholder of a crawfish. Lastly, the six hands with varying numbers of fingers, sitting at the end of very short arms, give this Siren a harmless and at the

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same time disquieting appearance. Just as the red rays, which are attached to her likewise red, heart-shaped, mouth, are signifying a strange power, so do her stretched-out arms and fingers. Based on this short comparison it becomes evident that each illustrator chose to emphasize different features of a Siren on the denotational level. Whereas Brown refers to her as a woman, Fanelli portrays her first and foremost as an animal, oscillating between bird and fish in the eye of the beholder. Naturally, this observation raises the question whether and, if so, how these differences are carried out on the level of exemplification. In her description of “looking at Woolly,” Doonan examines a number of aspects of Kitamura’s art of drawing in When Sheep cannot Sleep. Applied to the Sirens’ portrayal, they offer helpful guidance for accessing and understanding their exemplification.23 Doonan’s exercise in “close looking at action,” as she herself calls it,24 focuses on the aesthetic components of line, linear emphases, color, shapes, viewpoint, and patterning, and thus explores the ways in which Woolly the sheep is portrayed on the level of expression. A line, as she explains, “creates contour, modelling, shading and a sign for movement.”25 It also endows a denoted object its individuality and character. In contrast, linear emphases, that is to say, visible lines produced by a pen or brush, signify psychological states. For example, emotional off-balance is expressed through diagonals, and, depending on whether the line moves from the lower left to the upper right or the reverse, it may be interpreted with Doonan either as “energy, going up in the world, friction” or as “falling, literally and metaphorically.”26 The size of a denoted object, in turn, and its positioning in an image determines the weight that the illustrator wants to give it. Color, too, evokes symbolic and emotional associations in the beholder. Distinguishing a color’s hue, tone, and saturation, Doonan points out, for example, that a color’s tone determines whether it is associated with positive or negative feelings. To put it in Doonan’s own words, “a high-key colour scheme using light colours is able to suggest feelings of well-being, whereas a low-key scheme in dark colours may well have a more sombre effect.”27 Finally, shapes, viewpoint, and patterning are aesthetic components that affect the way in which the beholder perceives a denoted object and, consequentially, how he or she looks at it. According to Doonan, the contrast of shapes and their regularity 23 24 25 26 27

Doonan (1993) 22–36. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 31.

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or irregularity, respectively, determines the character of a composition as either calm or busy, and this impression may have a profound impact on how the onlooker interprets the state of mind of the denoted object.28 By contrast, the attitude with which the beholder assesses the denoted object is determined by the viewpoint that the artist establishes between both. In other words, depending on how Brown or Fanelli control space in their images, the picturebook reader is invited to look up to or to look down upon a monster or, most frighteningly, to look it in the eye.29 Here one may take note of a first obvious difference: Brown wants the beholder to look down on the Sirens, whereas Fanelli wants him or her to look in her eye. Returning to the two depictions of the Sirens, a look through the lens of Doonan at each rendering’s mode of exemplification in fact reveals that Fanelli’s Siren has not a single notion or idea in common with her counterparts in Harris and Brown, except that they are perceived as monstrous. And even the nature of monstrosity is defined in different ways. To begin with linear emphases, one can detect an emotional off-balance in both images. Yet, since each diagonal rises into a different direction, the conveyed messages are opposite. The slope on which the Sirens are positioned in Greece! Rome! Monsters! seems to foreshadow their defeat by Odysseus who resisted their temptation and thus caused their demise. Harris and Brown might have drawn on the information provided by the Epitome of Apollodorus 7.18-19 or perhaps on Hyginus’ Fabulae 141, where it is stated that it was foretold to [the Sirens] that they would live so long as no one sailed past them while listening to their song. Ulysses was the man destined to seal their fate; for through a clever ploy he sailed past the cliffs occupied by the Sirens, and they threw themselves into the sea.30 In Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece, by contrast, it is the ship with sailors that is positioned diagonally towards the Siren. According to Doonan’s reading of linear emphasis, the composition thus exemplifies the emotions of the sailors, expressing the energy needed for mastering the challenge posed by the Siren and, more generally, the friction caused by man’s encounter of a monster. Likewise, in both images the Sirens receive weight by means of the size in which they are portrayed. Yet a closer look at the use of color indicates that 28 29 30

Ibid. 36. Ibid. 34–35. Cited from R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma, Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007) 146–147.

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their illustrators have associated them with very different ideas. In Brown’s image, the Sirens are painted in colors that are more saturated than those chosen for Odysseus and his men. Through this device, the illustrator expresses the monsters’ strength. In Fanelli’s composition, the color scheme is used the opposite way. That is to say, for depicting the sailors’ ship, Fanelli uses a more saturated color than for the Siren. Likened in its shape to a phallus, the ship, though much smaller in scale than the monster, has a force that Brown’s ship has not. Yet, it seems to compete not so much with the Siren herself than with the ‘song-rays’ that stream out of her mouth and that are painted in the same saturated red as the ship itself. This difference in the balance of powers in each image is reinforced by the color tones that each illustrator deploys. Brown’s Sirens are portrayed in dark tones of blue, which give them a somber appearance. Overall, the color-scheme that Brown chose for them evokes associations of threat and negativity. Com­ posed in reddish-brown hues and set against a textured red background, Fanelli’s Siren could not be more different in her representation. Unlike her counterparts in Greece! Rome! Monsters! she expresses warmth, and so does her depicted environment. Unlike Brown’s Sirens, she does not form a stark contrast to her background. Moreover, unlike Brown’s Sirens, she is represented against a background that, on account of the fine irregular horizontal lines, evokes the sensation of a soft texture. The quintessential sense, however, that these warm and soft hues of red evoke is eroticism. In this regard, Fanelli’s re-imagination of a Siren differs most from that of Harris and Brown’s – in both the image and, as will now be shown, in the metanarrative. Before examining the text-image interdependency and the metanarrative associated with it, however, the literal exemplification of each Siren-representation, that is, the printed text, deserves a closer look. A comparison of the text in Harris and Brown with that in Fanelli reveals two significant differences. Most notably, Harris and Brown combine much more words with the image than Fanelli. That means that the young reader has more freedom in interanimating and interpreting the information provided by text and image in Fanelli than in Harris and Brown. Furthermore, Fanelli’s arrangement of the words does not make sense when simply read from left to right. Structured in three short segments, the text invites to be explored and interpreted as well, until it makes sense and reads: They charmed passing sailors with their beautiful songs. The Sirens Half women, half vultures.31 31

Fanelli (2002) 12.

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The last segment, i.e., “half women, half vultures” points to the second major difference between Fanelli and Harris and Brown, namely, the choice of information provided by the text. Quite evidently, each retelling puts its own emphasis on the Sirens and the story associated with them. Drawing possibly on the information that can be found in Apollodorus’ Epitome 7.19 Fanelli attributes major importance to the tradition that imagines the Sirens as women who had the form of birds from approximately the waist down.32 In contrast, Harris and Brown refer to the Sirens primarily as women and thus seem to draw on their description by Homer in Odyssey 12.39-52 and 165–191, respectively. Another significant difference between the information provided by Fanelli and by Harris and Brown pertains Odysseus and his trick. While her drawing features Odysseus, tied to the ship mast, Fanelli’s text refers neither to him nor to his command that his men should seal their ears with wax. Lastly, it may be worth noticing that Harris and Brown associate the beautiful song of the Sirens with the activity of luring as opposed to Fanelli who regards them as charming. Related, but not synonymous, to lure and to charm are characterized by different dynamics. Inevitably, each word choice thus shapes the Sirens’ representation not only on the word-image level but also on the level of the metanarrative. For distinguishing the literal from the metaphorical message that is produced through the interaction and interdependency of word and image, Doonan’s terminology, though repurposed, offers once again a suitable vehicle. Thus it is possible to say that on the literal or denotational level of each representation, the Sirens are signifiers of trouble and challenge in the broadest sense. On the metaphorical or exemplifying level, however, trouble is associated each time with a different idea. The representation by Harris and Brown links it to the female and, as a result, presents her in a negative light. Picturing them in unsexy dresses and overdone make-up Brown does not give his re-imagined Sirens an attractive appearance. Nor does his choice of color tone present them in a positive light. By contrast, the representation by Fanelli connects trouble with something that does not physically exist, that is to say, a strange animal with a heart-shaped head of a woman and a heart-shaped mouth, a depiction of the abstract notion of eroticism. The creature’s appearance puzzles the onlooker; however it does not evoke a sense of negativity. Returning to the semantic difference between ‘to lure’ and ‘to charm,’ it  becomes now evident that the use of the verb ‘to lure’ contributes to the 32

Note that, according to Apollodorus, Epitome 7.19 (Smith and Trzaskoma 2007), the Sirens had the forms of birds from the thighs down, whereas Hyginus’ Fabulae 125.13 (Smith and Trzaskoma 2007) inform the reader that above their waist they were women and hens below.

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misogyny that Harris and Brown have implicated in their representation of the Sirens. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, ‘to lure’ denotes the activity of “tempting or attracting with the promise of pleasure or reward.”33 By contrast, ‘to charm’ is defined as “to attract or delight greatly, and to cast or seem to cast a spell on someone.”34 Through her choice of word and image, Fanelli thus succeeds in leaving out notions of misogyny in her representation of the Siren and thus challenges the position taken by Stephens and McCallum, who argue that the retelling of myth conflicts with aims of reconstructing cultural formations.35 Yet it should also be noted that neither Greece! Rome! Monsters! nor Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece mentions explicitly the one aspect that is persistently associated with the Sirens in ancient as well as in modern texts for grown-up readers, namely, death. Obviously, both 2002-refashionings of the Sirens yielded to an adult’s educational agenda. Yet what goal is the agenda pursuing? In regard to the presentation of the Sirens one might consider two possibilities. First, the authors intended to imply a more complex message, which Nodelman calls the ‘shadow text’ that evokes the “more complex truths they leave unspoken.”36 Second, the authors aimed at protecting their young readers from something that they should not know. For, according to Nodelman, the idea of “not teaching them what they cannot or should not know” has been and still is a defining characteristic of children’s literature.37 The belief, however, that there are indeed some things that a young reader  should know becomes perhaps most evident in each picture book’s re-imagination of the Minotaur, which will be analyzed next.

The Minotaur and Ethics: the Educational Agenda

As the analysis of Brown’s and Fanelli’s denotation and exemplification of the  Sirens has shown, both images are more interpretive than illustrative. This means that each image conveys an implicit evaluation that, as Stephens and McCallum put it, “works to shape the reader point of view in accordance with a particular metanarrative.”38 Young readers are thus indirectly taught a 33 34 35 36 37 38

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., s.v. “lure.” Ibid. s.v. “charm.” Stephens and McCallum (2013) 88. Nodelman (2008) 143. Ibid. 158. Stephens and McCallum (2013) 72.

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value-system, a metaethic, that they, as members of a society’s culture, are expected to adopt. In the end, this metanarrative always aims, as Stephens and McCallum note, at inculcating a sense of justice, and thus of an ethic that “will balance altruism against egotism, justice against self-interest, and even enable justice to prevail.”39 As will be shown, the re-imaginations and representations of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in Greece! Rome! Monsters! 40 and Mythological Monsters of Ancient Greece41 complement each other, as each centers on one of the two binaries. When comparing the composition of text and image in each representation of the myth, one difference becomes immediately apparent. In Harris and Brown, a huge text portion is balanced by the visual re-imagination of the Minotaur, Minos, and the labyrinth. By contrast, on Fanelli’s page the visual re-imagination of mythological characters outweighs the words – not only in terms of proportions but also in terms of quantity. In the top left corner of her

Figure 4.3 From Greece! Rome! Monsters! by John Harris, illustrations by Calef Brown. Text © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust, Illustrations © 2002 Calef Brown. Reproduced with permission.

39 40 41

Ibid. 75. Harris and Brown (2002) no page number. Fanelli (2002) 18–19.

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Figure 4.4 From MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli. © 2002 Sara Fanelli Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ.

double-spread page, the reader sees king Minos and seven stick-figure shaped Athenian youths who descend on a sloping line to the huge labyrinth, which dominates the visual arrangement. Down in the left corner, Fanelli placed Ariadne, who holds a red thread that Theseus, depicted more closely to the center of the image, has wrapped around his waist. Theseus, in turn, is positioned slightly diagonally toward the Minotaur who dominates the right half of the image and who shares the visual space with three tiny figures, representing two people in a boat who look at a stick-figure shaped Icarus, falling head-first from the sky. A subsequent look at the word-part of each picturebook text reveals that Fanelli’s re-imagination and representation of the myth is not only more comprehensive but also closer to the mythological tradition. Most likely drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses 8.152-235, her visual narrative links Theseus’ slaying of the confined Minotaur to Daedalus’ attempt to escape his own confined existence on Crete. Furthermore, both Ovid and Fanelli present the periodical killing of fourteen young Athenian men and women in terms of a coerced due that had to be paid.42 Lastly, both make mention of the circumstance that the labyrinth had been designed by Daedalus. Harris, by contrast, does not mention Daedalus at all. He associates the labyrinth solely with king Minos and the Minotaur who is haunting it. Moreover, contrary to the mythological tradition, 42

Note, however, that the two narratives differ in regard to the interval in which the due had to be paid. According to Ovid, the due was paid every nine years; according to Fanelli (2002) it was paid every year.

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he gives a new reason for the Minotaur’s annual feasting on “poor, innocent, young people.”43 This, as the reader learns, “kept the Minotaur happy, and when the Minotaur was happy, King Minos was happy.”44 A few, but substantial, changes to the storyline thus enabled Harris to portray Minos as a villain right from the beginning and to present both Theseus’ slaying of the Minotaur and his escape with the help of Ariadne as acts of correction, that is to say, of restoring justice. Harris exemplifies the Cretan king’s egocentrism with the statement that both Theseus’ and Ariadne’s actions drove Minos “really mad.”45 Their concerted effort to kill the Minotaur and to preserve Theseus’ life render him powerless, a circumstance that may be reflected in the small size, which Brown chose for the king’s visual representation. It is thus possible to say that primarily in the verbal re-imagination and representation of the myth by Harris and Brown, Minos and Theseus exemplify the binary of self-interest versus justice. By contrast, the idea around which Fanelli has organized her rendering of the myth is not only different, but moreover, primarily conveyed through the careful composition of the double-spread image. For, like in her representation of the Siren, Fanelli places three text segments on her image that do not form a coherent text, but rather explain individual parts of the depiction. In view of this circumstance, the concept of a visual grammar – this time applied to the composition of an image – once again provides a helpful tool. Based on the premise that “any semiotic mode has to have the capacity to form ‘texts,’ complexes of signs which cohere both internally with each other and externally with the context in and for which they were produced,”46 Kress and van Leeuwen distinguish the information value associated with what is placed left and what is placed right in an image that makes significant use of the horizontal axis. According to their findings, an object or element that is placed on the left is represented as “Given,” that is to say, as “something the reader already knows, as a familiar and agreed-upon point of departure for the message.”47 By contrast, an object or element that is placed to the right is represented as “New” or, as Kress and van Leeuwen put it, “as something which is not yet known, or perhaps not yet agreed upon by the viewer.”48 In other words, the

43 Harris and Brown (2002) no page number. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) 43. 47 Ibid. 181. 48 Ibid. 181.

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right side presents the message, i.e., the information to which the reader must pay special attention. Read through the lens of Kress and van Leeuwen, Fanelli’s double-spread image thus seems to offer a visual rendering of the myth that focuses on the binary of altruism versus egotism. Positioned in the left part of the image, Minos, the Athenian king’s tribute of seven young men and seven young women, Ariadne, and Theseus are represented as “Given.” They, together with their actions, constitute the agreed-upon point of departure for the message, which is represented by the Minotaur, Icarus, and the right portion of the labyrinth, which is not only larger than the left one but also has the name of its designer, Daedalus, inscribed. The common denominator of the objects that are represented as ‘New’ is confinement. The experience of suffering that it causes is denoted by a Minotaur who is squeezed – arms down and tail up – into a tiny oval space in the middle of the labyrinth and exemplified by the monster’s facial expression. The big, distorted, and sad-looking eyes cause the viewer to pity rather than to fear the creature. Binding the ‘Given’ and the ‘New’ together is Ariadne’s red thread, which, besides tying Minos’ daughter to Theseus, runs across the left and the right part of the image in approximately equal length. Fanelli’s composition is thus – literally as well as metaphorically – about ties and, as will be shown, their opposite. Tied to the arrangement that Minos had imposed on him, the king of Athens is forced to sacrifice fourteen young men and women to the Minotaur. Likewise, tied to Ariadne, Theseus is able to find his way out of the labyrinth. However, tied to Theseus by her feelings of love, Ariadne cuts her loyal bond to Minos, and thus causes the ‘unbinding’ of the Minotaur, on the one hand, and the end of the sacrificial practice established by Minos, on the other. Since the one wants to become a hero and the other wants to marry, both Theseus’ and Ariadne’s altruism is determined in part by an egotistic goal. Yet it stands in stark contrast to Minos’ egotism, which manifests itself in his exacting of a sacrifice that did not atone anyone but himself. The imprisoned Minotaur, portrayed as both victim and victimizer, thus becomes the linchpin around which deeds of altruism and deeds of egotism are pivoting. Obviously, the exploration of the metanarrative should not limit itself to confirming that each rendering of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur aims at teaching indirectly a metaethic. For, once it has been revealed that both ‘picturebook texts’ complement one another by basing their re-imagination and representation of the myth on the respective opposite binary, the concept of the ‘Given’ and the ‘New’ becomes relevant once again. Thus far, it had been applied only to Fanelli’s visual rendering of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. When applied to Brown’s image, the concept of ‘Given’ and ‘New’ first of all reveals that Brown guides the viewer’s perspective

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into a different direction than Fanelli. In fact, read through the lens of Kress and van Leeuwen, Brown’s visual composition turns out to be diametrically opposite to that of Fanelli in regard to the positioning of the elements in the image. By placing the Minotaur to the left, and Minos to the right, Brown represents the monster as the ‘Given’ and the Cretan king as the ‘New.’ In doing so, Brown wants the viewer pay special attention to Minos the villain. By contrast, Fanelli places Minos to the left and the Minotaur to the right, and thus directs the viewer’s attention to the confined Minotaur. In keeping with the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuwen, this shift in perspective reflects a shift in the ideological structuring of both images and, as one may add, both metanarratives. At the image-level, Brown focuses on the king who, with the Minotaur as a menace at hand, has turned into a villain. Applying one of the principles and practices of patriarchy, namely, moral authority, Brown represents Minos as a bad example that should not be imitated. Fanelli, in turn, focuses on the Minotaur, who, like Daedalus, is kept confined by king Minos. In her image, the monster is not represented as an evil, but rather as a pitiful creature. Applying an egalitarian perspective, Fanelli thus represents the Minotaur as much as a victim of king Minos as Icarus, that is, as an oppressed subject or a relative of an oppressed subject who appeals to the reader’s capacity to act as a humane and altruistic citizen. Based on this comparison, it is thus possible to argue that the composition of each image is ideologically structured in such a way that it directs the reader’s attention not only to a particular element but also to a culturally determined outlook on what is going on. Brown’s Minos is associated with a warning, while Fanelli’s Minotaur calls for a decisive course of action. Furthermore, it  should be noted that the outlook adopted by Fanelli avoids references to patriarchal practices, and this may be regarded as another indication that the retelling of myth needs not to conflict with aims of reconstructing cultural formations. The ultimate test case for reconstructing traditional gender assumptions, however, is, and probably will always be, the re-imagination and representation of Medusa. A comparison of her rendering in each ‘picturebook text’ will thus complement as well as conclude this paper’s discussion of two very different modes of reception of Greek mythological monsters in the literature for the very young.

Medusa and the Workings of Tradition

According to Nodelman, the reinforcing of traditional gender roles is “one particular and particularly important aspect of the colonizing work of children’s literature – so much so that a defining characteristic of children’s literature is

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that it intends to teach what it means for girls to be girls and boys to be boys.”49 At the first moment it is therefore little surprising when Stephens and McCallum state that representations of female mythological monsters are inevitably sexist.50 At the second moment, however, one is urged to challenge this verdict in view of the new paths that Fanelli has opened up in her reception of the Sirens and the Minotaur. And indeed, it is highly instructive to analyze Medusa’s different representations in Harris and Brown and Fanelli, respectively.51 For as will be shown, each illustrator defines female gender, sexuality, and monstrosity in very distinctive ways. To begin with gender, it is remarkable that both Brown and Fanelli re-­ imagine the Gorgo as a monster wearing a skirt. Brown even adds a turtleneck sweater and a belt. Moreover, each illustrator creates a monster with long hair. Yet neither Gorgo has the appeal of a female, and this effect is achieved by each

Figure 4.5 From Greece! Rome! Monsters! by John Harris, illustrations by Calef Brown. Text © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust, Illustrations © 2002 Calef Brown. Reproduced with permission.

49 50 51

Nodelman (2008) 173. Stephens and McCallum (2013) 84. Harris and Brown (2002) no page number; Fanelli (2002) 8–9.

Figure 4.6 © 2002 Sara Fanelli. From MYTHOLOGICAL MONSTERS by Sara Fanelli. Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ.

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author in a very different way. Fanelli uses the technique of collage to patch together a monster with an over-dimensional furry head, a furry trunk, and thin red arms with animal-like claws. A row of white over-sized teeth, framed by tusks, possibly a another reference to Apollodorus, this time Epitome 2.40,52 makes the face appear like that of an animal, despite the added human nose. With the painted snakes attached, head and trunk form a fragmented whole that oscillates between human and animal shape. Moreover, if breasts were not painted on the furry trunk, one would not even be able to determine whether the creature is male or female. Brown, by contrast, presents a solid female figure with breasts that wears neither a necklace nor make-up and thus draws the onlooker’s view to her one and only human accessory, that is, her glasses. Together with the stern expression of her face, her look, her thin lips, her claw-shaped polished nails, and her skinny body they reinforce the stereotypical image of an intellectual woman: vigilant, humourless, unsexy, and not fun-loving at all. The textured background, composed of colors ranging from white to hues of yellow, blue, and green, enhances the disturbing effect of her appearance. As noted in the previous word-image analyses, the essence of each visually rendered Medusa is further illuminated by the accompanying text. Placed under a row of petrified figures, both animal and human, Fanelli’s statement, poor creatures whom Medusa turned to stone. She petrified them!!!53 may thus hint at the ‘animal-ness’ of her re-imagined monster, and specifically at her lack of intention. Especially the petrified owl, pig, and bug on the left side appear to be rather accidents than victims. By contrast, Medusa’s lack of female appeal in Brown’s visualization is augmented by the aggressive and maybe also bitchy nature that Harris ascribes to her on the word level. Scared by the attacking Perseus, She hissed, she flew around with those claws ready to rip Perseus to shreds, she tried every trick in the book, but by the end of the day Medusa – chop! chop! no longer had a head.54 52 53 54

The reference text is Smith and Trzaskoma (2007). Fanelli (2002) 8. Harris and Brown (2002) (no page number).

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The last two lines, of course, also underline the ease with which Perseus killed Medusa, and thus stress the hierarchy between the female monster and man. In regard to the depiction of female monstrosity on the level of the metanarrative, it is thus possible to say that Brown’s exemplification of Medusa undoubtedly brings a sexist as well as misogynist metanarrative into existence. The intellectual woman, or perhaps just the kindergarten teacher, is viewed as much as a threat to the male identity as the petrifying glances of the mythical monster. In contrast, Fanelli’s exemplification of Medusa evokes a sense of irregularity, of not fitting into one of the categories that give humans a place and space in society. Far from being a sexist depiction, her ‘animal-female’ demands to be reckoned with on her own terms in her own realm, i.e., that of mythical monsters. This mode of re-imagination and representation may indeed be regarded as a revision of the basic principle on which ancient myths have been based, that is, the gender dichotomy.

Concluding Thoughts

The findings that this detailed comparative analysis of three sets of mythological monsters has delivered provide both a meta-commentary on and a number of new impulses for the scholarly practices in the study of the Classical Reception in children’s literature, and in particular in picture books. Thus Fanelli’s renderings of the Sirens, the Minotaur, and Medusa, refute the position articulated by Steven’s and McCallum, according to which the preservation of the knowledge of Classical myth inevitably conflicts with the attempt of reconstructing cultural frameworks. A closer look at the re-imagination and representation of the three monsters by Harris and Brown, in turn, reveals that the deconstruction of cultural formations can only be achieved by images that reject traditional authority like in the portrayal of the Sirens; that experiment radically like in the visual narrative of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur; and that create a deliberate surrealism like in the rendering of Medusa. Lastly, Fanelli’s preference of the image over the text testifies to a semiotic shift in communication that, according to Kress and van Leeuwen, is characterized by a “decrease of control over language” and an “increase in codification and control over the visual.”55 This new trend, in turn, harbors a huge potential not only for changing ‘old’ cultural formations but also for readjusting the discourse of Classical Reception Studies – not only in regard to ‘picturebook texts.’

55

Stephens and McCallum (2013) 28–29.

chapter 5

Reading the Fiction of Video Games Mary McMenomy

Mythological Reception in a Half-Real Medium …video games are two different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules with which players actually interact, and in that winning or losing a game is a real event. However, when winning a game by slaying a dragon, the dragon is not a real dragon but a fictional one. To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.1

So Jesper Juul begins Half-real, his seminal work on the relationship between game mechanics and game fiction. Unlike almost every other medium in which classical reception is traditionally studied – unlike novels, poems, short stories, drama, and films – games are partly made of rules, the system by which the player may interact, the means of winning or losing or affecting the state of the game. A game’s rules contribute to the construction of the game’s meaning just as much as do game’s art, dialogue, or narrative structure. For instance, Paolo Pedercini’s protest work McDonald’s Video Game (Molleindustria, 2006) is a simulation in which the player directs the operations of the fast food corporation. The art and presentation are cheerful and upbeat, and the narrative text never overtly speaks against McDonald’s. However, a cutting critique emerges from the rules of the game: it is hard for the player to attain gamewinning profits without growing high volumes of feed in environmentally damaging ways, treating employees unethically, and lobbying for special treatment from the government. The rule-fiction split is at the core of many debates, among both scholars and practitioners, about the nature of games. Game studies in the early 2000s saw scholarship split between ludologists who thought that games should be analyzed primarily as formal systems and narratologists who thought that 1 Jesper Juul, Half-real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (The mit Press, Cambridge ma, 2005) 1. Juul’s distinction between mechanics and fiction will be used through the rest of this article.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_007

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games could be considered as new forms of narrative. Game critics speak of ludonarrative dissonance, the aesthetic distancing that arises from a game whose narrative meaning is at odds with the meaning suggested by its rule systems: To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all.2 Nonetheless, having some fictional content speaks to the game designer’s need to make a legible system. To play a game, the player must understand (even if imperfectly) how his actions will affect the state of the game. If the relation between the player’s actions and the game’s responses remains opaque, the player is doomed to frustration and may soon stop playing. The craft of game design offers many solutions to this issue: tutorials that train the player in the game controls; level progressions that gradually introduce new mechanics of play; scoring and achievement systems that reward successful player behavior; death and replay systems that punish unsuccessful behavior. Much of the craft of game design is pedagogical. A well-chosen fiction can support this communication as well. If the player has a choice of two weapons, one slower to use but dealing much more damage than the other, presenting one as a cannon and the other as a pistol is an easy way to make the distinction both clear and memorable. As Juul writes: Even though fiction and rules are formally separable, the player’s experience is shaped by both. The fictional world of a game can cue the player into making assumptions about game rules: In a game with a first-person perspective, the player facing evil-looking monsters is likely to assume that the monsters are to be avoided or possibly destroyed. If the images of the monsters were replaced by something benign, perhaps large flowers, the player will likely make different assumptions about the rules of the game.3 2 The term “ludonarrative dissonance” was first introduced by designer Clint Hocking in a blog post about the game Bioshock, from which this excerpt is taken. The post could be retrieved from as of 17:28 gmt, February 15, 2014. 3 Juul (2005) 177.

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This has significant implications for how we understand the reception of any previous fiction in the context of video games. Many of the same questions that apply in other fields of reception do apply to games. For instance, one might profitably examine the process of acculturation by which Japanese game designers produce such hybrids of eastern and western mythology in works as Kid Icarus (Nintendo, 1996), a game about a flying cupid-like child with a bow and arrow; Athena (Imagine Studios, 1986), which casts the goddess as a half-naked princess who accidentally leaves the Castle of Victory and enters a realm of monsters; or Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (KOEI Ltd, 2008), in which the player gains the ability to summon an android Orpheus who can also transform into Thanatos. We might consider the commercial conditions under which the games were created, observing that Disney released two Hercules-themed tie-ins to its animated movie (Disney’s Hercules Action Game, 1997; Disney’s Hades Challenge, 1998), that Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief (Activision, 2010) accompanied the popular film, and that the strategy games Gates of Troy (Slitherine Software, 2004) and The Battle for Troy (ValuSoft, 2004) were both timed to coincide with the release of the film Troy (Plan B Entertainment, 2004). Nonetheless our ability to address classical reception in the context of games is significantly hampered unless we are prepared at least to consider the special relationship between fiction and rule. This paper seeks to demonstrate, through several case studies, that a game’s use of received fiction cannot be understood separately from that game’s rules and mechanics. It looks at classic text adventures from the 1980s, real-time strategy games from ca. 2000, and independent art games from the past few years, in order to demonstrate several kinds of uses to which mythology can be put. It presents evidence that when classical mythology is used as a fictional basis for games, the designer’s purpose is often to provide the player with a familiar framework in which to understand other aspects of the game’s mechanics and play, rather than in order to confer cultural legitimacy or to educate the player about the original source material. Finally, it examines some of the available evidence about how younger players build an understanding of mythological material through their exposure to games.

Video Games as a Children’s Medium

This brings us to our second challenge of definition. With video games it is not easy to know which games should be understood to be “for children” and which should not. Prior to 1994, there were no standardized rating systems to c­ ompare

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with the current Entertainment Software Rating Board ratings,4 and not all games released even now have such ratings. Most independent game makers do not bother to procure an esrb judgment on their work. In Europe, pegi (“Pan-European Game Information”) ratings are also issued, and are also not universal in their coverage.5 One casual assumption might be that video games are by definition a medium primarily marketed to and enjoyed by children and young adults. This is not true. According to the Entertainment Software Association, in 2013 the average age of game players was 30 and the average age of frequent purchasers was 35. 32% of players were under 18, 32% between 19 and 35, and the remaining 36% were 36 or older.6 The same source provides statistics about parental involvement in game choice, claiming that 93% of parents pay attention to the content of games their children play, that parents are present 89% of the time when games are purchased for their household, and that 79% of parents place  time limits on their children’s access to video games. They add that 35% of ­parents play video games with their children once a week or more, and 58% once a month or more – making video game playing a communal family activity.7 Finally, of game genres sold, games from the Children’s Entertainment ­sector constitute only 0.5% of sales. If these numbers can be relied on, the evidence is that many children play games, but by no means all gamers are children and not all games are designed with an audience of children in mind. Given the number of children playing and the low sales of child-specific games, however, it is also clear that many games not exclusively targeted to children are nonetheless written and sold with children as part of the intended or actual audience. The approach taken here is therefore to focus primarily on games that were not explicitly marketed as Mature or Adult-Only products (or the equivalent 4 esrb ratings fall into the categories Early Childhood, Everyone, Everyone 10+, Teen, Mature, Adults Only, and Rating Pending. Adults Only games are set apart from the Mature category by the presence of even more graphical sexuality or the possibility of gambling for real-world currency. These categories are described in detail at as of 16:26 gmt, February 15, 2014. 5 pegi ratings are keyed to age, at 3+, 7+, 12+, 16+, and 18+. A more extensive explanation of the rating system can be found at as of 17:28 gmt, March 19, 2015. 6 “2013 Sales, Demographic and Usage Data: Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry,” Entertainment Software Association. Retrieved from as of 16:42 gmt, February 15, 2014. 7 It is worth noting that, since the esrb is an association created by the esa, the esa does have a vested interest in demonstrating that esrb ratings are important to parents.

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when these ratings were not yet available). When talking about children’s experience of these games, I support the analysis with evidence that children or teenagers did play the games in question in reasonable numbers, or that a given game was marketed to or available to children. This criterion therefore excludes treating as children’s material the popular but gory and sometimes sexually explicit God of War series,8 or the somewhat less successful Rise of the Argonauts (Liquid Entertainment, 2008), both of which received a Mature rating from the esrb; or LoveChess: The Greek Era (Beat Games, 2004), in which the pieces engage in an animation of sexual activity any time one captures another. Many other games not explicitly marketed to children are included, however.

Mechanizing a Fiction: Ulysses and the Golden Fleece

Hi Res Adventure #4: Ulysses and the Golden Fleece (Bob Davis and Ken Williams, Sierra On-Line 1981) was part of a successful series of illustrated text adventures9 released for home computer use. As the title implies, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece freely mixes elements from the legends of Jason and Odysseus. The mix of myths is not due to ignorance on the part of the game developers: rather, Sierra On-Line feared a copyright battle with Columbia Pictures if they released a game entitled Jason and the Golden Fleece, so decided to sidestep the problem by incorporating a different hero into the story.10 The text on the back of the game box acknowledges the blending of stories and offers a sort of explanation for it: Protected by the gods, the “GOLDEN FLEECE”, legendary treasure of ancient mythology, has been kept from man for many decades. Many 8

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The series, started in 2005, includes as of this writing God of War I, God of War ii, God of War: Betrayal, God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War iii, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, and God of War: Ascension, as well as several collections of these games remastered for new platforms. Text adventures were a popular form of game during the early 1980s in part because they fit within the storage and memory limitations of a home computer. Sierra On-line’s text adventures presented the player with a static image of a location together with a brief textual description. The player interacted by typing commands, typically two-word commands such as GO NORTH or TAKE FLASK, and the game replies by narrating the results of this action. The primary mode of interaction in this kind of game is puzzle solving: all play is turn-based and relies on the player’s ability to figure out or guess what he ought to do next. No arcade-style reflexes are required. See the account of this game’s development in Stephen Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition (Sebastopol, ca: O’Reilly Media, 2010) 292.

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v­ aliant men have attempted its recovery, but none have been successful in possessing it for any amount of time…The setting is ancient Greece and YOU are Ulysses. The king has requested an audience with you, to assign you the task of retrieving the “GOLDEN FLEECE” and returning it safely to him…On your voyages you will encounter many of the same foes dealt with by your predecessors … When designers speak about the mechanics of games, they often speak in terms of verbs: what is the player permitted to do in this game? How many different types of action are available? So for instance the mechanics of a firstperson shooter might be described in terms of the verbs of moving and shooting and perhaps taking cover or reloading. Surrounding these actions are a series of encoded rules that determine what will happen when the player does these things and whether they work in particular circumstances, so that the game world knows a player cannot move left if there is a wall there, or shoot with a gun that has run out of ammunition, or take cover if there are no objects to provide it. The concepts of “wall,” “cover,” and “ammunition” are parts of the game’s mechanics, and provide the context in which the player’s actions can be productive or counterproductive. Unlike our hypothetical first-person shooter, a text adventure can have arbitrarily many verbs. The designer is not constrained only to the number of buttons or button combos on a controller, but is free to introduce as many verbs as the player is able to type. Conversely, text adventures tend, especially in their earliest incarnations, to have relatively simple mechanics, designed to support particular verbs only in the right context. For instance, there might be a guard dog that must be pacified with a bone, but the game might recognize only GIVE BONE TO DOG and not other possible combinations of gifts and recipients. So in the text adventure, we have a format whose mechanics are highly flexible and adaptable to the constraints of the fiction; and indeed in which the mechanics are generally not comprehensible at all without the assistance of the fiction. The only way the player will guess that GIVE BONE TO DOG is a viable strategy is by reading the text, imagining what he might do in that context, and then forming that action into words. Because they demand an active and responsive literacy, text adventures have sometimes been used to teach reading or second languages.11 11

Brendan Desilets, “Interactive Fiction vs the Pause that Distresses: How Computer-Based Literature Interrupts the Reading Process Without Stopping the Fun,” Currents in Electronic Literacy, Spring 1999 (1). Retrieved from 20:39 gmt February 27, 2014. See also Joe Pereira, “Beyond Hidden Bodies

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In Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, designer Bob Davis took full advantage of this adaptability, rendering many mythological events into a sequence of actions performed by the protagonist and then implementing them literally. Because text adventure puzzles typically turn on clever solutions and moments of insight, source material about a trickster like Odysseus might seem especially well suited to this kind of adaptation. The player is instructed to fetch the golden fleece in order to present it to his king (there is no acknowledgement that Odysseus himself is a king), but during his voyages he encounters the Cyclops and the sirens, vanquishing them in ways that resemble Odysseus’ solutions in the Homeric account. He also makes a pair of wings with feathers and wax in Daedalus’ style; tames and mounts Pegasus; and does battle with skeletal attackers reminiscent of those in the movie Jason and the Argonauts.12 Less explicably, the game includes a dragon, a fjord, and a medieval castle. The relative transparency of text adventure mechanics does not, however, mean that no adaptations need to be made in order to translate these clever solutions into gameplay. In Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Davis wished to make the player reenact Odysseus’ method of escaping the sirens, but he cannot compel the player to share Odysseus’ original motive for doing so. Inner desires and compulsions, such as longing for the aesthetic pleasure of song or the ego gratification of hearing one’s own adventures retold, are more difficult to simulate in game-play than external requirements.13 So Davis supplies an external rather than an internal reason for this sequence. As Odysseus does, the player of Ulysses and the Golden Fleece must have his protagonist tie himself to the mast. The solution sequence goes as follows:

12 13

and Lost Pigs: Student Perceptions of Foreign Language Learning with Interactive Fiction,” in, Youngkyun Baek and Nicola Whitton, eds., Cases on Digital Game-Based Learning: Methods, Models, and Strategies (igi, 2013). A complete walkthrough for Ulysses and the Golden Fleece could be found at as of 20:47 gmt, February 27, 2014. There are games that do explore this territory in various serious or silly ways: Blurst’s Minotaur China Shop (2009) presents a player character who is periodically overcome by uncontrollable rage that alters the way he moves. Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013) presents the player with a series of choices from the perspective of a depressed person, modeling changes in their mood that then affect what subsequent choices they are able to make. These and similar approaches to mood modeling (by changing the user interface, offering the player different actions during different emotional states, or constraining the player’s success depending on emotional levels) are well-documented now but were not prevalent in the early 80s. Even now video game situations involving external challenges and threats greatly outnumber those concerning protagonist interiority.

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(1) The player types TIE ROPE TO ME, and the game responds by asking whether the player wishes to be tied to the mast. The player replies YES. (2) The player types HOLD WAX to soften the wax he has in hand. (3) The player types WAX EARS to instruct the game to put the wax in the crew’s ears. The sirens then sing a poem that sounds partially nonsensical, but includes a password that will be used later in the story to solve another puzzle. If the player does not experience this sequence, he does not get the password and cannot proceed. The idea that the sirens possess valuable knowledge is thus retained, but reconfigured to conform to a text adventure’s need for puzzles and solutions. Ulysses and the Golden Fleece was not the only early text adventure to rely on classical material. Perseus and Andromeda (Channel 8 Software, 1983) was similarly an illustrated text adventure drawing its major events from a particular myth. Like Ulysses, it relies heavily on the idea of finding objects and giving them to other characters in exchange for rewards or additional tools for progress: a sack of water given to a thirsty tramp earns a discus, which can then be thrown to knock down an object the player needs, and so on. The game warms up with several of these simple exchanges before moving on to scenarios in which the player must acquire, for instance, the winged sandals from a statue of Hermes. More sophisticated text adventures soon began to move away from requiring external knowledge of this kind. Infocom’s game Zork (1977–9 in its initial creation), a fantasy adventure not otherwise concerned with classical subject matter, includes a Cyclops as an obstacle for the player, and one solution for getting past the beast is to type ODYSSEUS in his presence, thus scaring him off. But the game does include an alternate solution of feeding the Cyclops a hot pepper sandwich: an acknowledgement, one might think, that requiring the player to solve a riddle using knowledge from outside the game was not strictly fair. Plainly Ulysses and the Golden Fleece is not intended to be educational. On the contrary, the manual for the game suggests that a familiarity with the classic adventures might be a good means to winning, rather than that the game should be played for the purpose of acquainting oneself with a classic story. The manual for Ulysses and the Golden Fleece includes the following admonition: Knowing a bit of mythology and the Classics – a familiarity with Ulysses’ adventures – also will help you survive…As with many classical Greek

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heroes, you will be required to perform certain superhuman feats and to use magical substances to overcome malicious gods and evil creatures. Remember, logic will not always work because the gods are not always logical. However, two games that were designed with the explicit intention of teaching children about ancient mythology also used an approach centered on minimizing mechanics and maximizing the narrative and fictive aspects of the experience. Wrath of the Gods (Luminaria) was a cd-rom graphical adventure from 1994 featuring a number of live-action sequences, and Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey (Palladium Interactive, 1996) also a graphical adventure with Wishbone the talking Jack Russell terrier in the role of Odysseus. Unlike text adventures, these games present the world to the player mostly through sound and image and take input via mouse clicks; but like their textual forebears, they are predominantly concerned with single set-piece puzzles that need to be solved. In practice, the type of puzzle produced by recasting classic enigmas as gameplay was not always very satisfying to players. If the player did not know about the original story, the solution could seem unreasonably obscure and difficult; if the player did know, the course of the story became at best predictable. Quentin Heath remarked in his review of Perseus and Andromeda: After defeating Medusa you must find Pegasus and ride him to defeat the Kraken and save Andromeda. The final part of the adventure is spoiled slightly because you can refer to the myth for a solution to a particular problem…The adventure is faithful to the old Greek story but if you want to find extra hints you might like to see the film Clash of the Titans, or read the book. Those sources provide information on the plot and are also easier to read than the translation of the original.14 Heath and other players were beginning to discover the curiously antimimetic quality of these puzzle sequences. Re-enacting Odysseus’ brilliant conquest of the Cyclops doesn’t feel brilliant when the player is typing POKE EYE WITH STICK because he’s already heard how the story comes out. In such a direct translation, the action sequences of the story are preserved, but at the expense 14

Quentin Heath, “The Clash of the Titans: Quentin Heath treads warily through labyrinths of Greek mythology,” Sinclair User 27 (1984) 133. . Retrieved 20:17 gmt, February 27, 2014.

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of the qualities of character that endow them with meaning. Odysseus’ mêtis is lost, as is the longing that makes him wish to hear the sirens, and the folly that drives him to tell the Cyclops his true name. Creating a game in which the player can truly play the trickster means letting him invent his own solution from available materials, even if that solution is not the one in the orthodox text. It means setting aside fidelity to a particular narrative sequence and giving the player a richer set of game mechanics instead.

Avoiding Dominant Strategies: Age of Mythology and the Structuralism of Game Designers

Age of Mythology (Microsoft Game Studios, 2002) was a popular real-time strategy game15 spun off from the historical Age of Empires series, released with an esrb rating of Teen.16 Previous games in the series allowed the player to choose one of several civilizations to play, each civilization having special advantages unique to its own combat units. Age of Mythology continues that tradition, but with a mythological framing. The available civilizations are Egyptian, Greek, Norse, and (in an expansion) “Atlantean.”17 Military units and bases are given names derived from the relevant civilizations, so that the player who chooses the Greeks might build a trireme or a pentekonter, while one playing the Egyptians might have access to a war elephant.18 What particularly expands the game into the realm of the mythical, however, is the application of divinities and resources. Where Age of Empires required 15

16

17 18

“Real-time strategy game” refers to a game in which the player must make decisions, typically in a battle context, about what resources to build, what combat units to deploy, and where and how to attack. These games may be played against other live players or against a computer AI. The phrase “real-time” distinguishes the genre from combat games in which players take turns. The first Age of Empires game was released in 1997; as of 2014, there have been over a dozen Age of Empires and Age of Mythology sequels and spinoffs, including several games for mobile devices and one boardgame adaptation. The Atlantean characters are also roughly Greek-themed, but enjoy the patronage of Titans. It is worth noting that the game’s single player campaign mode does include a loose narrative and might be said to have a plot, in which the heroes of several mythologies are teaming up to fight a force that threatens the whole world. This plot exists mostly to provide a framework for a series of battles, however, and is not an obligatory part of the player’s experience in multiplayer mode.

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the player to collect resources such as wood and stone in order to be able to build new buildings and combat units, Age of Mythology introduces the idea of divine favor as a resource. As the player proceeds through the game’s campaigns, he can seek the approval of various gods associated with his chosen civilization. A player who has chosen to play the Greeks must first decide whether he wants to side with Zeus, Poseidon, or Hades. The choice to use Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus as the initial divine trio presumably comes (if indirectly) from Iliad xv.187–93, in which these three gods divide the world by lot. From a game-play perspective, this is a more balanced structuring of the pantheon than one in which Zeus is unambiguously the most powerful of the Olympians. For the player’s choice of divine sponsor to be interesting, there must be some ambiguity about which god is best; otherwise, selecting Zeus will be a clear dominant strategy.19 On subsequent levels, the player may pursue the favor of additional “minor gods” such as Dionysus, Apollo, and Hermes. Each god who favors the player brings new benefits: worship of Apollo means the player is able to build temples to restore the health of combat units, while worship of Hermes allows the player to confer a speed bonus on his men. Some minor gods may only be chosen in combination with specific others: it is only possible to gain Hera’s sponsorship if one has already selected Zeus. This is a well-established structure in games: as he progresses, the player earns the right to buy new mechanical advantages, which in turn open future possibilities. For instance, a player who chooses to purchase the advantage of stirrups in one turn might later be able to buy the advantage of heavily armored knights, whereas that second advantage would remain out of reach for a player who had instead invested in long bows. Possession of different advantages determines which play strategies are likely to be most successful. This design allows the player to customize the game towards his own preferences – some players will prefer more aggressive or more defensive tactics and will choose to “level up” along technology paths that support those play styles. The variety of options also supports replay, since a player who has finished a campaign with one set of technical advantages may find it a different experience if he restarts 19

This is what is meant by veteran designer Sid Meier’s famous dictum that a good game is “a series of interesting choices”: the player’s decisions must affect what happens next in the game, and must be balanced so that discovering the right one is not overly obvious. Meier’s quote is discussed in a number of places, but a detailed elaboration in his own words could be found at as of 13:54 gmt, February 26, 2014.

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and follows a different path. Age of Mythology has simply overlaid a metaphor of divine support on a structure that games often use to describe technological advancement. Consider the set of advantages associated with worship of Hades:20 GOD POWER (activated only once per game): Sentinel: Creates four statues at a target town center which will attack any enemies within range. BONUSES: When human units are killed, there is a 20% chance a Shade will be generated at the player’s temple. Shades are weak melee units that become more powerful in later ages. Buildings have 25% more hitpoints and 20% more attack. Archers have 10% more attack. TECHNOLOGY: Vault of Erebus, which produces .75 gold per second. We see here some of the standard associations of Hades (god of the dead and of wealth) interpreted through the medium of combat mechanics, but his association with archery seems arbitrary. The other gods also present a mix of explicable and incongruous powers, though all are a similar mix of “god powers,” “bonuses,” and building or unit features. Among the more obviously motivated: Hermes, as herald and truce-maker, can create a temporary cease-fire, allowing the player time to regroup and rebuild. Hephaestus improves access to armor technologies. Poseidon allows the player to summon the powerful Polyphemus and Argo units. Artemis grants additional archery bonuses. Apollo  has an oracular ability allowing the player to see parts of the map that would otherwise be concealed because they were too far from any of the player’s units. But incongruous examples also abound. Ares allows the player to cause a pestilence (which might be more logically associated with Apollo) and controls the Cyclops (who might be more obviously connected to Poseidon). Dionysus has a power called “Bacchanalia,” but its function is to give extra hitpoints to all units, allowing them to take more damage before dying. Apollo’s god power, “underworld passage”, allows the player to create a portal between two parts of the map: a spectacularly ill-suited function considering his lack of chthonic associations. As for Aphrodite, she possesses the god power of turning attackers into pigs (conflating her with Circe), improves the speed at which the player gains resources, and allows the player to deploy the Nemean Lion as an attacking unit. The game mechanics contain no model of sexual attraction or fertility, so there is no mechanical correspondence for her central function; 20

Exact numbers taken from the Age of Mythology wiki resource at , retrieved 19:15 gmt, February 17, 2014.

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the most we can say is that Aphrodite’s skills are less combat-oriented than those of most of the other gods. This method of associating mythological characters with different types of game-play advantage is by no means unique to Age of Mythology. There were other mythologically-based real-time strategy games, less richly developed and well received but with many structural similarities, including Ancient Conquest (Re:Action Entertainment, 1999), Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus (Interplay Entertainment, 2000), and The Battle for Troy (ValuSoft, 2004). The premise of Invictus is that the protagonist has been chosen as a champion in a grudge match between Athena and Poseidon, trying to demonstrate that it is possible for another mortal to be as successful as Odysseus. The protagonist is then allowed to select companions from a list of mythological heroes, including Achilles, Arachne, Atalanta, Cadmus, Electra, Hercules, Hippolyta, Icarus, Orion, and Perseus. As with Age of Mythology, these choices affect the player’s battle abilities from then on. Arachne is able to transform into a giant battle spider, while Atalanta confers speed bonuses to her associated units and Electra is given an abstractly vengeful personality.21 Again we see these characters’ iconography filtered for application to the mechanics of combat, often at the expense of deeper themes in their stories. The fall of Icarus is the crux of his story, yet in Invictus he flies easily and without trouble: that Icarus has wings is the mechanically defining fact about him, because it permits him a unique relationship to the terrain. Golden apples appear in the game, but are severed from their association with Atalanta and are now simply objects that can be used to heal combat units. One game scenario involves finding Pandora’s Box, which will then free several very hostile combat units if the player is foolish enough to open it:22 the result is a nasty boss fight, not the unleashing of general evil onto the world. In all of these cases, the game designers have drawn selectively from the source material to invent a structured scheme of gods (or gods and heroes) based around contrasts between the gods’ abilities and scope of action. Divine aspects that cannot be fitted to this structure have been recast or discarded. In this regard the game designer’s pantheon resembles the pantheon construction imagined by certain scholars of Greek religion: 21

22

I would speculate that this roster of protagonists was designed with gender balance in mind, which would explain the presence of a number of women who do not have any combat function at all in their original stories. However, I have been unable to find public statements to that effect. Fuller information about the unit abilities and game-play possibilities, including some information used for this article, can be found at as of 21:05 gmt, February 22, 2014.

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[The] Greeks’ polytheistic system was a rigorously logical ensemble, designed for the purpose of classifying divine capacities and powers, and fitted very tightly into the cities’ modus operandi.23 While it may be an error to speak of Greek polytheism having been “designed” in any meaningful sense, the pantheon of Age of Mythology was designed, and if we don’t have direct access to the designers’ reasons behind each choice, nonetheless they are working within a culture of design to which we do have access. In that culture, for example, the duality often recognized by structuralists – the opposition between god and man, between edible and inedible, between home and outside – gives way to trinities or sometimes larger groups, as game designers (for reasons we’re about to see) tend to prefer three-fold over binary choices. When designing a set of units for balance, designers use several approaches to prevent the emergence of dominant strategies. One is to create units that are contingently useful: for instance, cavalry units that are devastating in scenarios featuring flat plains, but useless in mountainous scenarios; or infantry troops that can be very powerful, but only when accompanied by an expensive field marshal unit. Contingencies become more interesting as they become more responsive to the current state of play: a system that contains only infantry and naval units, each useful on exactly one type of terrain, is less interesting than a system in which, say, one unit was more specialized and another more generally applicable. Systems of many more than two elements are usually required. Another design strategy is to create an intransitive relationship between units. The archetypal intransitive relationship is the relationship between rock, paper, and scissors: each defeats and is defeated by one other element of the set, so that no element is strictly better than any other and no dominant strategy emerges. Establishing intransitivity, however, requires a set of at least three elements, though one can design larger sets that maintain intransitive relationships, such as the five-member expansion set rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock.24 23 24

Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, Trans. Paul Cartledge. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 185. This game variant was designed by Sam Kass and Karen Bryla to reduce the frequency of ties relative to rock-paper-scissors. In the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock variant, each of the five entities defeats two others (lizard poisons Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, etc.) and is defeated by the remaining two. This system maintains intransitivity over a larger group than the original three. The full rule set is documented at as of 11:52 gmt, February 27, 2014.

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A more extreme version of this is the idea of orthogonal unit differentiation, introduced by Harvey Smith. Smith argues that each unit must be unlike the other units in some new dimension, rather than better or worse along an existing dimension. Each kind of unit should have abilities that no other unit has. Otherwise, some units will be strictly weaker than others and will not be worth including except as pieces to be upgraded later.25 Implementing this idea can be a challenge, however. Each new unit capability will require additional coding, testing, and balancing, not to mention artwork and animation to represent the results to the player. In practice, designers of strategy games rarely pursue this goal of total orthogonality, though there are a few genres, such as tower defense,26 in which the scope of action is simple enough and there are few enough unit types that orthogonality can be the norm. The powers related to various gods in Age of Mythology demonstrate all of these principles. Special “god powers,” such as the ability to create pestilences or lightning storms, are orthogonal in the sense described above. The quantitative bonuses, such as the ability to enhance cavalry ability, are contingently valuable. Finally, specific units that the gods are able to summon forth participate in intransitive relationships: monsters are typically dangerous against ordinary units, ordinary units against heroes, and heroes against monsters, with additional nuances governing which of two monsters will prevail in head-on combat. With these understandings, we can read the choices in Age of Mythology as internally consistent even where they deviate from our initial expectations based on the myth in question. The choice of gods is presented to the player in four sets of three, and we can cluster their functionality more or less as follows: 1:

Zeus (infantry, faster accumulation of favor), Poseidon (cavalry, naval heroes, and defense of structures), Hades (archery and attacks from a distance; defense of soldier units)

25

“Orthogonality” is a frequently-used term in the aesthetics of designing computer programs. This terminology was originally introduced in Harvey Smith’s 2003 lecture “Orthogonal Unit Differentiation” at the Game Developer’s Conference. See also the further discussion in Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (Berkley, CA: New Riders, 2009) 331. There it is part of an entire chapter Adams devotes to avoiding dominant strategies. Tower defense games are a subset of real-time strategy games in which the player’s challenge is to lay out a maze of defensive units. Computer-driven attackers then pass through the maze and attempt to survive the player’s defenses. Typically the player has a palette of orthogonally different tower units to place: units that pierce armor, that chain to hit more than one victim, that poison the victims so that they continue to take damage after the initial strike, and so on.

26

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2:

Hermes (cavalry, movement speed, ability to see distant parts of the map); Athena (defensive strength for infantry); Ares (offensive strength for infantry and archers) Dionysus (offense and defense bonuses across all units but especially cavalry); Apollo (archery counterattack, “oracular” improved visibility, healing); Aphrodite (improved economy) Hera (increased melee offense); Hephaestus (armor, improved defense); Artemis (improved archery offense).

3: 4:

The first tier or “major” gods most cleanly divide the world into parts, infantry vs. cavalry vs. archers: these are the most prevalent categories of combat unit. The second tier of gods represents different approaches to the domain of warfare. Where classicists might be inclined to identify a productive distinction between Ares’ brute-force warfare and Athena’s strategy and technê, Age of Mythology instead contrasts strong offense with strong defense, and adds a third category emphasizing tactical flexibility, represented by Hermes. In the third tier, we might identify three approaches to managing a unit economy: Dionysus allows the player to strengthen the units he has, Apollo to conserve and protect units, Aphrodite to generate resources to replace units more quickly. Apollo’s mythologically incongruous “underworld portal” ability is consistent with other aspects of the god because it supports the rapid rescue or replacement of units in the wrong part of the map. Finally, the fourth tier of gods – unlocked only at the end of the game – provide devastating, high-end special effects. As we move up through the tiers, the defining characteristics of these gods become more complex, correlating with sophisticated approaches to the mechanics of Age of Mythology – just as the player who reaches these choice points will have mastered more of the nuances of play. Nonetheless, we can usually also identify at least some point of contact between the god’s ultimate game-world manifestation and his original: Apollo’s support function arising, perhaps, from Apollo as healer; Hera’s devastating attacks from the stories of her wrath; Athena’s defensive function from the symbol of the aegis. Though our primary examples have been real-time strategy games with a strong combat emphasis, we can find similar approaches to game designer pantheons in games that permit other types of interaction. In the role-playing game27 Rise of the Argonauts, the protagonist Jason is consistently presented 27

“Role-playing game” refers to a game in which the player assumes the role of a single character and guides him through a series of adventures, often with the opportunity to upgrade that character’s skills and also perhaps make narratively important decisions about his story. In contrast with the real-time strategy games Age of Mythology and Invictus in which

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with options in which he can choose to align himself with Ares, Hermes, Apollo, or Athena. Not only do the gods each have associated combat behavior, but when confronted with dialogue, the player is able to make Jason say one of four things; choosing the dialogue corresponding to a particular god earns Jason favor points with that deity that can later be traded for skill upgrades. A designer explains the concepts behind two of the divine characterizations: Ares, the god of war and the mace, is suited to throwing himself into battle with no regard for his own life. By dedicating deeds to Ares, Jason will not only become more brutal with the mace, but also more aggressive in dialogue choices with other characters. Following his wife’s assassination, Jason is viewed as a weak King unable to protect those around him, so he will need to prove his toughness with the help of Ares’ powers. Hermes, the god of swiftness, will reward Jason with increased quickness and agility in battle. His weapon of choice is the sword, so dedicating deeds to Hermes will provide players with quicker and faster-paced combat. He is also the god of cunning, and is very manipulative, so Jason can win back the hearts and minds of his fellow Iolcans by gaining an intellectual edge over them.28 The designer’s explanation of the gods’ functionality mixes combat features (such as the ability to use particular weapons more effectively) with narrative approaches and outcomes taking a forceful or a subtle approach to the game’s interpersonal dilemmas. What we have seen in this set of examples is the methodical application of game design principles to game mechanics in order to produce a satisfyingly balanced experience. The fiction may prompt specific elements of game-play (such as the introduction of a Cyclops unit or a Medusa who can turn people to stone with a stare), but at no point are the game-play advantages of playability and fun sacrificed in favor of a fictional direction. Game designers systematically elaborate both the mechanics and the fictions that label those mechanics, distinguishing elements so that each element possesses some advantages and some disadvantages relative to the others; typically placing

28

almost all player activity involves directing many combat units from above, Rise of the Argonauts combines a variety of different play activities, from one-on-one combat to exploration and dialogue. Nonetheless, all three games incorporate the idea of divine favor that can be accumulated and then spent on upgrades to play abilities. From a pre-release article on the game’s features. , retrieved 14:18 gmt February 27, 2014.

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three (or sometimes more) elements in opposition; and preferring iconography that relates to mechanically active concepts. In combat games, mechanically active concepts include things like ability to deal damage, ability to withstand damage, the total amount of damage that can be taken before destruction, range or distance at which damage can be dealt, number of opponents who can be damaged at once, and the ability to change position. In games with more emphasis on role-playing and dialogue, mechanically active concepts might include the ability to deceive, threaten, bribe, or seduce.

Mechanic Out of Fiction: Orpheus and Midas

Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back (2009) is a 2D platformer29 that incorporates the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into both its rules and the fictional trappings such as graphics. The trope of the woman sought (but not always successfully recovered) is tightly connected with the history of the 2D platformer genre. Princess Peach is the heroine in Super Mario Bros and its sequels, typically portrayed as the protagonist Mario’s love interest, though she is kidnapped repeatedly by the series villain Bowser in order to allow her to function as a trophy again in later games. In the original game, Mario finishes some early levels and a boss monster successfully only to be told, “Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!” – and this pattern of reaching castles that turn out not to be the final castle repeats several times before the end of the game. So deeply is the princess-rescue trope embedded in the genre that Jonathan Blow’s genreaware platformer Braid (2008) culminates in a level in which the player’s actions to rescue the heroine are recast as the deranged pursuit of a stalker. Cavanagh has also mentioned30 being influenced by The Battle of Olympus (Imagineer, 1988), which cast the protagonist as Orpheus and presented a series of battles against various mythological monsters before Orpheus succeeds in rescuing his true love, there named Helene. 29

30

“Platformer” in this context refers to a game in which the player’s activity primarily involves moving, climbing, and jumping across a predesigned terrain, potentially while dodging enemies. Frequently this involves leaping onto platforms suspended above the game’s ground baseline. A 2D platformer is one in which only two dimensions of space are presented: Donkey Kong (1981) is a classic arcade example, and Super Mario Bros. (1985) is a well-known representative of the genre. A 3D platformer models a space that has depth as well as breadth, such as the games in the Tomb Raider series originating in 1996. Terry Cavanagh, personal correspondence, March 6, 2010.

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In Don’t Look Back, the small figure of Orpheus begins at the left side of the screen mourning over a tombstone, then moves to the right to enter the Underworld. Armed with a gun and able to leap moderate distances, he faces perils such as spiky pits, falling stalactites, snakes, and bats, as well as Cerberus and other “boss” monsters that can only be killed by exploiting a weakness. (Cerberus, for instance, is vulnerable only when shot in the tail, so that the player must repeatedly leap over him, turn, and shoot before the monster is able to reverse its own direction.) Crossing any given screen requires a combination of good timing and strategy, since the player may have to select the safest path across the various pits and platforms and then execute the journey without encountering any of the moving threats. When Orpheus does arrive at his destination, he must cross several screens of blank space to reach a companion, a ghost-like figure that begins to trail behind him. This figure of Eurydice introduces a new mechanic to game play. She is impervious to the monsters and obstacles that endanger the protagonist, but she will dissolve if the protagonist’s figure ever turns back to face her. The player must now play through another sequence of screens, this time moving from right to left, and now challenged by the fact that otherwise straightforward screens require finesse or strategy to cross without reversing direction. In fact, it is very likely that he will sometimes go too far to the left and (for instance) miss a rope he was supposed to climb or platform he was supposed to leap onto. The only thing he can do next – since the screen is now impossible to complete – is to turn back and cause Eurydice to vanish. The meaning of Orpheus’ destructive glance is changed: where in the source texts, the reader might regard this action as a tragic sign of Orpheus’ human passion and fallibility or (less generously) as the mark of an undisciplined or stupid character, in Don’t Look Back the player is forced into the position of enacting that moment himself and in full knowledge of its results. Because the game is forgiving, however, the act of destroying Eurydice triggers the current screen to reset itself – just as if the protagonist himself had died. Thus the player is able to experience some number of failures and eventually success within a single narrative arc. Don’t Look Back does not offer any fictive explanation for why the player is given an infinite number of chances to succeed, relying on the convention of the platformer genre that the protagonist may have multiple (or even infinite) “lives.” Cavanagh’s description of his own process makes it clear that the fictional and mechanical aspects of Don’t Look Back built on one another: I didn’t really approach it from a perspective of looking for a classical story to attach to this gameplay mechanic; it was that I recognised that

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my action-game-with-a-rescue-twist idea was basically already Orpheus and Eurydice, and that I should run with that… The forward looking mechanic emerged completely from the idea to base the game off the Orpheus myth, and was never part of the initial game concept. The game’s main success for me is that it adapts this myth in such a way that’s consistent with a traditional platform shooter, where the gameplay is literally retelling the myth – so the control restrictions in the second part of the game weren’t really a primary concern for me at first … I didn’t worry at all about deviating from the details of the original myth – my real concern was Eurydice, as far as I was concerned, nothing else was really important to the way I wanted to tell the story… I didn’t want to make things too obvious; the game is designed to at first appear to be a traditional shooter, and if I’d, say, implemented the boatman, or something along those lines, it would have spoiled things a bit. It was very important to me that the Orpheus connection wouldn’t be apparent until you actually met Eurydice. I did think about [avoiding the use of weapons], though – it certainly would have been possible to design an interesting game that at the very least didn’t use a gun (the second part of the game doesn’t use it). I just liked the idea of gameplay-as-fantasy enough to want to conform to something more traditional for this game.31 The game ends when the player passes out of the underground cavern area again and returns to the open air, where the rain is still falling. Eurydice returns with him until he reaches the grave site that was the first scene, but at this point the player sees that an avatar is still standing beside the tombstone, in the same pose that began the game. The game holds on this image for a moment – the grieving original avatar, the pair of Orpheus and Eurydice avatars who have just returned from Hades – before both of the pair dissipate into thin air. This final revelation recasts the video game play – together with the sensation of agency, the idea that the player can alter the outcome of a situation – as the fantasy of a grief-stricken lover. However successfully the player may negotiate the territory of Don’t Look Back, he can never procure a happy ending for the protagonist. Midas (Harry Lee, Jarrel Seah and Sam TC Wong; Wanderlands, 2011) is another 2D platformer that uses mythological features to inform its mechanics. In this case, the player character is the eponymous king, and he has to 31

Terry Cavanagh, personal correspondence, March 6, 2010.

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t­raverse platforms made up of individual blocks. Each block he touches – whether he steps on it, approaches it from the side, or jumps to touch it with his head – is transformed into gold. Gold blocks behave differently from others, falling to the ground if there is space beneath them. On each level there is also at least one blue block representing water: if Midas can reach this block, he is cured of the golden touch. Finally, each level contains a female figure. Approaching her is the victory condition for the level, but if Midas gets to her before he has touched the blue block, he will turn her to gold and have to start the level over. The series of levels culminates in an unwinnable level that is displayed over the game’s credits; in the final level, the female character is already gold as soon as the level begins. Familiarity with the myth might suggest that the female figure is meant to be Midas’ daughter, but the text accompanying the game levels might imply that their relationship is romantic instead. The following lines appear between levels of the game: She waits for me every day. This is the price of gold: a heavy heart. I step in the same river again and again… just so I can touch her hand. I am a prisoner to Pactolus. But I must have her! My burden only grows. My world collapses. And she feels so distant. I live on borrowed time. Is she still waiting? Or is love just fool’s gold? The mentions of “borrowed time” and the world “collapsing” are references to the way the gold blocks threaten to fall away from Midas’ feet on the associated levels, forcing him to move quickly or die. The final level recapitulates the theme of the text even more directly, as the layout of platforms here is shaped like a heart (where the female figure stands) next to a question mark (where the blue blocks of Pactolus may be found). Despite superficial resemblances to Don’t Look Back – the platformer mechanic, the forced unhappy ending, the use of a female character as both trophy and vulnerability – Midas offers a significantly different play experience. It less a game about reflexes and timing, and more a set of puzzles: in each level the player must work out which bricks need to be turned into gold

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(and which must not be turned) to plot a successful progression through the space. At a fictive level there is a difference as well. In Don’t Look Back Orpheus loses Eurydice over and over, but in Midas the protagonist repeatedly makes successful contact with his female goal, only once again to revert to the golden touch and to lose her in the end.32 Then, too, Midas is telling a story that both relies on the mythological original to make sense, and is distinct from that original. It was initially developed as part of a game jam33 whose theme was “Alone,” and the new elements redirect our attention to the idea of loneliness and solitude. Midas the game implies that the lost and regained woman is a romantic interest rather than a daughter; that Midas’ “golden touch” is a persistent problem that cannot be shed with one single visit to Pactolus; and that ultimately the distance between Midas and his beloved is unbridgeable because of his flaws. The line “I step in the same river again and again” may also be an inversion the famous line attributed to Heracleitus:34 by disagreeing with Heracleitus’ statement about the changeability of the universe, the game character of Midas is asserting his own tragic incapacity for change. The love of gold is a persistent ambition that remains forever a part of Midas’ personality, sometimes temporarily set aside (and only for the sake of the woman he loves) but never entirely overcome. Meanwhile, Midas cannot be sure that his beloved is patient enough to endure in the face of his personality, or that the love he seeks with her is even a thing of genuine value. If love is just “fool’s gold,” it is worth even less than the material gold he is able to produce every day. Midas and Don’t Look Back draw partly from a tradition of what are known as art games: pieces intended to transcend a pure entertainment function in order to communicate some truth about the human condition, often in a brief  and poetic format. In Midas, the fiction is not placed at the service of the mechanics (as in Age of Mythology) nor the mechanics at the service of the fiction (as in Ulysses and the Golden Fleece). Rather, both mechanic and fiction support an intended player experience of a particular kind of effort, frustration, and disillusionment. The old, well-known mechanic of jumping from 32

33

34

A complete video of game play can be found at as of 15:12 GMT, February 15, 2014. Information about levels the author was unable to solve is taken from this video. A game jam is an organized session in which small groups of developers work for a short period of time typically between 24 and 72 hours to put together a small game or prototype. In the case of Midas, this was Ludum Dare 22; details of the jam and the full list of entrants can be seen at . ‘δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.’ Quoted in Plato, Cratylus 402a.

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platform to platform makes the game-play easy to pick up, while the myth provides an immediate recognition and comprehension of the protagonist’s situation. The game then brings effects from the fiction into the game-play and vice versa: the golden touch mechanic is added to the platforming challenge; words about repetition and inability to change are added to the story, justifying the repetitive level design. Just as plainly, Midas and Don’t Look Back belong to a very different creative tradition than Age of Mythology or Invictus or even Rise of the Argonauts. Far from seeking to provide balance for the player, they deny the player the happy ending and use game imbalance to produce a particular aesthetic experience. A number of earlier and contemporary games derive their emotional power from thwarting the player’s expectation of being able to earn a positive outcome for the game’s story. Infidel (Mike Berlyn, Infocom, 1983) is an early adventure game in which the protagonist is a greedy archaeologist plundering a pyramid; when the player reaches the end of the game, by disabling many traps and overcoming many challenges, the protagonist nonetheless dies in that location, punished for his selfishness and lack of respect. Later games work even more heavily with the idea of futility and in contexts where the player is more likely to be rooting for the protagonist. Adam Cadre’s text adventure Photopia (1998) frames the story of a teenage girl’s death in such a way that the player might expect to be able to prevent that outcome, but in fact cannot.35 Stephen Lavelle’s Home (2009) presents a simulation of life in a retirement home in which the game’s challenges become less and less possible to meet as the player avatar degenerates. In Shadow of the Colossus (2005), in a storyline reminiscent of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, the hero Wander sets out to perform a series of quests in order to restore his dead lover Mono, but in the end game discovers that he cannot approach the resurrected Mono. No matter how he tries, he will never be able to overcome the constraints of the game’s physics and get close to her. He must ultimately give up and allow his protagonist to die without experiencing the reunion for which he has fought. Nick Fortugno describes the end of the game thus: Embedded in this scene of futile interactivity is the core theme of the entire game. Wander is a tragic hero, motivated by single-minded dedication, recklessness, and grief to try to resurrect his dead love … By 35

Cavanagh was certainly familiar with Photopia and with Cadre’s work in general; in fact he names Cadre as his favorite developer in one interview. (, retrieved 19:01 GMT, February 27, 2014.).

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c­ onstructing interactive scenes where the player is led to believe that he can succeed when the goal is in fact mechanically impossible, the game uses multiple moments of futile interaction to give the tragedy its emotional power.36 Pippin Barr’s art game Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment (2011) embraces this idea of mechanical connection and futility by inviting the player to take on the roles of Sisyphus, Tantalus, a Danaid, Prometheus, and (incongruously but amusingly) Zeno. Each of the small scenes requires the player to tap the G and H keys in order to accomplish a task, such as running the next half of the racecourse as Zeno, or trying to push the boulder up the hill as Sisyphus. These mini-games are deliberately unsatisfying, requiring unrewarding keyboard tapping with no expectation of success. Once the player has selected a level, there is no mechanism to end it: the level cannot be won and no QUIT or RETURN TO MENU button is provided. The player can only access other parts of the game by reloading it in the browser window and selecting another level. As with the endgame of Shadow of the Colossus, the game ends when the player decides to give up. One game reviewer read this as a commentary on the nature of Greek thought: Dr Barr is a specialist in ‘video game values’, and his newest offering provides five different scenarios for its players to explore. All of these hinge on punishment, and all of them reveal that, when it comes to the Greeks, punishment was often thematically preoccupied with a single idea: futility. Whether you’re Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down again, or Prometheus bound to a mountain, pecked by an eagle, and cursed with – this still strikes me as kind of strange – a regenerating liver, the punch line comes quickly, and is then endlessly repeated for comic effect.37 The game in and of itself is not difficult to complete – that is, it doesn’t take long to play each minigame long enough to understand its gist and then to quit – and the overall effect is closer to a joke than to a short story or even a poem. 36 37

Nick Fortugno, “Losing your grip: futility and dramatic necessity in Shadow of the Colossus,” in Drew Davidson, ed., Well Played 1.0. (Pittsburgh, PA: etc Press, 2009) 75–83. Chris Donlan, “The Friday Game: Let’s Play – Ancient Greek Punishment!”, Edge Online. , Jan 13 2012. Retrieved 18:12 gmt, February 15, 2014.

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Barr’s oeuvre38 includes such games as Kicker, in which the protagonist plays the kicker in an American football game, and spends most of the game waiting around in boredom before having an opportunity to act; Art Game, in which the player’s performance at a simple arcade game is recorded and displayed as an artwork to other characters, who critique it; and The Artist is Present, a game version of the experience of attending the performance art piece of the same name by Marina Abramovic. The Artist is Present includes long real-time waits to enter the exhibit, but, of course, does not feature the real presence of Abramovic. Barr is interested in games that produce player experiences that are not necessarily identifiable as fun, but that might be of value for other reasons. The title “Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment” is also significant. Many gamers create “let’s play” videos, titled in the format “Let’s Play [some game].” These videos demonstrate the gamer playing the game and typically providing commentary at the same time. So it is important that Barr’s game is not simply titled “Ancient Greek Punishment.” As a “Let’s Play,” it presents itself as a game that is a commentary on, demonstration of, or walkthrough for, the challenge of receiving Greek-style punishments. It is also at the same time, and by means of the same mechanic, a commentary on the kind of vacuous engagement that certain modern games inspire, either because their mechanics are entirely trivial or because the only incentive they offer players is the pleasure of seeing an arbitrary score rise and rise. While we might question whether Age of Mythology is in any meaningful dialogue with its source material – whether the precise battle statistics of its Cyclops units have much to say about the Greeks or about ourselves – it is clear that Barr’s work does aspire to such a relationship.

Accidental Pedagogy: Children as Unready Consumers of the Familiar

As we’ve seen, the vast majority of video games on classical subjects are not marketed exclusively to children, and games directed at children constitute a very small percentage of games sold, despite the fact that roughly a third of game players are children or teenagers. Designers are choosing classical themes for reasons that do not necessarily have to do with the younger members of their audience. Several designers who have turned to classical subject matter

38

A more extensive list of Barr’s work can be found at as of 18:26 gmt, February 27, 2014.

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cite the familiarity of that subject matter as the reason to use it, with education a distant and sometimes surprising secondary concern: I expected virtually all players to recognise the Orpheus and Eurydice connection immediately – it’s one of the most well known myths from Greek mythology, but even if you’re not familiar with it in its original context, it’s a story that’s been retold and adapted countless times in many other works. I was surprised that I ended up introducing the story to so many people! – Terry Cavanagh on Don’t Look Back39 We looked at a number of mythologies in developing the game. The decision to go with Atlantis was based on several factors. Atlantis is fairly well known to people through extensive literature, and, of course, a recent Disney movie. There’s a cool mystery involved in where and when Atlantis existed and what happened to it…Regarding the second part of your question, our practice consistently has been to borrow the cool things from the historic record – or in this case, the mythology of Atlantis – that will make the best game…We’re trying to entertain people first. That’s critical. Once they’re having fun with our games, though, we think it’s very cool that they may learn something new. – Bruce Shelley on Age of Mythology’s Titan expansion40 This concern about accessibility, of the need to work with a fantasy that the player can immediately understand and desire to enter, is raised over and over by game designers. Here is a pithy, but far from unique, formulation of common game design advice: [Yu] suggested that between gameplay, theme and platform, it’s advisable to limit innovation to one of those three when making a new game.41 In the context of this quote, “platform” refers to the computer or console used to play, “gameplay” means the rules and mechanics, and “theme” refers to the same thing we have been referring to as the game’s fiction. In other words, Yu expresses the idea that it is best to draw on a fictional background that is already well understood by players unless all other aspects of the game are familiar. 39 40 41

Terry Cavanagh, personal correspondence, March 6, 2010. Allen Rausch, “Bruce Shelley Interview,” retrieved from 18:52 GMT February 22, 2014. Justin Hall, “A Story of GameLayers, Inc.: Making online social games 2007–2009,” published online and retrieved from at 23:05 GMT February 22, 2014.

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This advice speaks to considerations about marketing (it’s easier to sell what people already understand) and risk aversion (so much money is spent on developing a modern commercial game that it can waste tens or even hundreds of millions if a company pursues an unsuccessful strategy). But there is an additional consideration behind such advice, less economic than structural. Games require more instant comprehension from their audience than almost any other medium. It is possible to read a book or watch a film with only a partial understanding of what is happening, passively accepting additional information until the story begins to make sense. By contrast, most games require their players to begin interacting within the first few minutes of the experience. To interact meaningfully with a game, the player must know how to use at least some of the game’s controls, and must have a goal he is trying to accomplish. The tropes of a particular game genre may supply this information to experienced players – for instance, a frequent player of first-person shooters may easily guess which controls are likely to result in movement or shooting, and also that the aim of the game is to eliminate enemies while avoiding damage oneself. But the opening of a game is often the most difficult part to craft, because it must communicate so much to a player who has had so little time either to learn the game systems or to become emotionally invested. A fiction that can provide immediate, recognizable context and establish strong narrative stakes is a great help. This instinct for the simple, clear, and strong helps explain why certain popular fictions persist in game design ecologies long after they might seem to have become stale. There are a very large number of games about zombies, but more continue to be made, because the zombie situation conveys urgency, purpose, and a clear sense of the negative outcomes (kill or avoid the zombies, or you’ll become a zombie yourself!), but requires no more setup than the single image of a decayed and shambling corpse. As a game fiction, the zombie premise is highly efficient at creating legible mechanics and goals. Indeed, the power of a useful in-game fiction goes beyond the initial task of introducing the player to the game. As James Wallis writes, Intentionally or not, [Edward Gorey’s shuffled story The Helpless Doorknob] hits one of the four cornerstones that underlie any successful game or system that allows players to actively manipulate a story: a clear understanding, encapsulation, and communication of its genre.42

42

James Wallis, “Making Games that Make Stories,” in Pat Harrigan and Noah WardripFruin, eds., Second Person: Role-playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2007) 73.

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A game that clearly communicates genre is telling the player what kinds of things may be expected to happen in this world and this story. The meaning and possible uses of a shotgun are different in a game about zombies than in a game about romance; the player’s intuition about what actions fit the game’s story will help determine what the player tries to do – and even which objects in the world she even notices as potentially interesting. Classical mythology, then, is thematically familiar. On the other hand, so are superheroes, zombies, settings from popular movies and tv shows, and so on. However, unlike much other cultural material that might be familiar to players, ancient mythology is not dependent upon owned intellectual property. The creators of games do not have to pay the hefty licensing fees or submit their work for review and possible veto by the ip owners – two challenges that often come with the use of well-known ip. Another consideration for game designers working in a corporate context in the west is the relative safety of classical sources. Several designers have mentioned a strong interest in Asian, Native American, or African stories, but have said they hold back from using this material because they are afraid of appropriating someone else’s cultural heritage, or misrepresenting their source in a way that will offend players from those backgrounds.43 Stories from the Biblical tradition might also offend Judaeo-Christian players, especially if they treated the source material flippantly or altered details to accommodate game play.44 Classical source material, because it belongs to a historically privileged culture but is associated with very few currently practicing religious believers, presents fewer dangers. But what happens when children who are not familiar with these stories encounter them first or primarily through video games?

43

44

This observation is based largely on private conversations about design, but for a public discussion of the pitfalls here, consider Ben Esposito’s presentation on how he explored and then eventually removed Hopi imagery in his work Donut County . This presentation was delivered at the 2015 Game Developer’s Conference, and is summarized at as of 14:10 GMT, March 19, 2015. This is not to say that no video games have been created that approach the Bible as literal truth: see for instance Super 3D Noah’s Ark (Wisdom Tree, 1994), a modification built on an engine originally designed for first person shooters, in which the player must fling food at various animals aboard the ark in order to pacify them. Games taking a literal approach to the Bible have most often been created by Christian publishers for distribution to a religious audience and are not always sold through the same venues as other video games.

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Don’t Look Back and Midas were both made available to players on Kongregate,45 an ad-supported website where players can play games for free using their browsers. Kongregate games are not esrb or pegi-rated, but with its free entry, easy accessibility, and lack of parental controls, Kongregate attracts many younger players – roughly 50% of its users were under 18 according to one available estimate.46 The number of players is also large in absolute terms: the site lists how many players are currently logged in at any given moment, and this number is typically in the tens of thousands.47 As of February 22, 2014, Don’t Look Back had been played 1,240,096 times on Kongregate,48 and Midas 333,058.49 Kongregate allows site users to leave comments about games. Inevitably some of the commentary consists simply of users approving or disapproving of a particular game, but it is also common for players to leave one another hints about difficult levels or hard-to-solve puzzles. What we see in the case of both Midas and Don’t Look Back is that players treat the mythological backstory of the game as itself a puzzle to be solved and discussed. About Don’t Look Back, players left such remarks as these: “Just thought about the best post here. The story is Orpheus and Eurydike, the old version takes places in the antiquity; in this one you use a gun. This leads to my conclusion that the man you play is in our times and thinks of the old story of orpheus and how stupid it ended (Orpheus turned around and Eurydike died); and as he finally comes to the climax he hopes for a good ending and turns around, just to realize that his dream didnt come true. So maybe the game is about the death and our 45

The game is accessible at as of 14:41 GMT, February 15, 2014. 46 As of January 2011, website analysis source alexa.com gave an average age of 20 for kongregate.com users, with 12% of users falling into the age range of 3–12 and 38% in the age range of 13–17 – so that a full 50% of site users were not legally adults. Age demographics are no longer provided by Alexa without a pro account, but as of February 22, 2014 (), alexa.com ranked kongregate.com as the 915th most popular website in the United States, 757th in Great Britain, and 228th in Canada. 47 listed 62,934 players on 19:26 gmt, February 22, 2014; 48,546 on 15:14 GMT, February 26, 2014. 48 Retrieved from at 19:32 GMT, February 22, 2014. 49 Retrieved from at 19:32 GMT, February 22, 2014.

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helpnessless in front of it. Well anyway; loved it, great sound, hard and pixxels, simply awesome sad.” – lookcloserman, listed profile age 21 “its the myth of orpheus and eurydike!!!The story:Orpheus was a beautiful musician who loved a nymph called Eurydice. They married and were very happy.One day she trod on a deadly snake and died.He took his lyre and went to visit Hades the god of the underworld, to plead for her life.Orpheus played his lyre to charm Hades, and Hades relented and told him that Eurydice could follow him out of the underworld, but only if he did not look back and see her.Orpheus made his way carefully and slowly back,but then with only a tiny way to go he looked back.As he did so Eurydice faded, she was pulled back into the underworld…gone forever. Sad....” – Chilibrot, listed profile age 1550 And for Midas: What’s the meaning of this game? you have gold, but as soon as you get near a wife the gold goes away huh? – Trena99, no age listed in profile Oh, yes the story of King Midas, he invites a poor and homeless person to dinner. He then gets one wish . He wishes that everything he touches turns to gold, but he finds it a curse. He cant eat or sleep. His daughter hugs him before he can say no. He loves gold but loves his daughter more. He gets a chance to rid of the curse. He must bathe in the creek…after that the curse is gone and everything is back to normal. – GamerGuy75, listed profile age 13 Just recently I discussed the midas touch with my physics teacher (who also read mythology) and we came up with this as the first problem: the mass. Matter can neither be created or destroyed, so either the gold is basically painted. Otherwise it would have to shrink in size, or the air around it would be converted. So why doesn’t the air around him turn to gold? Anyway cool game. – wrothmonk, no age listed in profile.51 Explanatory and interpretive comments receive “up-votes” from other players, pushing them towards the top of the game’s comment stream. The handling of these comments suggests that understanding the mythological basis of the story is part of the process of game mastery, and is valued in similar ways, and 50 51

Retrieved from . Retrieved from at 19:37 GMT, February 22, 2014. These are only samples, as the Midas game has received many hundreds of comments.

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for similar reasons, as comments that provide hints towards a successful playthrough. The game’s designers may have expected the players to be immediately familiar with these stories, but for those who weren’t – often younger players – the surrounding community of play provides the necessary context. Older games were not able to provide this sort of mediation through social networks, but often relied on alternative methods to decipher the associated mythological material. The Age of Mythology Special Edition set, for instance, came with six mini-posters of major gods, a minotaur figurine, and a free copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology.52 The game also – just as significantly – has a very large online wiki to which players contribute not only game-play information but also brief précis about the mythological characters depicted. Even the early text adventures belonged to a context in which people explained games to one another. The expected play experience for Ulysses and the Golden Fleece is one in which the player devotes a long time (weeks or months) to resolving its challenges, while often having recourse to hints from outside the game proper. Sierra On-line invited phone calls from stuck players. There were also assorted gaming magazines that would publish hints for popular games, or accept write-in questions from players as a monthly column feature. It was considered acceptable, and part of the pace of contemporary gaming, for a player to become stuck, write or phone away for assistance, and only be able to proceed further after a lapse of some weeks. In that context, it is perhaps a little more comprehensible to imagine that players might turn to mythology books for external guidance in their game. The fictive mythological layer is thus simultaneously universal – thought to appeal to a broad audience and to be familiar to many people – and esoteric, requiring detailed explanations that must be provided either within or alongside the game. That pattern is not unique to games that deal with classical material, but can also be found in other games that draw on a large textual tradition. In the games Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady, 2009) and its sequels, featuring dc Comics’ superhero, the player can unlock snippets of information about secondary characters as a reward for gameplay accomplishments. The game’s creators assume that the player is familiar enough with the character of Batman to be attracted to buying such a game, but that the biographies of Batman’s assorted opponents and companions will be known only to avid readers of the comic books. Explanations planted by the designers are only the beginning of the available interpretive material, because video games exist, are played and inter52

Product description retrieved from at 19:58 GMT, February 22, 2014.

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preted, in community – a point often missed by pundits when they describe games as a socially isolating pastime. As the survey data showed above, children often play games alongside their parents, but that is only one axis of connection. The interactivity of the medium means that players are especially motivated to compare the narratives they experienced, because the ending they saw might not be the one another player saw. Meanwhile, the challenge of video games means that players rely on others to teach, to offer hints, or to demonstrate outright (for instance through Let’s Play videos) game levels or modes that the less-skilled players are unable to reach. The experience of a single player with a single game is thus only a fragment of the total experience possible with a game, and players turn to one another for guidance through this space. Game designer Raph Koster has argued that the pleasure of games is the pleasure of mastery, of learning and understanding patterns.53 Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek proposed at least eight types of intended aesthetic experience for the player, and state that they do not consider this to be a complete list of the possibilities: Sensation: Game as sense-pleasure Fantasy: Game as make-believe Narrative: Game as drama Challenge: Game as obstacle course Fellowship: Game as social framework Discovery: Game as uncharted territory Expression: Game as self-discovery Submission: Game as pastime54 If Koster’s analysis is accurate, then at least for some players, mastery of a game’s lore, its fictional underpinnings, is part of the mastery of the whole; in the terms of Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek, games provide an enterable fantasy world, a make-believe space that can be learned and explored. From the evidence on Kongregate, and to a lesser extent from personal anecdotes about young players’ encounters with Ulysses and the Golden Fleece and similar games, we can see that at least some children experience the mythological content of games as part of a puzzle to be worked out. 53 54

Raph Koster, A Theory of Fun For Game Design, (O’Reilly Media, 2013). Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek, “mda: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research,” (2001). Retrieved from as of 16:30 GMT, March 5, 2014.

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Young people’s literacy when it comes to games is often sophisticated, in that they are familiar with many types of mechanic, readily understand that concepts can be communicated through both fiction and rules, and appreciate that fictive material may be adapted for game purposes. Scholars of classical reception who look at the medium of games must be willing to interrogate the mechanics equally thoughtfully if they are to understand how these works have been written and how they are likely to be read.

Games Cited

Age of Empires, Microsoft Studios, 1997. Age of Mythology, Microsoft Game Studios, 2002. Age of Mythology: The Titans, Microsoft Game Studios, 2003. Art Game, Pippin Barr, 2013. The Artist is Present, Pippin Barr, 2011. Athena, Imagine Studios, 1986. Batman: Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady, 2009. The Battle for Troy, ValuSoft, 2004. Braid, Jonathan Blow, 2008. Depression Quest, Zoe Quinn, 2013. Disney’s Hades Challenge, Disney, 1998. Disney’s Hercules Action Game, Disney, 1997. Don’t Look Back, Terry Cavanagh, 2009. Gates of Troy, Slitherine Software, 2004. God of War, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2005. Hi Res Adventure #4: Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, Sierra On-Line, 1981. Home, Stephen Lavelle, 2009. Infidel, Infocom, 1983. Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus, Interplay Entertainment, 2000. Kicker, Pippin Barr, 2012. Kid Icarus, Nintendo, 1996. Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, Pippin Barr, 2011. LoveChess: The Greek Era, Beat Games, 2004. McDonald’s Video Game, Molleindustria, 2006. Midas, Harry Lee, Jarrel Seah and Sam TC Wong, Wanderlands, 2011. Minotaur China Shop, Blurst, 2009. Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief, Activision, 2010. Perseus and Andromeda, Channel 8 Software, 1983. Photopia, Adam Cadre, 1998.

138 Rise of the Argonauts, Liquid Entertainment, 2010. Shadow of the Colossus, Sony Computer Entertainment, 2005. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, KOEI Ltd, 2008. Super 3D Noah’s Ark, Wisdom Tree, 1994. Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey, Palladium Interactive, 1996. Wrath of the Gods, Luminaria, 1994. Zork, Infocom, 1977–9.

McMenomy

chapter 6

From Chiron to Foaly: The Centaur in Classical Mythology and Fantasy Literature1 Lisa Maurice The figure of the centaur is a well-known, yet ambiguous, character in classical mythology that, even in the ancient world, represented the union of human and animal in both a positive and negative light. These different traditions associated with centaurs have filtered through to the portrayal of centaurs in fantasy literature, where they feature regularly. In this paper I outline the figure of the centaur in classical Greek mythology, and then briefly consider its reception through the medieval period to modern juvenile fantasy literature in the writing of C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, Eoin Colfer, Rick Riordan, Diana Wynne Jones and Ellen Jensen Abbot, contextualizing these receptions within the framework of recent work in animal studies. 1

Centaurs in Classical Mythology

1.1 The Physical Appearance of the Centaur With the exception of Chiron, who is depicted wearing clothing, and with human legs with the hindquarters of a horse attached to them (See Figure 6.1),2 centaurs are usually depicted with the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse’s withers, and unclothed, although some early painted vases from Attica and Boeotia depict them as naked versions of the Chiron model. The physical difficulties of such a cross breed were not lost on the ancients. Lucretius, for example, stated that centaurs could not exist since humans and animals mature and develop at different rates.3 Galen, too, explains at length why centaurs were a physical impossibility.4 This did not prevent their continuing popularity, however, as the subject of art and literature throughout the GrecoRoman world. But how were these creatures portrayed, and what was their nature? In truth, the figure of the centaur, even in the ancient world, represented 1 I am very grateful to Brill’s anonymous reader for many helpful comments on this paper. 2 Musée du Louvre G3;ARV2, 11.53 no. 1, 1618; bad 200435. 3 Lucretius De Rerum Natura 5.878–91. 4 Galen de Usu Partium 3.1–3 (3.168–184 K=1.123–134 Helmreich).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_008

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Figure 6.1  Vase depicting a clothed Chiron, together with Achilles, sixth century bce. Photocredits: photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Hervé Lewandowski

the union of human and animal in a very ambivalent way, for two parallel traditions seem to have emerged, the first concerning one particular centaur, Chiron, and the second regarding the rest. 1.2 Chiron Chiron was markedly different to the rest of the tribe of centaurs, not only in character, but also in origin. Unlike the other centaurs, Chiron was immortal, a son of Chronos and the nymph Philyra. According to one version of the myth, Philyra turned herself into a mare in an attempt to escape Chronos, but was thwarted when he too turned himself into a stallion and fell upon her.5 An alternative account omits the rape motif and presents Philyra as a willing mate, explaining that the pair were in the act of procreating when Rhea, the wife of Chronos, appeared, and that Chronos transformed himself into a horse to escape his wife’s notice. According to both traditions, the result of this coupling between Kronos and Philyra was Chiron, a son who was half horse, half man.6 5 Sch. Ap. Rh. 1.554. 6 Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 8 – 9; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 1231–41 with Sch. Ap. Rh. Ibid.; Callimachus, Hymn 4 to Delos 104 ff; Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 138; Ovid, Metamorphoses 6. 126 ff and 7. 352 ff; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7. 197; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 48. 77 ff.

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The myth goes on to describe Philyra’s horror at giving birth to such a creature, resulting in her own abandonment of the child, and subsequent transformation into a linden tree. This child, Chiron, was therefore educated and cared for by Apollo and Artemis, from whom he learnt the skills of prophecy, music, gymnastics, medicine and hunting.7 With this expertise, he went on to become an unparalleled healer, prophet and astrologer, and thus the wise educator of heroes. In particular, he is credited with knowledge, and even the invention of medicine,8 going on to teach this aspect of his wisdom to Asclepius.9 The ultimate educator, his other pupils included Aristaeus,10 Ajax, Aeneas, Actaeon, Caeneus, Oileus, Phoenix, Peleus, Telamon, Perseus, Theseus, Achilles, Jason, Heracles and according to one late tradition, even Dionysus.11 Chiron is the only centaur to settle down, marry and produce a family. He lived on Mount Pelion, where he lived with his wife, the nymph Chariclo, who bore him three daughters and a son.12 Although he was immortal, Heracles arranged the exchange of Chiron’s immortality for the life of Prometheus in order to enable Chiron to die and Prometheus to be freed. Chiron was then honoured by being transformed into the constellation known to the Greeks as Centaurus. 1.3 The Race of Centaurs Chiron is as different from the other centaurs of Greek mythology as it is possible for two physically similar creations to be. In contrast to Chiron, the rest of the race of centaurs were not descended, not from Chronos, but from Ixion, one of the most evil villains of classical mythology. Amongst his crimes was the attempted rape of Hera after whom he lusted. It was not Hera herself however upon whom he leapt, but Nephele, meaning cloud, fashioned in the image of the queen of the gods. From this union was created either the first centaur, a monstrous cross breed, or Centaurus, a man who then mated with a mare to become the father of the centaur race. 7 Xen. Cyneg.1; Philostr. Her. 9, Icon. 2. 2; Pind. Pyth. 9. 65. 8 Aelian, On Animals 2. 18; Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 274; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7. 197. 9 Homer, Iliad 4. 215 ff; Pindar Pythian ode 3.1 ff, 43, 61; Nemean Ode 3. 52; PseudoApollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 118 – 122; Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 38; Ovid, Metamorphoses 2. 628 ff. 10 Pindar, Pind. Pyth. 9. 26 ff and Apollonius’ Argonautica (ii.522ff). 11 See A.F. von Pauly, Real-encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1890), “Chiron,” col. 3, pp. 2303–7. 12 Pinday, Pyth. 401–2; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.812–3; Pseudo-Hyginus, Astrono­ mica 2. 18; Ovid, Metamorphoses 2. 636.

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In keeping with their origins as a race founded by Ixion who repeatedly opposes the civilised union of marriage,13 centaurs in Greek mythology were portrayed as savage, sexually lascivious and dangerous. This is particularly clear in the most famous story featuring the Centaurs, namely the Centauromachy, the battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. This took place when the centaurs were invited to the wedding of Hippodamia and Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, himself the son of Ixion and therefore related to the centaurs themselves. Unused to wine, the centaurs attempted to rape the bride and other women there. Intoxication also features in the tales of one of Heracles’ brushes with the Centaurs. This involves Pholus, the only other civilised centaur in Greek mythology, whom Heracles visited during the course of his labours. When Heracles drank from a jar of Pholus’ wine, however, the other centaurs in the area smelled it and, crazily intoxicated, charged into Pholus’ cave and attacked Heracles, who killed most of them and drove the rest away.14 Heracles’ other encounter with a centaur, in this case Nessus, also demonstrates the barbaric nature of the tribe. Nessus lived by a river across which he acted as a ferryman, a service of which Heracles took advantage when he arrived there with his new bride, Deianeira. While carrying Deianeira across the river, Nessus attempted to rape her, causing Heracles to shoot him with one of his poisoned arrows. As Nessus was dying, he told Deianeira to collect his blood and semen, telling her that they were a powerful love potion. It was this liquid that later would kill Heracles.15 The picture of Nessus from this tale, as a bestial, violent, lustful creature, with the power to destroy even the greatest hero, reflects the savagery of the centaur as he is traditionally depicted in classical myth. All of these myths depict centaurs in a similar way; as lustful, uncontrolled, uncivilised beasts, who are easily corrupted by alcohol, and who know nothing of the customs of civilised behaviour such as xenia, and marriage. Living on the edges of society, they are more animal than human in many ways. In Virgil’s 13

Even before the episode with Nephele, Ixion had married Dia (probably another variant of Hera herself), a daughter of Deioneus (or Eioneus) and promised his father-in-law a valuable present. He then however reneged on this agreement, leading Deioneus to steal some of Ixion’s horses in retaliation. Ixion thus invited his father-in-law to a feast, but when the man arrived, Ixion pushed him into a bed of burning coals and wood, murdering him. See Pindar, Pyth. 2.21 with scholia. 14 According to tradition, it was at this point that they came into contact with Chiron who was then wounded by Heracles’ arrows. Pholus also accidentally wounded himself with one of the venomous arrows and died while Heracles was pursuing the centaurs. 15 Ovid, Metamorphoses 9.95–135.

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Aeneid, centaurs are found at the entrance to the underworld, along with a host of other monsters (Scylla, Briareus, the Lernean Hydra, the Chimaera, Gorgons, Harpies, and Geryon), placing them firmly in this category.16 As such they are at wild odds with Chiron, and presumably the two mythological strands originally developed from entirely independent sources. 2

The Centaur Between the Ancient World and the Modern

Classical mythology passed into the medieval period through the texts that continued to be read and studied, and through new works that employed mythology, albeit now often from a different perspective than in the earlier pagan times. Prominent among these latter is Dante’s Divina Commedia. In Dante’s Inferno, as in Virgil’s Aeneid, centaurs feature as fearsome creatures of the underworld, who appear alongside the Minotaur and Geryon, both also mixed species. Like the Minotaur, they are half man, half beast; but, unlike him, the human half, culminating in the head is uppermost. The centaurs in Dante’s Divine Comedy are the guardians of the first ring of the seventh circle, the river of blood which in which those who harmed others through violence are boiled at varying depths. Armed with bows and arrows, thousands of centaurs patrol the bank of the river, shooting arrows into any sinners who emerge higher out of the river than each is allowed (Inf. 12.73-5). The reason centaurs are chosen to guard those who are violent, apart from their own bestial and violent aspect, is surely the dichotomy between their lower, animalistic halves and their upper, rational, human halves, which symbolise physically the two elements within these humans who, with their violent behaviour, allowed the animal-like tendencies to conquer the human.17 Three centaurs who approach Dante and Virgil are mentioned by name; Pholus, whom Dante describes as "full of fury" (Inf. 12.72), Nessus, who maintains his role as ferryman and carries Dante across the river,18 and Chiron, the leader of the centaurs. Again Chiron seems different from the other centaurs, in that he is their leader and spokesman, and marked out as such by Virgil. Although Nessus calls out to Dante and Virgil as they enter the area, Virgil will 16 Virgil, Aeneid 6.285–88. 17 See Virginia Jewiss, “Monstrous Movements and Metaphors in Dante’s Divine Comedy,” in Keala Jane Jewell, ed., Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination (Detroit, mi: Wayne State University Press 2001) 182. 18 Here Nessus transports Dante without attacking his passenger, but the episode with Deinara is hinted at ironically in his description as “faithful escort.”

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speak only to Chiron, whom he describes as “Chiron the Great,” the figure who brought up Achilles (Inf. 12.70-1). Chiron is given more human mannerisms than the other centaurs, described as parting his beard with his arrow before talking, and his wisdom is stressed (Inf. 12.75-99).19 Yet he is still a centaur, and thus associated with the violence of those sinners whom he guards. Dante was of course not the only source in which centaurs are found in this period. Medieval commentaries and translations of the classical texts of writers such as Virgil and Ovid also appeared. Thus there is a commentary on most of the first half of Virgil’s Aeneid attributed to the twelfth century poet and philosopher Bernardus Silvestris.20 There are commentaries on Ovid, such as the one by Pedro Sánchez de Viana from the sixteenth century, and the one by George Sandys from the seventeenth century. The sixteenth century Dutch painter and poet, van Mander, included a translation of parts of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his Schilder-boeck, intended to aid artists seeking mythological rather than religious themes. Mythological handbooks also appeared; works such as the Albricus Philosophus, (also known as de deorum imaginibus libellus), Vederius’ imagines deorum (ca. 1550), Batman’s Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577) and Bacon’s de sapientia veterum (1609), while the fourteenth century Mythologiae by Natalis Comes, a ten volume work written in Latin, first published in Venice in 1551, became the standard source for mythology in later Renaissance Europe and beyond. Alexander Ross’ Mystagogus Poeticus, or The Muses Interpreter (1647) was a mythological dictionary that was widely used in the schoolroom and was reissued six times within three decades of its appearance.21 In all of these works, as in Dante, the centaur came to symbolise the duality of human nature.22 Thus the Silvestris commentary states on lines 285–286 of the sixth book of the Aeneid: We read in fables that Ixion decided to sleep with Juno and that she interposed a cloud, which, receiving Ixion’s seed, gave birth to the centaurs, who were part men and part animals….[They are] called centaurs because 19 20

21 22

See H. David Brumble, Classical Myths and Legends in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: A Dictionary of Allegorical Meanings (Westport, ct: Greenwood Press 1998) 72. This attribution is not uncontested however. See Julian Ward Jones, “The So-Called Silvestris Commentary on the Aeneid and Two Other Interpretations,” Speculum 64 (1989) 838–48. See Richard F. Hardin, “Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England,” Comparative Literature 24. 1 (Winter, 1972) 49. See Brumble (1998) 66–7.

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they are partly rational and partly vicious, that is they are human in the forepart and bestial in the hindpart23 Similarly van Mander explains, The man who obeys reason is meant by the bridled horse…People who lead superficial lives are represented as half man and half horse…The licentious man is meant by the centaurs, for (says one) not every man is a man, for he who gives himself to vice is a horse-man.24 Other writers also highlight this connection between the centaur and vice; in particular the centaurs’ horse elements are associated with lust and violence. Thus the Livre des Échecs Amoureux similarly states that the centaur is “composed of two different forms, i.e., half-human, insofar as he showed himself to be reasonable, and half-horse, insofar as he showed himself to be lustful and deceived by carnal delight, like an animal.”25 This association is in part because of their ancestry from the lustful Ixion. So Alexander Ross states, “Commonly as the parents are, such be the children; Ixion himself was given to leachery and so were the Centaurs, his children; for which cause they were said to be half horses, intimating their insatiable lust and proneness to Venery.”26 He also states that, “Every regenerate man is in a sort a centaur, to wit, a man in that part which is regenerate and a beast in his unregenerate part…Where things are not ruled by Laws, Order and Civility, but carried headlong into violence & force, we may say that there is a commonwealth of Centaurs.”27 Despite this association with vice, centaurs also continued to enchant. They were regarded as fantastic creatures, especially in light of the medieval attraction to exotic beasts, of which the centaur was believed to be one example. The bestiary, the illustrated compendium of animals, and birds, usually accompanied by a moral lesson, became hugely popular, especially during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and frequently featured centaurs.28 Indeed, as the taste for the exotic and the fantastic grew, centaurs, like other unusual 23 24 25 26 27 28

Earl G. Schreiber and Thomas E. Maresca, Commentary on the first six books of Virgil’s Aeneid by Bernardus Silverstris (Lincoln, ne: University of Nebraska Press, 1979). Uitbeelding der Figuren, 114v, translation from Brumble (1998) 66. Translation Joan Jones, (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1968) 522. Mystagogus Poeticus, 227. Ibid. 58. See e.g. Debra Hassig, ed., The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (London and ny: Routledge, 1999) 11–12.

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albeit less legendary animals, appeared in a range of media and genres. As Cuttler describes, “Centaurs often figured in medieval legends. They appeared in representations of Sagittarius in astrological scenes, on Romanesque cloister capitals, on bronze doors and, most frequently, in the calendars of books of hours.”29 From these sources, as well as through literature, the figure of the centaur continued to be recognised throughout different periods and places. 3

The Reception of the Centaur Figure in Juvenile Fantasy Literature

In the modern day, the centaur’s popularity has come through to the world of fantasy literature, as centaurs have featured in the writing of many of the mainstream fantasists. Turning now to some of the most central of these depictions, it will be clear that the centaurs of modern juvenile fiction are related to, but have come a long way from, their classical antecedents. 3.1 C.S. Lewis One of the writers who influenced modern fantasy literature most strongly was C.S. Lewis. His Narnia series uses a whole range of mythological elements from a mixture of traditions,30 and among other creatures, centaurs are found, often listed along with unicorns, satyrs and various animals such as eagles and deer. These centaurs are strong warriors, fighting in every major battle and war, always on the side of Aslan. Physically they are impressive, with human bodies from the abdomen up to the head, while the rest of their body is that of a horse. Their size is notable, with the equine part described as resembling a huge English farm horse, and the human part like giants. Thus Roonwit is described as “a great, golden bearded Centaur, with man’s sweat on his forehead and horse’s sweat on his chestnut flanks.”31 All centaurs, like Roonwit, seem to be bearded. Regarding the centaur, Glenstorm, for instance, we are told “His flanks were glossy chestnut and the beard that covered his broad chest was golden red,”32 while the two centaurs who take Jill and Eustace to Cair Paravel are

29 30 31 32

Charles D. Cuttler, “Exotics in Post-Medieval European Art: Giraffes and Centaurs,” Artibus et Historiae, 12. 23 (1991) 163. See David C. Downing, Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles (San Francisco, ca: Wiley 2008) 109–110. C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle, Chapter 2. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, Chapter 6.

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described as “one with a black and one with a golden beard flowing over their magnificent bare chests.”33 Even more than their physically imposing appearance, it is their nobility and esoteric knowledge that is most notable. Glenstorm and his sons are described as “the noblest creatures that Caspian had yet seen.”34 This is because they have enormous power but also because they are aloof and dignified; this distance is quite unnerving (“Most remarkable people, but I can’t say I feel quite at home with them yet,” declares Cor35), and inspiring of awe in men. In Prince Caspian, Trufflehunter declares that “No one ever laughed at a Centaur,”36 while The Silver Chair states again that “No one thinks a Centaur funny when he sees it.” This is because “They are solemn, majestic people….not easily made either merry or angry; but their anger is terrible as a tidal wave when it comes.” When they take Jill and Eustace on their backs, it is a very great honour, and they are “very polite in a grave, gracious, grown-up kind of way.”37 One of the reasons for this distance between mankind and centaurs is the deep and secret knowledge they possess. Glenstorm, for example, is “a prophet and a star-gazer,” and indeed we are told that “a good many” of the centaurs are prophets.38 Centaurs in general are “full of ancient wisdom which they learn from the stars,” and they have knowledge of “the properties of herbs and roots, the influences of the planets, the nine names of Aslan with their meanings, and things of that sort.” Presumably as a result of this knowledge, some are also healers; a centaur named Cloudbirth is described as being a famous healer.39 Despite this majestic nature, the centaurs are also presented amusingly as a result of the difficulties posed by the physical composition of man and horse in one body. Lewis writes: A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he attends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, Chapter 16. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, Chapter 6. C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, Chapter 14. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, Chapter 13. C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, Chapter 16. C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian, Chapter 6. C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, Chapter 16.

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a bag of sugar. That’s why it’s such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the week-end. A very serious thing indeed.40 While this portrayal has been criticised by Peter Dickinson for breaking the fantastic illusion, since he believed that Lewis “undermines his whole world because he is asking us to consider how a centaur actually functions,”41 even Dickinson admits that the piece has humour, surely one of the best features of successful fantasy, and perhaps here providing a much needed light relief in the context of Lewis’ such austere and noble centaurs. These centaurs then seem only distantly related to their classical counterparts, with more of Chiron in them than the wild, uncivilised beasts of ancient Greece. Yet unlike Chiron, they are not teachers and are aloof, stately and dignified, creatures on a higher plane altogether. This depiction seems to be original to C.S. Lewis, but has had a powerful influence on later fantasy writers, and in particular on perhaps the most successful author of this genre, J.K. Rowling. 3.2 J.K. Rowling Centaurs, like many other fantastical creatures, feature in the J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In her Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, she writes regarding centaurs: The centaur has a human head, torso, and arms joined to a horse’s body which may be any of several colours. Being intelligent and capable of speech, it should not strictly speaking be termed a beast, but by its own request it has been classified as such by the Ministry of Magic. The centaur is forest-dwelling. Centaurs are believed to have originated in Greece, though there are now centaur communities in many parts of Europe. Wizarding authorities in each of the countries where centaurs are found have allocated areas where the centaurs will not be troubled by Muggles; however, centaurs stand in little need of wizard protection, having their own means of hiding from humans. The ways of the centaur are shrouded in mystery. They are generally speaking as mistrustful of wizards as they are of Muggles and indeed seem to make little differentiation between us. They live in herds ranging

40 Ibid. 41 Peter Dickinson, “Fantasy: The Need for Realism,” Children’s Literature in Education 17.1 (1986) 40.

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in size from ten to fifty members. They are reputed to be well-versed in magical healing, divination, archery, and astronomy.42 These centaurs then, like those of C.S. Lewis, have a human upper body joined onto a horse’s back, and, again like those in the Narnian world, they are creatures who possess specialised knowledge of the stars, medicine and especially prophecy. It is for this reason that Firenze takes over as divination teacher at Hogwarts, and in his first lesson he explains this skill: “I know that you have learned the names of the planets and their moons in Astronomy,” said Firenze’s calm voice, “and that you have mapped the stars’ progress through the heavens. Centaurs have unravelled the mysteries of these movements over centuries. Our findings teach us that the future may be glimpsed in the sky above us…”43 In taking up this position as teacher, Firenze is very much at odds with other centaurs, and indeed has been portrayed as different in every centaur encounter before this appearance. It is Firenze who saves Harry from Quirrel/ Voldemort when the young hero encounters him drinking unicorn blood in the first book, chasing the figure away and allowing Harry to ride on his back, to the disgust of other centaurs, in particular Bane. Prefiguring his later role as teacher, he also gives hints to Harry of what is going on, and it is clear that even at this early stage, Firenze has thrown in his lot with the human world as the following speech indicates: “Do you not see that unicorn?” Firenze bellowed at Bane. “Do you not understand why it was killed? Or have the planets not let you in on that secret? I set myself against what is lurking in this forest, Bane, yes, with humans alongside me if I must.”44 This is particularly striking since Rowling’s centaurs, like those of Lewis, are usually aloof, choosing to avoid both Muggles and wizards alike. At the very 42

43 44

J.K. Rowling, Fantastic beasts and Where to Find Them (2001) 28. Quotes reproduced with kind permission of the author (Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them: Copyright © J.K. Rowling 2001). J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) Chapter 27 (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Copyright © J.K. Rowling 2003). J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (1997) Chapter 15 (Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone: Copyright © J.K. Rowling 1997).

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first encounter with centaurs in the series, Hagrid tells Harry and Hermione both of the wisdom of this race, and also of their lack of interest in sharing that knowledge with humans: “They’re deep, mind, centaurs…they know things…jus’ don’ let on much,” and grumbles, “Never…try an’ get a straight answer out of a centaur. Ruddy stargazers. Not interested in anythin’ closer’n the moon.” It is because of this detached world view that centaurs have chosen to be classed as beasts rather than humans, not because they consider themselves as animals but because they do not wish to be involved in worldly affairs whose outcome they have already seen in the stars, preferring to observe rather than to act.45 This is not mere preference but part of their ethical code, as Bane states: “We are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?” and continues “What is that to do with us? Centaurs are concerned with what has been foretold! It is not our business to run around like donkeys after stray humans in our forest!”46 This deep knowledge of the world makes them creatures that are dignified and garner respect. Centaurs have a xxxx classification by the ministry of magic, not as a result of aggression on their part but as indication of the great respect with which they should be treated.47 This separation from humans is a matter of pride for the centaurs; as Firenze tells his class, “Centaurs are not the servants or playthings of humans.” By agreeing to work for Dumbledore as teacher, Firenze indeed is banished from the herd, who see this humbling of the centaur in working for a man as “a betrayal of our kind.”48 As with Lewis’ centaurs, allowing a human to ride on his back is a demeaning act; as Bane accuses Firenze in the first book, ““Firenze!” Bane thundered. “What are you doing? You have a human on your back! Have you no shame? Are you a common mule?””49 Despite this awe-inspiring nature, there is also a rather more wild side to these creatures, as demonstrated by their bestial elements and by the fact that they live in forests, away from the trappings of civilisation. The introduction to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them states that: The centaurs’ habits are not humanlike; they live in the wild, refuse clothing, prefer to live apart from wizards and Muggles alike, and yet have intelligence equal to theirs. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 J.K. Rowling, Fantastic beasts and Where to Find Them (2001) 28. 48 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) Chapter 27. 49 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) Chapter 15.

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In the first book of the series, centaurs are described as ‘creatures’ like the rest of the animals in the Forbidden Forest, albeit the most intelligent of the creatures. They are also savage in attack. When they turn on Firenze for deciding to teach at the school, it is only Hagrid’s intervention that stops the centaur being kicked to death.50 After this interference, their anger towards Hagrid is roused, and it is only the fact that he is accompanied by children than prevents them attacking him. When Harry and Hermione lead Umbridge into the forest in order for her to be attacked by the centaur horde, it is the intervention of Grawp the giant that saves them from being attacked as well. Insulted by the idea that they have been used by humans in any way, they are on the verge of assaulting the pair: “We are not all like the traitor Firenze, human girl!” shouted the grey centaur, to more neighing roars of approval from his fellows. “Perhaps you thought us pretty talking horses? We are an ancient people who will not stand wizard invasions and insults! We do not recognize your laws, we do not acknowledge your superiority.”51 The nature of the centaurs’ attack is not made explicit, but after Umbridge is carried off by them, she is rescued by Dumbledore, and her condition afterwards is described as follows: Since she had returned to the castle she had not, as far as any of them knew, uttered a single word. Nobody really knew what was wrong with her, either. Her usually neat mousy hair was very untidy and there were still bits of twigs and leaves in it, but otherwise she seemed to be quite unscathed. “Madam Pomfrey says she’s just in shock,” whispered Hermione. “Sulking, more like,” said Ginny. “Yeah, she shows signs of life if you do this,” said Ron, and with his tongue he made soft clip clopping noises. Umbridge sat bolt upright, looking around wildly.52 These reactions sound very much like those of post-rape trauma,53 and indeed this scene spawned vigorous internet discussion and even fan fiction that 50 51 52 53

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) Chapter 30. Ibid. Chapter 33. Ibid. Chapter 38. See e.g. Cheryl A. Roberts, Coping with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Guide for Families (Jefferson, nc: McFarland 2003) 15–31.

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assumed that what had happened to Umbridge was a gang-rape by the massed centaurs.54 This is surely notable for if it is the case that the centaurs are conceived of raping the teacher, they are portrayed here as much closer to their traditional depictions in classical mythology as all-male uncivilised rapists and savage beasts. Similarly, the portrayal of Firenze as different from the rest, a wise teacher and prophet, parallels the other classical tradition of Chiron the centaur, although the name of Firenze, also familiar as the home of Dante, is surely inspired by echoes of the Inferno as well.55 It is surely no coincidence that this double portrayal is found in the work of Rowling, who had classical training, and whose works bear the constant reflection of this education. While Rowling’s depiction of these creatures owes a great deal to C.S. Lewis’ representation, the classical roots may be seen here far more clearly than they can in the Narnian centaurs. 3.3 Rick Riordan Rick Riordan is perhaps the writer in whom the classical roots can most clearly be seen. He features the centaur Chiron himself, who is the actual centaur trainer of heroes (or half-bloods as they are called) from Greek mythology, who is still carrying out his work in the twenty-first century by teaching the offspring of the gods in their centre, Camp Half-Blood. Physically he is portrayed typically (Figure 6.2 illustrates his appearance in the movie versions, which differs somewhat from the original descriptions in the books), and in the human world, he hides his true form by encasing his equine lower half in a wheelchair. Although he originally hides his identity from Percy, on the new hero’s arrival at Camp Half-Blood, Chiron reveals himself as a centaur and takes on his traditional role of educator and mentor of demi-gods. Riordan describes Percy’s first sighting of Chiron as a centaur as follows: And then he did rise from his wheelchair. But there was something odd about the way he did it. His blanket fell away from his legs, but the legs didn’t move. His waist kept getting longer, rising above his belt. At first, I thought he was wearing very long, white velvet underwear, but as he 54

See e.g. (accessed 24/09/13); (accessed 24/09/13); (accessed 24/09/13). 55 See Otta Wenskus, “Die so genannte Niedere Mythologie in Michael Hoffmans A  Midsummer Night’s Dream und in Fantasyverfilmungen,” in Stefan Neuhaus, ed., Literatur im Film (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008) 254–61.

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Figure 6.2 Screenshot of Chiron (Pierce Brosnan) and Percy (Logan Lerman) from Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (20th Century Fox 2010), showing a classic depiction of the centaur (albeit with differences from the description in the books).

kept rising out of the chair, taller than any man, I realized that the velvet underwear wasn’t underwear; it was the front of an animal, muscle and sinew under coarse white fur. And the wheelchair wasn’t a chair. It was some kind of container, an enormous box on wheels, and it must’ve been magic, because there’s no way it could’ve held all of him. A leg came out, long and knobby-kneed, with a huge polished hoof. Then another front leg, then hindquarters, and then the box was empty, nothing but a metal shell with a couple of fake human legs attached. I stared at the horse who had just sprung from the wheelchair: a huge white stallion. But where its neck should be was the upper body of my Latin teacher, smoothly grafted to the horse’s trunk. “What a relief,” the centaur said. “I’d been cooped up in there so long, my fetlocks had fallen asleep.”56 Certain elements are notable here. First of all the centaur’s size; then the bestial appearance of the equine elements – he has coarse white fur, his leg is long and knobby-kneed, he is a white stallion, but he is also the familiar Latin 56

Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2005), Chapter 5. From Percy Jackson & The Olympians, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. Copyright © 2005 by Rick Riordan. Reprinted by permission of Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group, llc. All rights reserved.

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teacher and the contrast between the two halves is comically underlined by Chiron’s own words, that allow the fact of his speaking to grate against the words as he refers to his own fetlocks as if they were legs. This attitude continues as Chiron gives Percy a tour around the camp: Once I got over the fact that my Latin teacher was a horse, we had a nice tour, though I was careful not to walk behind him. I’d done pooper-scooper patrol in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade a few times, and, I’m sorry, I did not trust Chiron’s back end the way I trusted his front.57 After these quips based on the animalistic elements of Chiron’s nature, a more serious perspective emerges as Chiron explains his identity and purpose in life. Admitting that he is “The Chiron from the stories? Trainer of Hercules and all that?”, he explains, in an unusually clear deviation from Greek mythology, why he is still alive: The truth is, I can’t be dead. You see, a eons ago the gods granted my wish. I could continue the work I loved. I could be a teacher of heroes as long as humanity needed me. I gained much from that wish…and I gave up much. But I’m still here, so I can only assume I’m still needed. Thus, despite the change, Chiron’s character and role as trainer of heroes endures, and he is both wise father-figure to Percy and actual teacher, in charge of master’s level archery and with overall responsibility for Camp Half-Blood. Again, like in Greek mythology, Chiron is different however from the other centaurs, of whom he says, “My kinsmen are a wild and barbaric folk, I’m afraid. You might encounter them in the wilderness, or at major sporting events. But you won’t see any here.” This depiction of the other centaurs as rough and uncontrolled is borne out by the second book of the series, when Chiron appears with his kinsmen centaurs to rescue Percy and his friends, but again there is a divergence between the classical myth and the modern interpretation. Chiron constantly refers to the other centaurs as his family, although it is true that the difference between Chiron and the others is stressed, with the other centaurs consistently described as ‘party ponies’. Chiron was among the crowd, but his relatives were almost nothing like him. There were centaurs with black Arabian stallion bodies, others with gold palomino coats, others with orange-and-white spots like paint horses. 57

Ibid. Chapter 6.

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Some wore brightly colored T-shirts with Day-Glo letters that said party ponies: south florida chapter. Some were armed with bows, some with baseball bats, some with paintball guns. One had his face painted like a Comanche warrior and was waving a large orange Styrofoam hand making a big Number 1. Another was bare-chested and painted entirely green. A third had googly eye glasses with the eyeballs bouncing around on Slinky coils, and one of those baseball caps with soda-can-and-straw attachments on either side.58 A similar description is given in the last book of the series, where again they regard a battle as a party, dressed in tie-dyed shirts, rainbow Afro wigs, oversize sunglasses, and with war-painted faces, while their weapons are “paintballs, arrows, swords, and nerf baseball bats.”59 Although there is something threatening in their make-up – centaur blood is described as “like acid,” and contact with it brings a hero out in hives that leaves him or her bedridden for weeks – and their wildness is emphasised here and later as well, it is not viciousness that characterises them, but a love of fun and a high-spirited craziness. They are eager to meet Dionysus because “they’d heard he threw some really wild parties.” Not over-endowed with intelligence, they live in a trailer park, and are irresponsible dare-devils rather than the wild and uncivilised monsters of Greek myth, charging at each other and knocking heads, before staggering off in different directions “with crazy grins on their faces,” causing Chiron to lament, “I really wish my cousins wouldn’t slam their heads together. They don’t have the brain cells to spare.”60 Clearly Riordan’s portrayal of centaurs owes much to ancient myth in his depiction of Chiron as the wise teacher and different from the other centaurs, but overall the differences are less blatant than in the original tales, and the creatures’ wild side has become a rowdy love of parties rather than a tendency towards rape and violence. The reason for this change is surely the need to adapt the material for a juvenile audience, as well as Riordan’s ever-present love of the comic and absurd which permeates the books despite the action adventure scenario.

58

59 60

Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters (2006), Chapter 18. From Percy Jackson & The Olympians, The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan. Copyright © 2006 by Rick Riordan. Reprinted by permission of Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group, llc. All rights reserved. Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian (2009) Chapter 15. Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters (2006) Chapter 18.

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3.4 Diana Wynne Jones One of the most original treatment of centaurs can be found in the ever innovative work of Diana Wynne Jones. Centaurs feature most centrally in A Sudden Wild Magic (1992) and Deep Secret (1997), both books marketed as adult novels, but read widely by young adults as well. The most detailed descriptions of centaurs are in Deep Secret, a book dealing with the multiple worlds of what Jones calls the multiverse, which is shaped like a figure eight, containing Ayeward worlds in which magic features openly and Naywards or magicless worlds. Control of the magical status of these worlds is in the care of magids, who try to urge the worlds in an Ayewards direction. In Deep Secret, Rupert Venables, the Earth’s junior Magid is forced to search for a new heir to the Koryfonic Empire, a collection of Ayewards worlds, after the assassination of the previous emperor. He also has to find a new magid for earth, after the death of the previous senior magid, a jockey named Stan. The action of the novel takes place on earth, in the Koryfonic Empire and on another planet named Thule where Rupert’s brother, Will, lives. Naturally as befits worlds where magic flourishes, magical creatures, including centaurs, exist in Ayewards worlds. Stan explains: “I started out my work as a Magid a long way Ayewards,” he murmured. His voice was getting weaker.…“I chose it for the centaurs. I’d always loved centaurs, always wanted to work with them. And as soon as I learnt that more than half the places Ayewards of here have centaurs, off I went. I thought I’d never come back here. Centaurs need a magical ambience to maintain them – well, you know they do – and they all died out here when we drifted off Naywards.”61 Physically these centaurs are very similar to those of classical myth, although, unlike classical centaurs, these creatures wear clothes on their top halves, Knarros a grey vest and Rob, a shirt and medallion. They are strong and possess two hearts, presumably a human one and an equine one. Interestingly, the skin colour of their human torso is the same colour as the skin under their horsecoat, so that Knarros, whose equine half was dark iron grey, also has a dark grey face, beard, hair and arms. They are also very intelligent, as Stan comments. “Smart people, centaurs. You should never forget that even a stupid centaur has more brain than most humans,” he explains.62 61 62

Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret (1997) Chapter 1. Quotations reproduced by kind permission of Diana Wynne Jones’ estate. Ibid. Chapter 18.

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Despite this intelligence, and their physical strength, centaurs are not power hungry, having no desire to rule worlds. “It doesn’t strike them as sensible” muses Stan, and the reason for this quickly becomes apparent. “The strict ones would disapprove of him and the others would laugh and call him mad. They’d only obey him if he had their personal loyalty for family reasons,” he explains. This is because although a centaur is fiercely loyal, their loyalty is rather different from human loyalty, being bound up in complicated family relationships.63 The centaurs’ view of honesty is also somewhat removed from that of humans. Although they do not lie, they are not necessarily honest and will adapt the truth if loyalty demands so doing. Stan explains as he continues: you’ll never get a centaur telling you a direct lie, like saying black is white or anything like that. But they’re all of them quite capable of bending the truth, if they see the need. Like they’ll tell you two things that don’t go together and make it sound as if they do – or they’ll add in a little word you don’t specially notice, that makes what they really say into the exact opposite of what you think they say. Although centaurs may have different ideas about some codes of behaviour, and despite the physical differences, both man and centaur are really portrayed as having very human reactions and behaviour. There are both male and female centaurs and interspecies reproduction is also allowed for, underlying the connection between the two races, as Stan explains when asked about interbreeding: “That’s not thought terribly decent,” Stan said, “but it can happen. You get physical problems with it, of course. Most crossbreeds die stillborn, and you’d never get a human mother getting that far with a centaur’s child. They mostly miscarry fairly early on. If they do go to term, the foal’s too  large, you see. But the other way round, human father, centaur mother: that does get to happen occasionally. I met the odd one or two. They tend to be a bit small. And the thoroughbred centaurs are painfully nice to them. Fall over backwards to make clear it’s not the foal’s fault – you know.”64 Diana Wynne Jones’ centaurs then, have progressed a long way from the classical and post classical roots, and have been given an entirely original twist, 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid.

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through which the original sources are still visible. Nothing seems to have permeated of the wild, uncivilised drunken rapist centaur portrayal, but the Chiron tradition does lurk behind the depiction in both Deep Secret and A Sudden Wild Magic. The centaurian refusal to lie and sharp intelligence are surely influenced by C.S. Lewis’ centaurs, but the classical Chiron’s wisdom and prophetic power lie behind this portrayal as well. Although in Deep Secret, the imperial heirs have been placed under the guardianship of Knarros, he does not really seem to be the traditional Chiron educator figure. It is for his centaur traits of loyalty to the true heirs, children of his sisters, that he was entrusted with the guardianship rather than from any pedagogical sense. Yet his role as guardian of the young heirs is a typically Wynne Jonesian twist on the figure of Chiron, whose shadow lurks behind Knarros. 3.5 Eoin Colfer Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series are a sophisticated set of books in which the young Irish teenaged genius criminal is first pitted against, and later in league with, the world of the fairies, and in particular, one representative of their race, Captain Holly Short, a member of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance division, or Leprecons for short, more familiarly known as Leprechauns. In the fairy world of Colfer, fairies do possess magic, but also use highly sophisticated technology, most of it developed by a centaur named Foaly. Foaly is one of the most intelligent characters in both the human and fairy worlds, and an inspired inventor. He is also highly conceited and prone to bragging and boasting, in particular delighting in irritating the Police commander, Julius Root. He despises “grunt work,” i.e. any task that does not involve his “genius mind” and which could be carried out by ordinary creatures. A James Bond-style cantankerous Q-substitute, this paranoid centaur, in a tin-foil hat that he wears to keep his mind from being read, produces an array of gadgets that are unsurpassed. He is conceited, enjoying watching videos or reading articles about himself, but is a good and loyal friend to Holly. During the course of the series, he courts and marries a female centaur, and fathers offspring. Of centaurs in general in Colfer’s worldview, the reader is told that they are one of the eight fairy families and that there are less of them than other fairy species. Although the most intelligent of the fairy races, they do not possess magic. Centaur culture also allows male centaurs to have more than one wife,65 although some centaurs remain single or live monogamous lifestyles. Like other centaurs, Colfer’s centaurs are human in front and equine in back. 65

Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl and The Time Paradox (2008) Chapter 2.

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The fact that the centaurs are non-magical creatures is interesting. The whole of Eoin Colfer’s philosophy of magic is closely aligned to the position outlined by Arthur C. Clarke in his quote that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In other words, magic and technology function in the same way, and create the same impressions, in different worlds. Thus Amie Doughty talks of a split pathway, with science and technology dominating one path and with magic dominating the other, and concludes that “though the magic may have come from a different ‘path’, ultimately it is treated like technology.”66 Foaly, as the only true non magical creature in Colfer’s worlds, has replaced magic with technology; yet paradoxically he is the creature who is physically the least human in many ways, since he is half equine. Even creatures in Colfer’s worlds such as trolls and goblins, who behave in less human fashions, are physically akin to humans in a way that the centaurs are not, a fact that helps keep the technological innovations firmly in the fairy, magical realm rather than the human. Colfer’s centaurs then seem barely influenced by either classical mythology or C.S. Lewis. While the centaurian intelligence may perhaps be rooted in Chiron’s wisdom, it is only Foaly whom we know to be brilliant, and his personality is in every way human, even if his physical appearance is not. The use of the centaur motif here seems purely in order to emphasise Foaly’s uniqueness and difference within the series, and to provide opportunity for humour on occasion. 3.6 Ellen Jensen Abbot A more recent view of centaurs is found in Ellen Jensen Abbot’s Watersmeet and its sequel The Centaur’s Daughter. These are set in a fantasy world in which “monsters” – centaurs, dwarves, fauns, and so on – are hated by bigoted raceobsessed humans who have retreated to within settlement walls, and a state of constant war exists between the humans and other races. Hatred runs just as hot within the human communities for those who fall short of this culture’s physical ideal for humanity. An example of this is the heroine of the novels, Abisina, who has been an outcast from birth because of her dark hair and skin. Fleeing a savage attack by her neighbours, Abisina sets out to find her unknown father, who is in an unknown place named Watersmeet. On her journey she has to learn to trust the native “monster” peoples of these lands, and when she finally meets her father, the leader of the united folk of Watersmeet, it becomes 66

Doughty, Amie A. “Just a Fairy, His Wits, and maybe a Touch of Magic: Magic, Technology, and Self-reliance in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction,” in Harry Eiss, ed., Children’s Literature and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne, uk: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) 55.

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apparent that he is not entirely human himself, but a centaur able to change his shape at will into that of a man. These books are teen ‘issues’ novels, dealing with the subjects of racism, prejudice, bigotry and identity, cloaked in a fantasy guise, with a familiar plot of the outcast girl who is compelled to go on a quest, is helped by magical creatures, and discovers her father, a blessed land, and hitherto unknown powers. Abbot’s depiction of the centaurs in this fantasy world reflects Abisina’s developing understanding. At first they are portrayed purely as monsters, savage and primitive, who take pride in biting off the toes of human victims they manage to capture and wearing them as jewellery. There is one particularly gruesome scene in which Abisina is captured by a wild centaur herd and has her own toes bitten off in gory detail.67 The humans are no better, however, in this portrayal; as well as their bigotry and fear and hatred-filled creeds, they delight in capturing centaur tails, which they nail to their walls as victor trophies. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that centaurs (and other non-human species) are not inherently evil. They have been driven to this behaviour as a result of the warfare between the races, which was primarily caused by the humans, although since then there have been atrocities on both sides. Although Abisina, traumatised by her abuse at the hands of the centaur gang, is physically repulsed and terrified by the mere sight of one of the creatures, it gradually emerges that she is guilty of assuming that all centaurs are like these wild beasts, and that this is as prejudiced and wrong an assumption as the ones held about her by her fellow villagers at the beginning of the novel. Her father tries to explain this to her, saying that most centaurs are nothing like those she encountered and adding, “But, like any race, there are some who destroy the good in themselves.”68 These centaurs can talk to deer and therefore will not kill these animals (“it was barbaric to slay animals you could communicate with”), and support each other (“Centaurs always stand as one”),69 but really have very few characteristics that are different from human ones, apart from their physical shape. The only clear hint to the classical tradition is that the leader of the centaur band at Watersmeet is called Kyron, but he is in no way the traditional teacher figure. Nor are the centaur herd who capture Abisina, although they are fierce and savage, the uncivilised barbarians of classical mythology, seeming more like a mafia gang than the creatures who fought the Lapiths. Indeed, since the

67 68 69

Ellen Jensen Abbot, Watersmeet (2009) Chapter 8. Ibid. Chapter 14. Ibid. Chapter 15.

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whole message of the book is that race does not determine good or evil, it would be strange if centaurs as a race were intended to be viewed in this way. 4

The Centaur and Animal Studies

In considering the modern depictions of centaurs, the recent work on animal studies can provide enlightening perspectives. Animal studies considers questions both of the nature of literal animals, and of ideas of ‘animality’ or ‘brutality’. This approach utilises a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminism, marxist theory, and queer theory, all of which emphasise a perspective of ‘otherness’, applying this to animals and humans, who are considered to be another form of animal. Political and social contexts have led to the rise of interest in questions of animal welfare and ecology, both of which have contributed to animal studies. In particular, this research considers how the characterization of humanity in relation to (other) animals, and the portrayal of animals themselves, reflect attitudes towards, and comprehension of, other species.70 As Walter Hogan points out, the emergence of the animal rights movement, and that of young adult fiction as a genre, were contemporaneous, and this is far from a coincidence, since many of the same social forces were behind the recognition of animals and of adolescents as social groupings with rights and needs.71 Thus this common root makes animal studies a fruitful tool with which to examine juvenile and young adult literature. Animal studies pays close attention to anthropomorphic depictions of animals.72 Talking animals, which feature prominently in children’s literature, are both anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphicat the same time. Animals are often used in adult literature as an analogy for social hierarchy, but in juvenile books the hierarchy can be upset, since the relative positions of adult and animal are not the same as those of animal and child, whose own place is lower down the social scale. The employment of animals, and in particular talking animals, can therefore be subversive, allowing issues such as gender and power 70

71 72

There is a vast bibliography on animal studies, but for some good overviews see e.g. Elisa Aaltola, “The Philosophy behind the Movement: Animal Studies versus Animal Rights,” Society & Animals 19.4 (2011) 393–406; Paul Waldau, Animal Studies: An Introduction (Oxford and ny: Oxford University Press, 2013); Margo DeMello, Introduction to HumanAnimal Studies (ny: Columbia University Press, 2013); Dawne McCance, Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction (ny: suny Press, 2013). Walter Hogan, Animals in Young Adult Fiction (Lanham, ml: Scarecrow Press, 2009) 1. Marc Bekoff and Carron A. Meaney, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (London and ny: Routledge, 1998) 446.

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relations to be explored obliquely.73 The centaur, as a hybrid of human and animal, is perhaps the most developed form of talking animal, and as such reflects authors’ perceptions of animals, humans and their respective roles. C.S. Lewis’ centaurs are influenced by his attitude to animals. It is clear from his earliest writings that Lewis was very fond of animals. Believing in a hierarchy whereby the world was structured in progressive order from plants, the ‘lowest’ form of life, to animals, humans, angels and finally God, he felt that animals were below humankind in the hierarchy but that animals themselves were not all on the same level, arguing that, “the higher animals have nervous systems very like our own.”74 Nevertheless, Lewis felt that animals were sentient members of the structure of life, and as such, he was opposed to vivisection and animal experimentation, seeing both as cruel practices, and, in a 1947 essay, comparing those who carried them out to Nazis, a statement that carried great impact only two years after the liberation of the concentration camps. It was not only mankind’s abuse of animals that Lewis found to be vicious however; he regarded nature itself as cruel; in the world of vegetation, the competition for light and nutrients led to some plants dying, while in the animal world, creatures attacked and killed each other. The questions of why this seeming harshness existed, and why animals suffered, caused him theological concerns, which he addressed in a chapter of The Problem of Pain.75 While he was convinced that adult suffering was a result of sin, the same could not be argued for animals. Lewis’ solution was to decide that as a result of Satan’s influence and the Fall from Grace, humans had dropped to an animal-like state of being, while animals had fallen closer to that of vegetables. If an animal was tamed by a human, however, in keeping with biblical verses that gave man dominion over other species, animals reverted to their true natures, becom­ ing  more themselves. This is analogous with a Christian’s acceptance of Jesus, which made him more like Christ himself, and on a higher plane than non-believers. If these ideas are applied to Narnia, the depiction of both talking animals and centaurs can be understood with deeper clarity. The talking animals who have accepted Aslan are more like the idealised ‘tamed’ animals of Lewis’ theology, while the centaur, as the creature who is both human and animal, is on a higher level than these animals. Their dignity, deep knowledge and wisdom, which sets them apart from both animal and man, is a result of this elevated 73

See Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot and Burlington, vt: Ashgate, 2006) 1–4. 74 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: The Centenary Press, 1940) Chapter 9. 75 Ibid.

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position, for they may perhaps have achieved perfection of both animal and human natures, and harmony between the two. J.K Rowling’s centaurs, as already noted, owe something to those of Lewis in their knowledge of the esoteric, but her very different world view has led to an altered presentation. Rowling’s world is both strongly hierarchical and divided by species.76 Wizards, Muggles, Squibs, house elves, goblins, gnomes, giants, leprechauns, Veela and of course centaurs, all have their clearly defined place, and the wizard is firmly at the top of the pyramid. Indeed, Amy Green has argued that Rowling presents a colonialist depiction of the world, in which the wizard is “steward of the inferior races who cannot take care of themselves,” and where slavery is institutionalized (in the form of the house elves).77 In the world of Harry Potter, human-animal hybrids are very rare,78 and this is natural, for such creatures do not fit easily into structured world depicted, in which animals are animals and humans far removed from them.79 The only other example of a human-animal hybrid is the werewolf, epitomized by Remus Lupin, and in this case, when the transformation takes place, the human becomes completely animal, and a danger to mankind. The other werewolf in the series, Fenrir Greyback, is human in shape at all times, but behaves like an animal who delights in killing and attacking humans, particularly young girls. Even Bill Weasley, after his attack by Greyback, has a fondness for blood rare meat, indicating that an animal element has entered his being. It seems that the two elements, human and wolf, cannot exist comfortably together in one creature. The centaurs are much more of a true hybrid, a combination of both animal and human, yet the two elements of their make-up are also clearly differentiated. While the human, intelligent part of the centaur enables him to communicate and to take a place in the wizarding world, the wild, dangerous, animalistic element is also always there, as the attack on Umbridge reflects. 76

See e.g. Farah Mendelsohn, “Crowning the King: Harry Potter and the Construction of Authority,” in Lana A. Whited, ed., The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon (Columbia, mi: University of Missouri Press, 2002) 159–181. 77 Amy M. Green, “Revealing Discrimination: Social Hierarchy and the Exclusion/ Enslavement of the Other in the Harry Potter Novels,” The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children’s Literature, 13. 3 (2009) () (accessed 12/12/2014). 78 Mermen and Mermaids also appear but far more briefly than the centaurs. 79 It is true that animagi exist, but these are portrayed as remaining human in mind, even when transformed into animal shape, although they may exhibit animal-like behaviour while in such form (Sirius for example is described as eating rats while in canine mode in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Chapter 27).

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Marginalised and living in the wild, possibly as a result of wizard oppression, centaurs can represent “spirits or nature and helper figures,”80 but they also cut themselves off from the world. It is striking that Firenze is marked out and depicted as a ‘good’ centaur, because he goes against this and allies himself with the human wizard society. This depiction reflects Rowling’s underlying approach, described by Green as colonialist, in which narcissism and acceptance underlie the oppressed peoples’ attitudes towards their oppressors. Rick Riordan’s portrayal of centaurs, like Lewis’ and Rowling’s, should be seen against the background of a wider perspective of the author’s aims and perceptions of the world. Duality is at the heart of Riordan’s writing. Conflict between two generations is central to the Percy Jackson plots, while on another level his work also attempts to bridge the gap between the expectations of his young readers and their parents. As Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey highlight, Riordan simultaneously appeals to the tastes of young readers, with his humour and lowbrow language, and to adults, through his use of Greek myths portrayed as valuable cultural capital.81 This “multivocality of the child-oriented series and the adult-oriented paratext” enables the text to work on different levels simultaneously, and reflects a reconciliation between conflicting views of the ancient world as old-fashioned, boring, elitist and highbrow and yet at the same time mythical, exciting and culturally pivotal. This complex attitude towards the ancient world is reflected in Riordan’s portrayal of centaurs, who not only stem from differing ancient traditions, but also represent the two different elements in their make-up, the animal and the human. To Riordan, the animal is uncivilised, wild and lacking in culture, while the human represents the opposite. While both Chiron and the other centaurs are a combination of man and horse, in Chiron the human element is firmly in control of the equine, while in the case of the other centaurs, the animalistic is dominant, and the human aspect becomes an uncultured red-neck inhabitant of a trailer park. Diana Wynne Jones’ centaurs, as already noted, seem much more human, a fact which is unsurprising when considering this author’s world view and approach to fantasy. The representation of fantastic creatures is part of Jones’ manipulation and subverting of traditional fantasy. While her work is bursting 80 81

Anne Hiebert Alton, “Generic Fusion and the Mosaic of Harry Potter” in Elizabeth E. Heilman, ed. Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter (ny and London: Routledge, 2003) 157. Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, “‘A God Buys Us Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and Education’s Culture Wars,” in Owen Hodkinson and Helen Lovatt, Changing the Greeks and Romans: Metamorphosing Antiquity for Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

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with elements of, and references to, earlier mythic traditions, including the Classical,82 she never merely inserts these traditions into her books unaltered. She herself explained the reasons for this: For one thing, the immense and meaningful weight of all myths and most folktales could drag a more fragile, modern story out of shape; for another, I do not find I use these things. They present themselves, either for inclusion or as underlay, when the need arises.83 As Farah Mendlesohn points out, Jones’ speciality is liminality, and the liminal figure of the centaur is therefore ideally suited to her creativity. In her manipulations of myth and fantasy, Jones created works in which the mundane, real world is imbued with the fantastical,84 and the fantastic carries echoes of the real world. Her centaurs, like her griffins in The Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Giffin seem completely human, albeit with physical animal characteristics. Her characters are so well-developed that each individual centaur or griffin is a personality, whose physical nature is an element of the whole in the same way that a human’s hair colour or size might be, rather than the defining characteristic. Mendlesohn stresses that “when Jones’ characters develop magic it is as a vital aspect of who they are, but it does not usually serve as a shorthand description of their personalities,”85 and the same may be said for the use of fantastical species. While centaurs as a race may have certain qualities that are common to all, this does not detract from their characters, which are indistinguishable from human personalities. Such an attitude derives partly from Jones’ views on ecology and man’s place within the world. Several of her books reflect her concern for these issues. The Dark Lord of Derkholm, for example, a book which parodies the fantasy genre, for all its satire nevertheless features an evil businessman who is draining the magical world of its natural resources. Hexwood has the Earth being mined for flint, the most precious substance in the galactic empire. A Sudden Wild Magic 82

83 84

85

See e.g. Sharon M. Scapple, “Transformation of Myth in A Tale of Time City,” in Teya Rosenberg, Martha P. Hixon, Sharon M. Scapple, and Donna R. White, eds., Diana Wynne Jones: An Exciting and Exacting Wisdom. Studies in Children’s Literature 1 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002) 117–124. Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (Harper Collins: Kindle Edition, 2012-09-25) (Kindle Locations 1941–1943). Farah Mendlesohn, Diana Wynne Jones: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature: The Fantastic Tradition and Children’s Literature (Children’s Literature and Culture) (London and ny: Routledge, 2005) 135–6. Ibid. 23.

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and The Merlin Conspiracy both feature global warming.86 That she was an animal lover is also reflected in her inclusion of creatures in her books, but again, each animal has a distinct and developed personality. The cats Throgmorton, Benvenuto and Plug-Ugly, as well as Mini the elephant,87 for example, are all characters as elaborate as any human; the hybrid creatures, the griffins and the centaurs, are even less distinguishable from humans, and indeed share the physical space of the world in which the book is set, be it Earth or elsewhere, with mankind. Animals, humans and anything in between are all treated as equals.88 Jones also subverts modern fantasy conventions on occasion through her attitude towards science, in that science rather than magic is sometimes presented as explaining events.89 It is Eoin Colfer who develops this fully however, particularly in his portrayal of the centaur, Foaly. Humans in the Artemis Fowl books are regarded with disfavour, for it is their destruction and pollution of the natural world through industrialisation that has caused the fairy community into hiding deep in the earth. Mankind are destructive creatures, unlike fairies who hesitate to harm even predators such as trolls and humans. The natural world, with which the fairies are aligned, is therefore depicted as wholesome and ideal, but under attack from human industrialisation and destruction. It might be thought that as semi-animal, and therefore aligned with the natural world, the figure of Foaly would be depicted animalistically, but that is not the case; magic in Colfer’s world, as already outlined, is closely connected to technology. Foaly, the non-magical creature and technological genius, is possessed of abilities that surpass even magic, and the fact that he is a hybrid human-animal is interesting from this regard. By making Foaly a creature without magical powers, but with huge technological ability, Colfer is in effect moving him as far away from an animal as it is possible to be. Non-human animals are traditionally regarded as unconnected to technology; the ability to use ­create and use tools is one of the things that separates human from beast. Indeed, as critical animal studies examine, animals themselves, particularly in 86

Charles Butler, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Lanham, ml: Scarecrow Press, 2006) 127. 87 From The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Magicians of Caprona and The Merlin Conspiracy respectively. 88 As Mendlesohn (2005) 13 points out with regard to Wilkin’s Tooth, “Friendship to the ­animal–familiar world is crucial in fairy tales, and the children must treat the cat as an equal, talk to it, and assume it understands the hint about Puss in Boots.” 89 See The Crown of Dalemark, together with Mendlesohn (ibid. 130).

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agriculture, are categorised in many cases as mere machines as a result of human exploitation and technologies.90 Few animals have played so central a role in such technologies as the horse, employed as transport for humans, war machines, and agricultural tools, among other uses. Modern research reveals growing awareness of animals’ ability to use technology, as projects such as the Animal Computer Interaction Lab at The Open University reflect.91 The depiction of Foaly as a master of, rather than a tool of technology, inverts expectations of what a (half) equine animal can do, which in turn leads to questions about the role of both animal and human in the world. Just as the portrayal of the young master criminal Artemis Fowl subverts expectations with regard to child and adult roles, so the creation of Foaly blurs the boundaries between the animal world and the human through the use of the figure of the centaur. If the bestial elements of centaurs are absent in the world of Colfer, they are notably present in that of Ellen Jensen Abbot. Although the Watersmeet books preach a message of racial tolerance, and, as argued above, stress that centaurs are no more inherently evil than any other group, nevertheless the graphic descriptions of the more savage tribes of centaurs reflect a sense of horrifying bestiality. Abisina begins by hating all centaurs, and this seems to be borne out by the evidence when centaurs are first encountered in the books. Yet she herself, as a descendant of both centaur and human, is in a sense a hybrid herself, just as true centaurs are. As the works progress, it becomes clear that bestiality is not the province of animals, nor virtue that of humans. This is symbolised both by Abisina herself, and by her father who can actually change his shape from human to centaur and back again, at will. According to this philosophy, animals and humans are on a par, and all races contain members who are noble and those who are evil. Such an equivalence epitomises postmodern views of the world in general, and animals in particular, and the centaurs in this case, who appear partly animalistic in shape, and revealed to be no different from those in human form. 5

From Chiron to Foaly: The Transformation of the Centaur

It is clear that the roots of classical myth can often be glimpsed behind the centaurs of modern juvenile fantasy novels. Modern centaurs are often heavily influenced by the classical depictions of Chiron and are depicted as wise and 90 91

See e.g. Glen A. Mazis, Humans, Animals, Machines: Blurring Boundaries (ny: suny Press, 2008) 1–19. (accessed 22/12/14).

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highly intelligent beings, while others are more like the bestial rapists of the centauromachy. Each author, however, uses the figure of the centaurs in order to reflect deeper ideas, exploiting the liminal nature of these creatures, who are set apart from others, both in the human world and separate from it. Such ideas reflect the development of deeper ideas about the role and nature of non-human animals in the world, which the centaur is ideally formed to highlight. As the fantasy genre for children has developed, during a period in which the roles of children, adults and animals have all been questioned, the centaur has proved a useful foil, cantering in the end a long way from his original roots in ancient Greece.

chapter 7

Classical Memories in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia Niall W. Slater Already in the second chapter of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy Pevensey has ventured into the woods of Narnia, where (to their mutual consternation) she meets the Faun, Mr. Tumnus.1 When he takes her home for tea, she begins looking about: In one corner there was a door which Lucy thought must lead to Mr. Tumnus’s bedroom, and on one wall was a shelf full of books. Lucy looked at these while he was setting out the tea things. They had titles like The Life and Letters of Silenus or Nymphs and Their Ways or Men, Monks and Gamekeepers: a Study in Popular Legend or Is Man a Myth?2 This light-hearted reference to Mr. Tumnus’ library provoked a strong reaction from one of its earliest readers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and more thereafter. Lewis’ biographers, Roger Green and Walter Hooper, give us the story: Tolkien met Green shortly thereafter and remarked: ‘I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story. It really won’t do, you know! I mean to say: “Nymphs and their Ways, the Love-Life of a Faun.” Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about?’3

1 Is his name a classical memory? Nancy-Lou Patterson suggests his name is related to the Roman woodland divinity Vertumnus (cited by Ford, Companion to Narnia: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis’ the Chronicles of Narnia. Revised and Expanded. 5th ed. (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) 441 n. 1). That Pomona shows up under her own name, though as a memory of King Peter’s where he calls her “the greatest of all the wood-people” (pc Ch. 2 p. 21), may make the suggestion more plausible. 2 I quote the texts of the Narnia books by pages from the current American editions (here lww Ch. 2 pp. 14–15) but hope chapter references will serve readers of other editions as well. 3 Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974) 241 (Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography. Fully revised and expanded edition. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 2005) 307). Immediately before this, they note Lewis had read Green “two chapters” of the book, presumably the first two and therefore including this moment, and then “Lewis stopped reading with the remark that he had read the story to Tolkien: was it any good?” followed by the explanatory anecdote.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_009

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Since Tolkien and Lewis eventually fell out for a time, in no small part over their different approaches to fantasy,4 this moment of reader response has been mined for premonitory significance. Tolkien seems to have found the book titles a violation of the integrity of the fantasy world.5 Others emphasize a possible touch of prudery. No reference to “the Love-Life of a Faun” appears in the printed text of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Did Lewis excise it in response to the reaction of Tolkien (or others), or did that rather more risqué title emerge from the mind of Tolkien himself in response to the much more delicate potential double entendre in “Nymphs and Their Ways”?6 The first title on Mr. Tumnus’ shelf, however, merits more attention than it has received. On initial reading it looks like a straightforward joke for the adult reader who has heard of Silenus: the old satyr’s life could indeed be very entertaining, but a more improbable epistolarian is hard to imagine. Yet neither of 4 Though Lewis’ growing friendship with the novelist Charles Williams and interest in the latter’s allegorical fiction also played a role: see the brief account in Miller, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2008) 244–248. 5 So Alan Jacobs, “The Chronicles of Narnia,” in R. MacSwain and M. Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 273: “No doubt Tolkien was offended by the very notion that fauns would have books at all.” 6 So Laura Miller (2008) 241: “The note of parody in the titles of Mr. Tumnus’ books seems to have particularly irked Tolkien, to have struck him, even, as improper … [Tolkien’s] memory nudges Lewis’ gentle teasing closer to raciness than his friend would ever have come himself.” While Miller (ibid. 73) thinks the titles of Tumnus’ books “peg him as a scholar of sorts,” I wonder if one might push this even a little further with the title Men, Monks and Gamekeepers, soberly subtitled A Study in Popular Legend. The latter tries to make it sound like a work of mythography, part of the basic joke that juxtaposes two books about “real” inhabitants of Narnia with “myths” about “man” (“a Son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve,” lww Ch. 2 p. 11 in the language of Narnia), a species not seen for many generations. Yet is a reference to “gamekeepers” really entirely innocent? In a brief article on “Prudery and Philology,” written as he was finishing the Narnia series, Lewis deprecated obscenity but had a good word for “the smoking-room story” (Lewis, The Spectator 194 (21 January 1955) 63–64). D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in an expurgated version in England in 1932, and among other references Lewis includes Lawrence in a catalogue of “rakehellie auctors” in a 1942 letter to E.R. Eddison (Nov. 16, 1942: Hooper, Walter, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis. 3 vols. (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco 2004) ii. 536). Within two years after Penguin Books was acquitted in its obscenity trial for publishing the unexpurgated version, Lewis published both an invited popular article on “Sex in Literature” (The Sunday Telegraph, No. 87 (30 September 1962) 8 [reprinted as C.S. Lewis and Walter Hooper, Present Concerns. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) 105–108]) and a provocative little study of the social versus comic significance of Lawrence’s obscene words, “Four Letter Words,” Critical Quarterly 3 (1961) 118–122 [reprinted as C.S. Lewis and Walter Hooper, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) 169–174] so one might infer Lawrence was not insignificant for him.

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the first two titles in Mr. Tumnus’ collection is really a throwaway joke, as the Faun goes on to entertain Lucy with his personal experiences in Narnia before the current, apparently endless winter descended: He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.7 Here in brief we have a quite representative sample of the “classical memories” that bubble up from beneath the surface of Narnia: figures of classical mythology, more often in their Roman rather than Greek incarnations,8 with hints of the story patterns in which they were once embedded, but with free and playful variation as well. Memory and forgetting seem to be central to a number of the Narnian books themselves as well as to Lewis’ own approach to storytelling. Characters forget and then remember just in time or not quite in time not only important pieces of information but whole narratives and histories,9 while the importance of memory in constituting the self or at least the better self runs throughout. Memory therefore offers a useful rubric under which to explore various kinds of classical reception in the Chronicles, for while there is no discernible master plot of classical allusion or allegory here, Lewis clearly thought with and through the rich repertoire of his own childhood and undergraduate education in the classics as well as his continuing professional engagement in mediaeval literature and culture. What follows here cannot attempt to be exhaustive 7 lww Ch. 2 pp. 15–16. 8 Edwards, “Classicist,” in R. MacSwain and M. Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C.S.  Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 66 suggests that generic figures from classical mythology are more common in the Chronicles of Narnia than borrowings from specific myths, but we shall find different degrees of allusion to classical story patterns. 9 Hauerwas, “On Violence,” in R. MacSwain and M. Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 190, notes “Several of the plots of the Narnia books turn on the forgetting of old lore by some and its remembering by others,” although his particular point concerns the role of Dr. Cornelius in Prince Caspian.

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but simply seeks to offer some representative instances of classical reminisce in the world of Narnia. The very name of Narnia itself is a classical memory, as Walter Hooper remembers it. When he asked Lewis the origin of the name, Lewis showed Hooper a classical atlas acquired while he was studying classics, and in it a map of ancient Italy on which Lewis had underlined the city name of Narnia, “simply because he liked the sound of it.”10 Narnia in Umbria, having been conquered by the Romans, failed to give them material support during the war with Hannibal,11 but nothing particularly connects it with the Bacchic themes of the first two novels. Those Bacchic revels, which are nostalgic memories for Mr. Tumnus in the seemingly unending winter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, finally appear before our eyes in the story of Prince Caspian. Centuries later in Narnian time after the first book’s events, the land is now ruled by Telmarines, and the talking beasts and non-human inhabitants seem to have vanished. The young prince, however, is brought up with stories about the Old Narnians. When his usurping uncle, Miraz, decides to kill him, Caspian flees. He not only re-discovers the world of the forgotten Old Narnians but joins forces with them and the returned kings and queens from the first book. While there may be other classical memories, they most strongly assert themselves on the eve of the final battle with the reappearance of Aslan to the Old Narnians. In the forests all of the true Narnia joins in celebrating the restored natural world, expressed as a series of dances12 around Aslan, the lion ruler of this world and “the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea”:13

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First noted in Green and Hooper (2005) 306 (cf. McGrath, C.S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Carol Stream, il: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2013) 266). Their original edition, Green and Hooper (1974) (where the roughly parallel passage would be 240–241, has nothing of this story. Earlier speculation, especially Ford (2005) 317 n.1, had suggested the classical origin of the name, noting literary references in Livy 10.10; 27.9; 27.50; 29.15; Tacitus (Ann. 3.9), Pliny the Elder, NH 31.51, quoting Cicero on its climate, and a letter (1.4) of Pliny the Younger about his mother-in-law’s villa there. On the theme of dance in pc, see Ford (2005) 63–65 and Schakel, The Way into Narnia: A  Reader’s Guide (Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2005) 57–59. On dance in Lewis’ thought more generally, see Kirkpatrick, “The Great Dance in Perelandra,” CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C.S. Lewis Society 7.4 (1976) 1–6, Downing, Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005) 125, and Wolfe, “On Power,” in R. MacSwain and M. Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 177. pc Ch. 7 p. 97; first in lww Ch. 8 p. 79.

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The crowd and dance round Aslan (for it had become a dance once more) grew so thick and rapid that Lucy was confused. She never saw where certain other people came from who were soon capering about among the trees. One was a youth, dressed only in a fawn-skin, with vine-leaves wreathed in his curly hair. His face would have been almost too pretty for a boy’s, if it had not looked so extremely wild. You felt, as Edmund said  when he saw him a few days later, “There’s a chap who might do anything – absolutely anything.” He seemed to have a great many names – Bromios, Bassareus, and the Ram were three of them. There were a lot of girls with him, as wild as he. There was even, unexpectedly, someone on a donkey. And everybody was laughing: and everybody was shouting out “Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi.” What made it more complicated was that the man on the donkey, who was old and enormously fat, began calling out at once, “Refreshments! Time for refreshments,” and falling off his donkey and being bundled on to it again by the others, while the donkey was under the impression that the whole thing was a circus and tried to give a display of walking on its hind legs. And all the time there were more and more vine leaves. And soon not only leaves but vines.14 Lewis does not identify participants in these revels immediately, but he clearly hopes that some will work it out. For other (younger) readers, the revelation comes just a little later, with both an appeal to memory and a warning: “I say, Su, I know who they are.” “Who?” “The boy with the wild face is Bacchus and the old one on the donkey is Silenus. Don’t you remember Mr Tumnus telling us about them long ago?” “Yes, of course. But I say, Lu—” “What?” “I wouldn’t have felt safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.” “I should think not,” said Lucy.15

14 15

pc Ch. 11 pp. 157–158. Cf. Myers, C.S. Lewis in Context (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994) 138–140 on the “allegory” of Bacchus here. pc Ch. 11 p. 160.

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Lewis splits the focalization of the story here. While some revels continue in the forest, Caspian, Peter, Edmund, and Susan proceed against the Telmarine forces. Peter challenges the usurping Miraz to single combat, but late in the fight, when Miraz is down, he is treacherously murdered by one of his own followers.16 The Telmarine traitors themselves cry “Treachery!” and full scale battle is joined. With the help of the awakened Trees, Caspian and his allies rout the Telmarines toward the river where they had constructed a bridge – only to find it vanished. The narrative then flashes back to where we had left Lucy and Aslan in the forest along with Bacchus and his followers. Their movement becomes an erupting Bacchic kômos that liberates the world of nature and cuts off the retreat of the Telmarine soldiers before turning to the humans oppressed by Telmarine culture. When they arrive at the river, “a great wet, bearded head” emerges and addresses Aslan: “Hail, Lord,” it said. “Loose my chains.” “Who on earth is that?” whispered Susan. “I think it’s the river-god, but hush,” said Lucy. “Bacchus,” said Aslan. “Deliver him from his chains.” “That means the bridge, I expect,” thought Lucy. And so it did. Bacchus and his people splashed forward into the shallow water, and a minute later the most curious things began happening. Great, strong trunks of ivy came curling up all the piers of the bridge, growing as quickly as a fire grows, wrapping the stones round, splitting, breaking, separating them. The walls of the bridge turned into hedges gay with hawthorn for a moment and then disappeared as the whole thing with a rush and a rumble collapsed into the swirling water. With much splashing, screaming, and laughter the revelers waded or swam or danced across the ford (“Hurray! It’s the Ford of Beruna again now!” cried the girls) and up the bank on the far side and into the town.17 Paul Ford suggests this scene draws directly on Ovid’s account of Bacchus’ destruction of the Lydian pirates’ ship in Metamophoses 3. 600–690.18 Particularly relevant are these lines: 16 17 18

There may be a very distant echo of the duel of Menelaus and Paris in Iliad 3 here, but I would not press it. pc Ch. 14 pp. 197–199. Ford (2005) 65 n.22. The recent film of Prince Caspian, of course, opted for the personified river god as agent of destruction, probably aping a river scene in Peter Jackson’s film ­version of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

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stetit aequore puppis haud aliter quam si siccum navale teneret. illi admirantes remorum in verbere perstant velaque deducunt geminaque ope currere temptant. impediunt hederae remos nexuque recurvo serpunt et gravidis distinguunt vela corymbis. (3. 658–663) The ship stood still as if a dry dock held it in the sea. — The wondering sailors laboured at the oars, and they unfurled the sails, in hopes to gain some headway, with redoubled energies; but twisting ivy tangled in the oars, and interlacing held them by its weight. trans. Brookes More

The Bacchic revel sweeps past the river and through the town, breaking up the lesson in a girls’ school, freeing oppressed animals and humans alike: At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into flower in the man’s hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root. The boy, who had been crying a moment before, burst out laughing and joined them.19 Some critics have found misogyny in Lewis’ description of the unnamed “dumpy, prim little girls” of the school who flee the revel (while one child named Gwendolen happily joins it),20 but one might also note how Lewis reverses both the power and gender dynamics of the Ovidian Apollo and Daphne only moments later, as the violent male persecutor metamorphoses into the tree while his victim escapes with laughter. After the surrender of the Telmarine soldiers, the celebration becomes even greater. The gustatory appeal of its description, written in and for an England still enduring post-war rationing, is not just Dionysiac but redolent of the abundance of a golden age:21 19 20

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pc Ch. 14 p. 201–202. pc Ch. 14 p. 200. Particularly harsh is the reaction of Goldthwaite, The Natural History of Make-Believe: A Guide to the Principal Works of Britain, Europe, and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 228–229, to which compare Miller (2008) 143–146 and passim. See Wolfe (2010) 182 on Lewis’ use of “a Golden Age familiar to classical and post-classical myth, but not so obviously acceptable to canonical Christianity.”

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Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads began a dance, far wilder than the dance of the trees; not merely a dance for fun and beauty (though it was that too) but a magic dance of plenty, and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell, the feast came into existence – sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smells, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-coloured sugars and cream as thick as porridge and as smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries – pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines: dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellow-green and greenish-yellow.22 The whole story of Prince Caspian is thus framed by memory and return. The memories of Old Narnia, kept alive by his nurse and tutor, shape the young Caspian and prepare him to welcome the return of the “kings and queens of old.” Once they have discerned the real plan of Aslan, led by the youngest returnee, Lucy, the very trees remember how to dance and communicate again, and Narnia is restored – at least for a time. Memory and forgetting are key to beginning and ending the tale of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The overall story pattern here is clearly Odyssean,23 although the adventure begins with an ecphrastic device that could come from one of the classical Greek romances. At the end of Prince Caspian the two older Pevensy children, Peter and Susan, have learned they may not return to Narnia. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader opens with the younger two, Edmund and Lucy, sharing a summer holiday with their disagreeable and disbelieving cousin Eustace Scrubb. As they are all looking at a picture of a ship on the bedroom wall, the scene begins to move, the water to splash them, and they pass through the frame into Narnia.24 Caspian is now King and on a voyage in search of the seven lords who once faithfully served his father but were sent off 22 pc Ch. 15 p. 211. 23 Manlove, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Patterning of a Fantastic World (New York: Twayne, 1993) 57–58. 24 Compare the image that contains the story of Daphnis and Chloe, dedicated in the shrine of the Nymphs at the beginning of their narrative, or the painting of the rape of Europa in the shrine that opens the narrative of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. Murrin “The Multiple Worlds of the Narnia Stories,” in Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar, eds. Word and Story in C.S. Lewis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) 237–241 also suggests that the power of the picture to move is an answer to Platonic criticisms of visual depiction.

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by the treacherous Miraz on a journey intended to eliminate them. Their adventures take them to strange islands and encounters with dangerous creatures, several with classical precedents though none, at least until the end, specific to the Odyssey.25 One island contains a pool of water that transforms everything it touches into gold: one of the unfortunate lords apparently dove into that water and is now a solid gold statue at its bottom. The story “invert[s] the fate of Midas”26 and becomes a test of greed the voyagers must pass. On another island invisible voices that serve a great magician (an echo of the invisible voices of Cupid’s palace in Apuleius’ tale of Cupid and Psyche?27) prove, when the spell that made them invisible is reversed, to be a tribe of creatures that hop about on their single giant foot. They call themselves Duffers, but the visitors dub them Monopods. While any number of mediaeval sources told of (and illustrated) such creatures, Lewis certainly would have known of the earliest source to imagine them, Pliny’s Natural History.28 An earlier adventure that might appear more Norse in its inspiration (and certainly Christian in its significance) is the transformation of Eustace into a dragon. Separating himself from his companions on yet another island, Eustace encounters an ancient dragon just as the beast expires. Though terrified by the sight, he is driven to take refuge in the dragon’s cave by a fierce thunderstorm and finds there the dragon’s treasure hoard – on which he then falls asleep. He awakes to another terrifying sight: 25

Though Vergilius, Lewis, and Reyes, C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) 32–33 suggests that a storm description in vdt Ch. 5 p. 68 (“a great valley in the sea opened”) may be reminiscent of the storm in the Odyssean opening of Vergil, Aeneid 1. 103–108. 26 Edwards (2010) 66. 27 Lewis famously metamorphosed the whole of this Apuleian story into his own Till We Have Faces: see among many other studies (briefly) Montgomery, “Classical Literature,” in Thomas L. Martin, ed., Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2000) 65–67, Edwards (2010) 67–68, and Glover, C.S. Lewis: The Art of Enchantment (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1981) 187–199. 28 7.2.23: idem hominum genus, qui Monocoli vocarentur, singulis cruribus, mirae pernicitatis ad saltum; eosdem Sciapodas vocari, quod in maiore aestu humi iacentes resupini umbra se pedum protegant. (cf. also Aulus Gellius, na 9.4.9). Ford (2005) 182 suggests they might also come from Augustine’s City of God 16.8: item ferunt esse gentem, ubi singula crura in pedibus habent nec poplitem flectunt, et sunt mirabilis celeritatis; quos Sciopodas vocant, quod per aestum in terra iacentes resupini umbra se pedum protegant. Intriguingly, Augustine illustrates his Sciapods by citing a mosaic in a public space at Carthage, but notes these depictions are “taken from books” (ex libris deprompta). Nor does Lewis forget his Monopods after this novel, for they also appear briefly in lb Ch. 14, p. 188.

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What woke him was a pain in his arm. The moon was shining in at the mouth of the cave, and the bed of treasures seemed to have grown much more comfortable: in fact he could hardly feel it at all. He was puzzled by the pain in his arm at first, but presently it occurred to him that the bracelet which he had shoved up above his elbow had become strangely tight. His arm must have swollen while he was asleep (it was his left arm). He moved his right arm in order to feel his left, but stopped before he had moved it an inch and bit his lip in terror. For just in front of him, and a little on his right, where the moonlight fell clear on the floor of the cave, he saw a hideous shape moving. He knew that shape: it was a dragon’s claw. It had moved as he moved his hand and became still when he stopped moving his hand.29 Only when he dashes from the cave in terror and looks into a pool of water does Eustace realize the truth: “The dragon face in the pool was his own reflection… Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.”30 The reader experiences Eustace’s sufferings as a dragon as direct narration, but of his re-metamorphosis into a human we hear only as Eustace tells it to Edmund. A lion (identified by Edmund as Aslan) has appeared to Eustace, led him to a pool of water, and told him to “undress.” Eustace discovers after immersing himself in the water that he can peel off his dragon skin – but there is always more dragon underneath. Only the claws of the lion can finally remove his dragon shape and restore the boy underneath. The baptismal allegory seems obvious,31 but the origin of the dragon less so. Lewis himself a few years later, however, argued that all western stories of dragons and treasure had their origin in one of Phaedrus’ Aesopic fables, where a fox comes to the cave of a dragon who guards hidden treasure (pervenit ad draconis speluncam ultimam,/custodiebat qui thesauros abditos, Fable 4. 21. 3–4).32 29 30

vdt Ch. 6 p. 94. vdt Ch. 6 p. 97. Glover (1981) 152 suggests this is “a comic but pointed version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis more akin to Apuleius than Ovid.” 31 Myers (1994) 145–147 (suggesting also an echo of Dante’s plunge into the river Lethe); Jacobs (2010) 272. 32 Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 147–148. There may be an etiolated version of a succession myth here too: though Eustace does not slay the old dragon, his transformation comes after taking his predecessor’s place “on a dragon’s hoard” in the cave. Is he a draco Nemorensis?.

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Near the end of the novel, Caspian wants to continue exploring, perhaps like Alexander to learn ever more, but he faces a rebellion among his crew, whose spokesbeast is the Master Mouse, Reepicheep:33 “If it please your Majesty, we mean shall not,” said Reepicheep with a very low bow. “You are the King of Narnia. You break faith with all your subjects, and especially with Trumpkin, if you do not return. You shall not please yourself with adventures as if you were a private person. And if your Majesty will not hear reason it will be the truest loyalty of every man on board to follow me in disarming and binding you till you come to your senses.” “Quite right,” said Edmund. “Like they did with Ulysses when he wanted to go near the Sirens.”34 The narrative thus finally invokes the memory of Ulysses at the moment that Lewis redirects it away from its classical archetype. Edmund as a child of earth knows the story of Ulysses and the Sirens but does not acknowledge that where the original Ulysses ordered his crew to bind him so that he could learn yet more from the Sirens and extend his quest even further, here Caspian/ Ulysses is forced by his crew to yield to duty and return home. Perhaps Caspian’s turn as Ulysses was not quite done with his first homecoming from the sea. The next story to be published (though written fifth), The Silver Chair, brings Eustace Scrubb back to Narnia, accompanied by a new character, Jill Pole. Aslan assigns them a quest, made more difficult at the outset because they just miss the now aged King Caspian as he sails away in search of his missing son. Some quest patterns have so many incarnations that proving a specifically classical origin for one may be challenging, but the cumulative details here help greatly. Here is how Eustace and Jill first hear the story of the disappearance/ abduction of the royal heir, Prince Rilian: About ten years ago, it appeared, when Rilian, the son of Caspian, was a very young knight, he rode with the Queen his mother on a May morning 33

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Ford (2005) 188 suggests that this title for Reepicheep comes from a famous Renaissance work, Robert Henryson’s The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian. In Henryson’s rendition of the Lion and Mouse we hear how (line 1411) “And with his pow, the maister mous he tuke.” Colbert, The Magical Worlds of Narnia: The Symbols, Myths, and Fascinating Facts Behind The Chronicles (New York: Berkley Books, 2005) 108–109 thinks Aesop was already at work in lww Ch. 15 pp. 159–160, as the mice there chew away Aslan’s bonds. vdt Ch. 16 pp. 229–230 ; cf. Ford (2005) 288 on the Ulysses allusion.

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in the north parts of Narnia. They had many squires and ladies with them and all wore garlands of fresh leaves on their heads, and horns at their sides; but they had no hounds with them, for they were maying, not hunting. In the warm part of the day they came to a pleasant glade where a fountain flowed freshly out of the earth, and there they dismounted and ate and drank and were merry. After a time the Queen felt sleepy, and they spread cloaks for her on the grassy bank, and Prince Rilian with the rest of the party went a little way from her, that their tales and laughter might not wake her. And so, presently, a great serpent came out of the thick wood and stung the Queen in her hand. All heard her cry out and rushed towards her, and Rilian was first at her side. He saw the worm gliding away from her and made after it with his sword drawn. It was great, shining, and as green as poison, so that he could see it well: but it glided away into thick bushes and he could not come at it. So he returned to his mother, and found them all busy about her.35 The Queen dies of the serpent’s bite, and Rilian then searches repeatedly for the monster, but eventually finds instead a lady in green, with whom he then disappears. As the reader will discover, Rilian has been imprisoned underground by the lady in green, and the action of the book is his rescue. As such, it has a broad resemblance to many classical and post-classical narratives of journeys to the Underworld, starting with Odysseus’ visit to the dead in Odyssey 11.36 The beginning of Rilian’s story, though, has other classical echoes too, with some gender inversion: mother and child in a woodland setting, abduction of the child, and a desperate search by the parent (in Silver Chair, the surviving father, King Caspian) might also suggest the myth of Ceres and Proserpina.37 35 sc Ch. 4, pp. 57–58. 36 Adey, C.S. Lewis, Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998) 172 suggests The Silver Chair “draws upon the medieval quest romances and beyond them the myth of Orpheus. The ‘Underland’ inhabited by the Witch’s inhibited and silent subjects blends elements from the Greek Underworld, the Judaic Sheol, and the modern totalitarian state.” Others have thought of more recent influences such as Rider Haggard’s underground cities of Mur in Queen Sheba’s Ring and Nyo in When the World Shook (Green and Hooper (1974) 251). 37 Given Lewis’ interest in Apuleius (on which see further, below), it is just possible that the serpent also owes something to the terrifying story in the Golden Ass 8. 19–21 of the old man who appeals to travellers for help for his grandson fallen into a ditch but then proves to be a serpent who devours those who come to his aid (immanem draconem mandentem, 8. 21).

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In this underground world, called by its inhabitants the Underland, Rilian is held captive in two different ways. For most of his waking hours, the prince has no memory of his life before he came to the Underland but relies on what the Green Witch has told him about the world above (which he does visit briefly, but only in her company and under her spell). For one hour a day, however, he regains his memory of his identity and overwhelming desire to escape – but during these periods he is bound by the Witch’s followers to the book’s eponymous silver chair, from which he cannot escape without aid. John Cox in an important and influential early study has suggested a particular influence of Spenser’s Faerie Queen on this central image and device. There Mammon offers Sir Guyon a “siluer seat” (ii. 7. 53) within the “Garden of Proserpina.”38 This may indeed be one reason the chair in Lewis is silver, but while Mammon tempts the knight to accept his worldview, there is no suggestion the “siluer stoole” (ii. 7. 63) itself will imprison him. Another myth, however, includes a chair or chairs in the Underworld which do hold the occupant prisoner: the story of Theseus and Pirithous, who descend in an attempt to steal Proserpina back. They are detected, caught, and imprisoned in chairs from which Theseus escapes – but cannot rescue his comrade Pirithous.39 While Lewis undoubtedly will have known an obvious source for this myth in Horace Odes 4.7 directly, one wonders if A.E. Housman’s famous translation of this poem might have had some influence as well: “And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain/The love of comrades cannot take away.”40 A different kind of myth clearly shapes the other form of Rilian’s imprisonment. Aslan calls the heroes of The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole, into Narnia in order to rescue the prince. They do not recognize Rilian when they find him in the Underland, for at first he seems a very fatuous, pampered, and self-satisfied individual, the opposite of what a prince should be – and with no memory of Narnia. 38

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Cox, “Epistemological Release in The Silver Chair,” in Peter J. Schakel, ed., The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977) 162–163. Did Spenser’s “Garden of Proserpina” influence Lewis’ original set-up of the story? Colbert (2005) 138–140 (with the piquant subtitle “Used Furniture”) has noticed the possible influence of the Pirithous myth and goes on to suggest that a silver-inlaid chair (ἐπὶ θρόνου ἀργυροήλου, Od. 10. 314 and 366) where Circe places Odysseus in her attempt to transform and enslave him may also have an influence. For the impact of Housman on Lewis, see Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005) 76–78 and Lewis’ letter of 6 October 1929 to Arthur Greeves, describing A Shopshire Lad: “What a terrible little book it is – perfect and deadly, the beauty of the gorgon” (Hooper (2004) i 832).

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“You must understand, friends, that I know nothing of who I was and whence I came into this Dark World. I remember no time when I was not dwelling, as now, at the court of this all but heavenly Queen; but my thought is that she saved me from some evil enchantment and brought me hither of her exceeding bounty. … And this seems to me the likelier because even now I am bound by a spell, from which my Lady alone can free me. Every night there comes an hour when my mind is most horribly changed, and, after my mind, my body. For first I become furious and wild and would rush upon my dearest friends to kill them, if I were not bound. And soon after that, I turn into the likeness of a great serpent, hungry, fierce, and deadly.”41 He regains his memory only once imprisoned in the chair – and his rage and despair in this condition but with his memory is so great that the children at first fear to loose him. They nonetheless do – only to be confronted by the returning Green Witch who attempts to convince the children as well as Rilian that the Narnia they remember and indeed the whole world above ground is a false memory, an illusion or a fiction they have spun for themselves.42 One of her key arguments is: The Witch shook her head. “I see,” she said, “that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty makebelieve, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”43 Given Lewis’ well known interests in Plato, the inspiration of the Cave with its flickering shadows in the Republic is obvious and has been extensively discussed.44 With the aid of Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, the Witch’s spell of illusion is broken and her serpent form exposed. Rilian slays her and with the children begins their escape from the Underland, though not without a look into the yet deeper realm of Bism, from which the Witch had drawn and enslaved her Earthmen servants. The reader catches a glimpse of its salaman41 42 43 44

sc Ch. 11 pp. 156–157. Myers (1994) 153–154. sc Ch. 12 pp. 179–180. Ford (2005) 337–338, with further references.

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ders, living fire creatures, another reminisce from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.45 When they break out to the surface, Rilian is welcomed as the lost heir, and two centaurs46 give the children rides back to Narnia. Rilian arrives there in time for only a momentary reunion with his aged father Caspian, before the latter dies. Any echo of Ulysses and Telemachus is very brief, as Aslan appears to convey them from Narnia to the Mountain of Aslan, and thence returns Eustace and Jill to earth. Published fifth, though written earlier, The Horse and His Boy is the only one  of the Chronicles set wholly within the Narnian world. At the outset we meet Shasta, a boy living with a poor fisherman in the southern kingdom of Calormen. When a visiting warrior tries to buy him from the fisherman, Shasta discovers that he is not the fisherman’s son, but a lost child raised only for his labor value. Simultaneously he learns that the warrior’s horse is a captured Narnian talking horse, named Bree, who then proposes that he and Shasta escape northward to Narnia together. The adventure plot both draws on and mocks elements and atmospherics of the Arabian Nights, and Lewis’ treatment of the largely perfidious Calormenes has provoked increasing criticism.47 Given the mode of the story-telling, one might expect no classical reminisces at all, but one major element of the plot’s climax has a startlingly clear source in Roman literature, though there has been virtually no discussion of this until recently.48 Interwoven with the escape of Shasta and Bree, as well as of the young Calormene noblewoman Aravis and her Narnian horse Hwin, is the story of the impetuous and arrogant Prince Rabadash, who has wooed but been rejected by Queen Susan of Narnia. His wounded pride leads him into a sneak attack on the kingdom of Archenland, a Narnian ally, as part of a larger plan to subjugate Narnia. Shasta, who proves to be a lost prince of Archenland, plays a key role in 45 Pliny nh 10.86 and 29.23; also found in Paracelsus, discussed by Lewis in his Discarded Image (Lewis (1964) 135); see Ford (2005) 380. 46 “A Centaur called Cloudbirth, a famous healer” (sc Ch. 16 p. 230), is doubtless an avatar of Cheiron, but Lewis found centaurs good to think with more generally: they are his image for how “Spirit rides Nature so perfectly” in Miracles (Lewis Miracles: A Preliminary Study. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947) 166). See the previous chapter by Lisa Maurice in this volume. 47 See for example the chapter on “Garlic and Onions” in Miller (2008) 119–128 and in response Taylor, “‘Beautiful Barbarians’: Anti-Racism in The Horse and His Boy and Other Chronicles of Narnia,” in Michelle Ann Abate and Lance Weldy, eds., C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 161–185. 48 Apart from six words in Glover (1981) 160 (“a la Apuleius’ The Golden Ass”), nothing seems to have been published on the Apuleian inspiration for Rabadash’s fate until the thesis of Hartman, “Transformation As Disease, Reincorporation As Cure: A Comparative Case-Study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses & C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy” (M.A. thesis. University of British Columbia, 2010), which she kindly shared with me after I gave a talk on the subject.

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foiling this attempt, but Aslan redirects this story in a remarkable way. Rabadash has been captured, in a humiliating fashion, but is furiously defying his captors when Aslan appears and warns Rabadash to accept mercy and peace. Here Rabadash loses all self-control, appealing to his own god, Tash: “Demon! Demon! Demon!” shrieked the Prince. “I know you. You are the foul fiend of Narnia. You are the enemy of the gods. Learn who I am, horrible phantasm. I am descended from Tash, the inexorable, the irresistible. The curse of Tash is upon you…”49 Aslan speaks three times, twice offering him the chance to repent, but the third time announcing, “The hour has struck.” In the midst of making faces and wagging his ears, Rabadash begins to change: Rabadash had been wagging his ears all the time and as soon as Aslan said, “The hour has struck!” the ears began to change. They grew longer and more pointed and soon were covered with grey hair. And while everyone was wondering where they had seen ears like that before, Rabadash’s face began to change too. It grew longer, and thicker at the top and larger eyed, and the nose sank back into the face (or else the face swelled out and became all nose) and there was hair all over it. And his arms grew longer and came down in front of him till his hands were resting on the ground: only they weren’t hands, now, they were hoofs. And he was standing on all fours, and his clothes disappeared, and everyone laughed louder and louder (because they couldn’t help it) for now what had been Rabadash was, simply and unmistakably, a donkey.50 Rabadash realizes what is happening and begins to plead just as he loses his human voice and starts to bray,51 but Aslan has one more thing to say: 49 50 51

hhb Ch. 15 p. 217. hhb Ch. 15 pp. 217–218. The donkey’s attempt at human speech that turns into a bray is a regular feature of the ass narrative. See for example Lucius’ attempts in ass form to appeal to Caesar at Golden Ass 3. 29. Lewis achieves a certain pathos by locating the transformation in the middle of a speech, as Rabadash cries “‘Oh, not a Donkey! Mercy! If it were even a horse – e’en – a  hor  – auh, eeh-auh.’ And so the words died away into a donkey’s bray” (hhb Ch. 15 p. 219). Cf. also Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 157 on the centrality of language to humanness in this passage.

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“Now hear me, Rabadash,” said Aslan. “Justice shall be mixed with mercy. You shall not always be an Ass.” … “You have appealed to Tash,” said Aslan. “And in the temple of Tash you shall be healed. You must stand before the altar of Tash in Tashbaan at the great Autumn Feast this year and there, in the sight of all Tashbaan, your ass’ shape will fall from you and all men will know you for Prince Rabadash. But as long as you live, if ever you go more than ten miles away from the great temple in Tashbaan you shall instantly become again as you now are. And from that second change there will be no return.”52 The narrator relates that Rabadash was indeed sent home and regained his human form at the temple as promised, in front of “four or five thousand people.” The conditionality of his return to human form makes Rabadash the most peaceful of rulers when he ascends the throne, never daring to go off to war himself nor allowing his military through their own successes to challenge him; as a result he is a laughingstock to his people. Given Lewis’ fascination with Apuleius, dating already from his first student days at Oxford, the comedy of Rabadash’s future may offer some reflection on Lewis’ view of the final fortunes of the narrator Lucius in the Golden Ass. The Magician’s Nephew, which supplies a creation narrative and pre-history of Narnia, also reveals the existence of multiple worlds or universes and so is perhaps more a tale in the mode of science fiction than any of the preceding Narnian Chronicles. Yet the magician of the title, Uncle Andrew, found the key to those multiple worlds in a box he inherited. The box is Atlantean in origin, and though instructed to destroy it unopened, Uncle Andrew like Pandora53 opens it and finds the dust of another world that he employs to make rings as transportation devices between worlds.54 His nephew, Digory, is forced into travelling between worlds in order to rescue his friend Polly, sent there unwillingly by the nefarious Uncle Andrew. While many kinds of metamorphoses could be traced in the complicated narrative that follows, the search for further particular classical reminisces may be less fruitful here.55 Polly and Digory end up in the Hall of Images, containing a long series of frozen figures seated in chairs. All magnificently dressed 52 53 54 55

hhb Ch. 15 p. 219. Colbert (2005) 65–68. mn Ch. 2 pp. 15–27. The tempting and dangerous magical apples, for example, which figure so prominently in the story’s conclusion, clearly come from the biblical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil rather than the gardens of the Hesperides.

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and imposing, the earliest figures nonetheless seem appealing: “Both the men and women looked kind and wise….”56 Succeeding figures grow sterner and crueler, culminating in the queen, Jadis, whose release will wreak havoc. Clare Hulton has suggested that this display of degeneration may suggest the Hesiodic Ages of Man, though there is no clear metallic imagery and the succession is very long.57 The subsequent chase through worlds leads back to our own and out again into a place that is no place58 where song, eventually the song of Aslan, brings a new world into being. First comes light, then land, then vegetation, until finally animals erupt out of the very earth itself: Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? … In all directions it was swelling into humps. … And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal.59 Narnia’s animals are thus truly autochthonous – apart from the very first Talking Horse, Strawberry, dragged through from Earth along with his cab and cabbie. Aslan then makes him the first flying horse and re-names him Fledge, therefore a Pegasus, since Fledge transports Digory to the otherwise inacces­ sible mountain garden that shelters those magic apples.60 Digory and Polly return to this world, but the cabbie Frank and his wife remain to rule over Narnia, producing a next generation that intermarries with Narnia’s classical 56 57

mn Ch. 4 p. 47. Colbert (2005) 73–77 offers a discussion, with the attribution to Clare Hulton, but gives no specific source. 58 An outopia? Though I see no specific invocation of the term. 59 mn Ch. 9 p. 113. Perhaps there is an echo here of Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth to bring forth armed warriors from the clods of earth: “inde ( fide maius) glaebae coepere moveri,/primaque de sulcis acies apparuit hastae” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 3. 106–107). 60 There might be an echo or two of Apuleius’ Cupid and Psyche here as well. Lewis first discovered the Golden Ass through a translation of Cupid and Psyche, wherein Zephyrus (mitis aura molliter spirantis Zephyri, 4.35) transports Psyche to Cupid’s otherwise inaccessible palace. There may also be an echo of Jove’s eagle, who helps Psyche when Cupid’s angry mother Venus sets her the impossible task of fetching water from an inaccessible mountain peak (insistentem celsissimae illi rupi montis ardui verticem, 6.13), guarded by dragons. The eagle not only obtains the water for her but informs Psyche that she dare not in any case touch the water from this “holy and no-less murdering stream” (6.15, trans. Lindsay), fearsomely similar to the apples. The very next task Venus imposes on Psyche is to take a box to Proserpina in the Underworld and bring back some of her beauty for Venus – yet despite warnings, Psyche like Pandora opens the box on her return with dire consequences.

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denizens: “The boys married nymphs, and the girls married wood-gods and river-gods.”61 While Lewis may later have suggested reading the novels in another order, the publication order has been followed here, thus taking us straight from Narnia’s creation to its apocalypse in The Last Battle. Though Lewis insisted that he began to write of Narnia without any notion of creating Christian allegory, the final novel is deeply informed by it – and more classical memories as well. At the novel’s beginning the ape Shift creates a false Aslan by putting a lion skin on his dim-witted “friend,” the donkey Puzzle, and proceeds to sell Narnia and its inhabitants to the Calormenes. When King Tirian, introduced as “the last of the Kings of Narnia” (lb Ch. 2 p. 16), learns of the return of Aslan, he is at first overjoyed, but the centaur Roonwit arrives to tell him it cannot be so, for “The stars never lie, but Men and Beasts do” (lb Ch. 2 p. 19). His dire warning is confirmed by the arrival of a dryad to report that she and her fellow talking trees are being cut down and slain: “Woe, woe, woe!” called the voice. “Woe for my brothers and sisters! Woe for the holy trees! The woods are laid waste. The axe is loosed against us. We are being felled. Great trees are falling, falling, falling….” “A-a-a-h,” gasped the Dryad shuddering as if in pain – shuddering time after time as if under repeated blows. Then all at once she fell sideways as suddenly as if both her feet had been cut from under her. For a second they saw her lying dead on the grass and then she vanished. They knew what had happened. Her tree, miles away, had been cut down.62 Mark Edwards is surely right to find here the echo of the murder of a dryad at the hands of Erysicthon in Ovid.63 Going to investigate, Tirian is captured and bound by Shift and his followers. In his despair, he nonetheless begins to remember all the history of the rulers of Narnia: And then he remembered (for he had always been good at history when he was a boy) how those same four children who had helped Caspian had been in Narnia over a thousand years before; and it was then that they had done the most remarkable thing of all. For then they had defeated the terrible White Witch and ended the Hundred Years of Winter, and 61 62 63

mn Ch. 15 p. 184. lb Ch. 2 pp. 20–21. Edwards (2010) 66. The nymph speaks to her murderer at Met. 8. 770–774, and her stricken fellow dryads (attonitae dryades, 777) race to Ceres for help.

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after that they had reigned (all four of them together) at Cair Paravel, till they were no longer children but great Kings and lovely Queens, and their reign had been the golden age of Narnia. And Aslan had come into that story a lot.64 It is memory that brings deliverance for, although his appeal to Aslan is at first unanswered, his cry for the “Friends of Narnia,” brings the children Jill and Eustace to his aid. Yet their appearance merely frees Tirian from captivity, and their attempt to expose the falsely metamorphosed donkey is foiled. They have returned to the stable from which Puzzle has made his appearances in the lion skin, which is explicitly compared to a theatre: …the whole thing was rather like a theatre. The crowd of Narnians were like the people in the seats; the little grassy place just in front of the stable, where the bonfire burned and the Ape and the Captain stood to talk to the crowd, was like the stage; the stable itself was like the scenery at the back of the stage; and Tirian and his friends were like people peering round from behind the scenery. It was a splendid position.65 Any hopes that undoing the damage of this theatrical fraud is simply a ­matter of stripping away costume and mask are dashed when Shift and his Calormene confederates themselves proclaim that an ass in a lion skin has already been seen abroad in the woods – whereas Tashlan, the syncretistic fusion of Aslan and the Calormenes’ god Tash, is still in the stable.66 Tirian and his allies nonetheless confront that audience and attempt to rally true Narnians to them. The complicated battle narrative that follows admits of no easy summary as they are ultimately forced back through the stable door – yet find themselves not in an interior space, but in a fresh and brilliant natural world. When Aslan himself arrives, the door re-opens, and they look back into Narnia – only to witness its end, as night arrives, the stars themselves fall, and ultimately the sea overwhelms everything.67

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lb Ch. 4 p. 49. lb Ch. 9 p. 114. Plato’s critique of theatrical illusion is surely implicated here. lb Ch. 9 p. 115. The dying sun grows huge and “very dark red” (lb Ch. 14 p. 180), fuses with the Moon, and all light vanishes. This apocalypse thus combines a dying red giant star and the heat death of the universe with the biblical version of Revelations 6: 12–13: “and the sun became

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They all turn toward the new world which opens out and up before them. The explanation is provided by Digory Kirke, the old professor returned to his prime again: “…that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” His voice stirred everyone like a trumpet as he spoke these words: but when he added under his breath “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” the older ones laughed. It was so exactly like the sort of thing they had heard him say long ago in that other world where his beard was grey instead of golden.68 We do not need the title of the next chapter, “Farewell to Shadowlands,” to recognize the influence of Plato’s ideal forms, of which the previous world has held only shadows.69

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black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth.” lb Ch. 15 p. 195. Edwards (2010) 67 asserts that this also “alludes to a passage in Plato which foretells the translation of souls after death to a world in which all that is best in ours persists except that the lines are bolder and the colours more intense,” i.e., Phaedo 110bcd. The narrator goes on, however, with an explanation that is decidedly un- or anti-Platonic: It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different – deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. (lb Ch. 15 pp. 195–196)

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Yet other memories compete or combine with classical ones as the characters continue to journey “further up and further in.” This new world contains not just the new and real Narnia, inhabited by all the characters we have known and cared for in the previous novels, but also the real version of the “real world” in which the very first novel began. Lucy discovers that she can see across on the ridge of another mountain Professor Kirke’s house, existing in “the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia” where “no good thing is destroyed.”70 As Mr. Tumnus explains: That country and this country – all the real countries – are only spurs jutting out from the great mountains of Aslan. We have only to walk along the ridge, upward and inward, till it joins on.71 M. Murrin has very persuasively suggested, “The model for Aslan’s country is the Earthly Paradise in Dante’s Purgatory (Canto 28), from which Lewis borrows the notion of an immeasurably high mountain which has no frigid zone.”72 Thus the Platonic ascent blends seamlessly into the climb up Mount Purgatory, and like Dante Pilgrim parting from Vergil, Lucy and the others now seem to leave purely classical memories behind. Aslan reveals that, having died with their parents in a railway accident in the earthly England, they are now at “the beginning of the real story.”73 Though Lewis eschews any detailed description of their life beyond this point, the book’s last sentence evokes a powerfully self-reflexive image with roots in the book of life (Revelation 20:12) and Dante’s book of the future (Paradiso 15.50): All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.74

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As Murrin (1991) 239 notes, this is precisely the reverse of Plato’s views of mirror images, though it may owe something to Apuleius’ defense in his Apology of mirrors as superior to pictorial art. lb Ch. 16 p. 208. lb Ch. 16 p. 209. Murrin (1991) 244. lb Ch. 16 p. 210. lb Ch. 16 p. 210–211. Cf. Rev. 20:12: alius liber apertus est qui est vitae; Dante, Paradiso 15.50– 51, del magno volume/du’ non si muta mai bianco né bruno (also Paradiso 19.113, quel volume aperto).

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We began, perhaps a little arbitrarily, by reading the titles on Mr. Tumnus’ bookshelves over Lucy’s shoulder, and we end with the option of joining her in becoming part of the story and the book that goes on and on. That notion of becoming a book could doubtless come from many places, yet one final classical possibility intrigues, given Lewis’ interest in and affection for Apuleius’ Golden Ass and its narrator Lucius. Early on, Lucius eagerly tells his doubting host of a prophecy he has received: nunc enim gloriam satis floridam, nunc historiam magnam et incredundam fabulam et libros me futurum (GA 2.12) on the one hand my reputation will really flourish, but on the other I  will become a long story, an unbelievable tale, a book in several volumes. trans. J.A. Hanson

I doubt that Lewis himself, could we now interview him, would think this the likeliest inspiration, and Lucy Pevensey is perhaps as far from Lucius in character as one might be, but she has been our first and last focalization for the stories of Narnia, and she shares with her brothers and sister, with many classical nods along the way, the flourishing fate of becoming “a long story…in several volumes.”

Part 3 Classical Mythology for Children

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chapter 8

Men into Pigs: Circe’s Transformations in Versions of The Odyssey for Children1 Sheila Murnaghan Among the most memorable and suggestive of Odysseus’ famous adventures is the episode in which Circe turns Odysseus’ companions into pigs and then back into men again. Forming part of Odysseus’ narrative to his Phaeacian hosts in Odyssey 9–12, the story connects with key themes of the adventures as a whole, featuring a lush and exotic setting and a powerful female figure who threatens Odysseus’ homecoming. In line with the poem’s interest in absolving Odysseus for the loss of his companions (signalled in the opening lines, Od. 1.6–9), the Circe episode underscores both Odysseus’ superiority to the companions and his concern for them. He is able (through Hermes’ gift of the magical plant moly) to withstand Circe’s attempt to turn him into an animal, and he refuses to touch her sumptuous feast until his men are restored to their human forms. At the same time, the episode ends with one of several moments at which the relations of Odysseus and his crew are reversed, as they have to remind him to think of his homecoming after a year of pleasure with Circe. In Odysseus’ narrative, the crew’s transformation into animals is treated as a purely physical matter and a great hardship. As the men take on the voices and bodies of pigs, their minds remain “sound as before”;2 when they return to their true forms, they experience the relief and retrospective sorrow of survivors of a terrible ordeal, so that even Circe feels pity for them.3 There is no explicit indication that the men are inherently like the pigs that they become, so that the transformation expresses their true natures; that inference has, however, been repeatedly drawn by readers and retellers of the story and is implicit in the Odyssey’s version.4 The companions’ ­susceptibil­ity to Circe’s drugs follows 1 My thanks to Deborah H. Roberts for helpful comments on a previous draft of this essay, to my student Rachel Miao for allowing me to draw on her outstanding paper on Hawthorne, and to Francesca Richards for sharing her work-in-progress on versions of the Odyssey for children. 2 Homer, Odyssey 10.240. 3 Ibid. 10.399. 4 On the reception history of this episode, see Yarnall, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008) 33–35.

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from qualities that make them inferior and s­ ubhuman relative to Odysseus: their lack of caution (highlighted by the ­wariness of one companion who refuses to enter Circe’s house) and their uncontrolled appetite for food. Their eager consumption of Circe’s poisoned banquet contrasts with Odysseus’ restraint when he refuses to eat before they have been released, anticipates their own fatal choice to eat the Cattle of the Sun, and links them to Penelope’s suitors, who rapaciously consume the house of Odysseus (specifically in the form of his pigs). Beneath the Odyssey’s account of a pathetic and traumatic deformation, there lurks a moralizing message about the failings of humans who resemble animals too much. There also lurks an opportunity for humour, in the absurd and deflating conjunction of humans and animals, especially domesticated animals, which Homer again plays down, but which has also been exploited in reception. Both moralizing and humour figure prominently in retellings of the classics for children, in proportions that vary according to a given period’s tastes and assumptions about child readers. This discussion draws on English-language versions of the Circe story from the past two centuries to chart shifting conceptions of how classical mythology should be presented to children. Many wellknown children’s Odysseys (including those by A.J. Church, Padraic Colum, and Rosemary Sutcliff) tell the story only briefly and rather blandly, but three in particular stand out for their expansion of Homer’s version (to a degree that increases over time) and their distinctive responses to the challenges to conventional decorum, as well as to the opportunities for moral instruction and playfulness, provided by a scenario in which humans are transformed into barnyard animals. As we will see, the element of playfulness steadily increases over this span of time, while a moral message that hinges on the difference between humans and animals, however variously conceptualized, remains an indispensible feature of the story.5 The first of these versions is found in the earliest children’s Odyssey in English, Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808).6 Following on the successful Tales from Shakespeare (1807) that Lamb co-authored with his sister 5 In their study of retold classics for children Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) note that such stories consistently display a marked ethical dimension while encompassing a wide range of registers, including the mocking. 6 On The Adventures of Ulysses in the overall context of Lamb’s writings for children, see Riehl, Charles Lamb’s Children’s Literature (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1980) especially 9–44 and 86–101. My discussion of Lamb has also benefited from a draft version of Francesca Richards’ forthcoming dissertation on English-language versions of the Odyssey for children.

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Mary, The Adventures of Ulysses represents an early attempt to turn a classical text into recreational reading for children, at a time when children’s books also had to meet strict standards of morality and good taste. Lamb himself was out of sympathy with the prevailing orthodoxy concerning children’s reading: the view, strongly influenced by the educational theories of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, that fairy tales and other imaginative forms should be rejected in favor of everyday material, factual instruction, and moral uplift. In a famous letter to Coleridge written in 1802, Lamb denounced works of contemporary authors as offering “vapid and insignificant” knowledge and contrasted them to the “wild tales” and “old wives, fables” that he and Coleridge had been inspired and shaped by.7 In the retelling of canonical works by Shakespeare, Lamb found an acceptable way to incorporate romance and adventure into marketable children’s literature. The Odyssey was a similarly respectable source and had already acquired the status of an improving book for the young through the popular adaptation by the French cleric Fenélon, Les Aventures de Télémaque (published in 1699 and immediately issued in English translation as The Adventures of Telemachus). In this work, Telemachus’ quest for his father takes him through a series of character-building trials and instructive visits to foreign lands under the guidance of Minerva disguised as Mentor; Fenélon’s educational mission was carried out via an adventure narrative, which assured the steady popularity of his book with English schoolboys.8 Lamb explicitly presented his own version of the Odyssey, which omits the opening books involving Telemachus, as a sequel to Fenélon’s work. But, like the plays of Shakespeare, the Odyssey also represented an exciting imaginative work associated with the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods: bypassing later and politer translations, Lamb based his retelling of the Odyssey largely on the vigorous early seventeenth-century version by George Chapman, often following Chapman’s wording very closely.9 7 Marrs, The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 2: 1801–1809 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) 81–82. On Lamb’s role in this controversy, in which the division between the two camps was far from absolute, see Riehl (1980) 9–44; Summerfield, Fantasy and Reason: Children’s Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) 245–58. On the broader debate about appropriate reading for children, see also Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 8 Bottigheimer, “Fairy Tales, Telemachus, and Young Misses Magazine: Moderns, Ancients, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Children’s Book Publishing,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 28 (2003) 172. 9 James, “Lamb and The Adventures of Ulysses,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 147 (2009) 107–115.

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Lamb’s publisher, William Godwin, shared many of his views but was inevitably more deferential to contemporary tastes. He tried to convince Lamb to tone down some of the most violent details of Odysseus’ adventures, such as “the minute and shocking description of the extinguishing of the giant’s eye,” noting that “we live in squeamish days,” and urging that the book should be acceptable for girls as well as boys. Godwin also made, from a pragmatic perspective, a point that is foundational to recent theorizing about children’s literature: “It is children that read children’s books (when they are read); but it is parents that choose them.”10 With an eye to these influential adults, Godwin also encouraged Lamb to add an informative preface that would make the book seem more educational. Lamb largely resisted Godwin’s suggestions; he refused to make “enervating” omissions (“If you want a book that is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a Tale which was so full of Anthropophagi & monsters,”) and he wrote only a brief preface (refusing to include “such a drawling biography,”).11 But in that preface he does indicate an intention of balancing entertainment with moral instruction. Homer’s original has been streamlined to “give it more the air of romance to young readers,” but the story of Ulysses is also an illustration of virtue: a brave man struggling with adversity; by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of mind under difficulties, forcing out a way for himself through the severest trial to which human life can be exposed… The agents in this tale, besides men and women, are giants, enchanters, sirens: things which denote external force or internal temptations, the twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect to encounter in its course through this world.12 Accordingly, Lamb makes Circe a thrilling enchantress, “deeply skilled in magic, a haughty beauty,” with “hair like the Sun,” but also stresses her “foul 10

Marrs (1975) 278. A seminal statement of the view that children’s literature is fundamentally shaped by adult conceptions of children and their needs is Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. (2nd edn.) (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992 [1984]); Rose’s views have been extensively debated, extended, and refined. See especially Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) and the special issue of the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35.3, published in Fall 2010. 11 Marrs (1975) 275, 283. 12 Lamb, The Adventures of Ulysses, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol 3., edited by E.V. Lucas (London: Methuen, 1903 [1808]) 207.

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witchcraft” as an affront to human dignity. Far from suggesting that the companions are inherently piglike, he draws attention to the distorting incongruity between human consciousness and animal form: to Homer’s report that the men retained their minds, he adds the observation that this “made them more to lament their brutish transformation.”13 In portraying Ulysses as an exemplary figure, Lamb throughout amplifies his superiority to his men and his excellence as a leader. In the Cyclops episode, he leaves out such complicating details as the companions’ attempt to dissuade Ulysses from lingering in the Cyclops’ cave, where several of them are then eaten, or the fatal curse that is brought down on them by Ulysses’ reckless boasting. The episode of the bag of winds is a moral lesson for the companions, “covetous wretches,” who bring unfair disgrace on Ulysses but are “cured of their surfeit for gold”.14 Yet, while the companions are morally weak compared to Ulysses, their transformation into pigs is by no means warranted. Ulysses manifests his exceptional virtue through horror at their abusive imprisonment in animal bodies and determination to rescue them. Any possible discrepancy between the men’s deficiencies and Ulysses’ esteem for them is softened by Lamb’s conversion of Odysseus’ first person narrative into a third person narrative, so that the men’s shortcomings are announced in the narrator’s voice, while Ulysses’ own words and reported thoughts dwell on their bonds of friendship and shared trials. In Lamb’s version, Hermes does not give him the moly right away, as in Homer, but only when it becomes clear that “compassion for the misfortunes of his friends had rendered [him] careless of danger” and Ulysses’ rejection of Circe’s banquet is described in terms that firmly place friendship and restoration of the natural hierarchy over sensual pleasure: “the feast which Ulysses desired to see was his friends (the partners of his voyage) once more in the shapes of men.”15 In the Odyssey, the rejected banquet occurs after Odysseus has accepted Circe’s invitation to go to bed; Lamb recasts this event in a way that allows him not only to clean up the unacceptable sexual content but also to spell out 13

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Lamb (1903) 217. With this addition, Lamb follows Chapman, whose version reads, “But still retain’d the souls they had before, / Which made them mourn their bodies’ change the more,” but gives the change an explicit moral coloration with “brutish.” This term recalls his earlier account of Ulysses’ clever plotting against the Cyclops, which “gave manifest proof how far manly wisdom exceeds brutish force” (Lamb (1903) 211). The sharp distinction between humans and pigs in this episode is consistent with Lamb’s subsequent (and now most famous) essay “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” (1823). Lamb (1903) 214–15. Ibid. 218–19.

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explicitly the dangerous connection between excessive indulgence in sex, eating and drinking and animal-like subhumanity: “O Circe,” he replied, “how canst thou treat of love or marriage with one whose friends thou hast turned into beasts? and how offerest him thy hand in wedlock, only that thou mightest have him in thy power, to live the life of a beast with thee, naked, effeminate, subject to thy will, perhaps to be advanced in time to the honour of a place in thy sty. What pleasure canst thou promise, which may tempt the soul of reasonable man? thy meats, spiced with poison; or thy wines, drugged with death? Thou must swear to me that thou wilt never attempt against me the treasons which thou hast practiced upon my friends.”16 Lamb’s Ulysses upholds the vital distinction between humans and animals in multiple ways: through his treatment of the resemblance between men and animals as only a metaphor; through his own display of the human virtues of loyalty and steadfastness; through his insistence on restoring his companions to their proper condition; and through his clear-headed resistance to the “internal temptations” that make men into virtual beasts. After he has spent a year with Circe, this hero does not need his men to get him back on track: Ulysses himself “awoke from the trance of the faculties into which her charms had thrown him…”.17 Some forty years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne also grappled with the proper balance of morality and entertainment in children’s literature, although in very different terms, as he retold the Circe story in his 1853 collection Tanglewood Tales. Hawthorne had already broken new ground in the presentation of classical myth for children with A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, published in 1851. There he recast a selection of Greek myths on the model of fairy tales, which had by that time returned to favor as desirable reading for children,18 converting them into lighthearted tales of wonder, with playful details and in some cases child protagonists, and detaching them from the educational context of classical history. In a nod to the inescapable adult arbiters of children’s reading, 16 Ibid. 219. 17 Ibid. 220. 18 Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008) 29; Roberts, “From Fairy Tale to Cartoon: Collections of Greek Myth for Children,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2009) 58–59. A “watershed” (Jackson 1989, 219) in this development was the publication in 1823 of the first translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales into English.

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he includes a defense of this reworking within A Wonder Book, in the form of a debate between his youthful internal narrator Eustace Bright (a vacationing college student who tells the tales to entertain his younger cousins and their friends) and an older scholar, Mr. Pringle. Bright asserts that the myths do not belong to any historical era but stem from a primordial golden age: they are “the immemorial birthright of mankind,” to which “an old Greek had no more exclusive right…than a modern Yankee.”19 In Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne again addresses the changes involved in reworking myths for a children, but with particular attention to the morally unsuitable elements that have to be removed. In a preface, he portrays himself as Eustace Bright’s advisor and editor and records a conversation in which he questions Bright about what he terms “those wild stories from the classic myths”:20 These old legends, so brimming over with everything that is most abhorrent to our Christianized moral-sense – some of them so hideous – others so melancholy and miserable, amid which the Greek Tragedians sought their themes, and moulded them into the sternest forms of grief that ever the world saw; – was such material the stuff that children’s playthings should be made of! How were they to be purified? How was the blessed sunshine to be thrown into them?21 Here Hawthorne signals the difference between his children’s tales and his adult fiction, which particularly dwells on themes of sin and immorality reminiscent of Greek tragedy – illicit sexuality, greed, hypocrisy, hereditary guilt – notably in two famous novels written shortly before Tanglewood Tales, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In answering this challenge, Bright again grounds mythology in a prehistoric golden age, and he identifies those darker elements as intrusions that fall away when the stories are told to children: The objectionable characteristics seem to be a parasitical growth, having no essential connection with the original fable. They fall away, and are thought of no more, the instant he puts his imagination in sympathy with the innocent little circle, whose wide-open eyes are fixed so eagerly upon him. Thus the stories…transform themselves, and re-assume the shapes 19 Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: The Library of America, 1982) 1255. 20 Ibid. 1308. 21 Ibid. 1310.

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which they might be supposed to possess in the pure childhood of the world.22 This sunny vision is tempered by the older man’s amusement at the “youthful author’s…confidence in himself and his performances” and assurance that “a few years will do all that is necessary towards showing him the truth, in both respects.”23 While Bright’s manifesto sets the tone for the tales that follow, Hawthorne also maintains a counterpoint between the two perspectives. Less suitable traditional elements do intrude, but are kept at a distance, sometimes through disavowals that draw the attention of savvier adult readers to what has been left out: “low-minded” people falsely claim that Ariadne ran off with Theseus and he deserted her.24 In treating myth as pleasure reading and decoupling it from historical instruction, Hawthorne did not renounce the goal of moral instruction but rather pursued it with a pointedly light touch. For example, Cadmus’ marvellous experience of sowing dragon’s teeth and seeing grown men spring up leads to an absurd aporia, “Cadmus hardly knew whether to consider them as men, or some kind of vegetable,” which ends in a surprisingly grim resolution, “although, on the whole, he concluded that there was human nature in them, because they were so fond of weapons and trumpets, and so ready to shed blood.”25 Hawthorne’s dark view of human nature colors his retelling of the Circe episode, which he includes as a free-standing tale detached from its epic context. He develops the Odyssey’s contrast between Odysseus and the companions into a more pronounced polarity between “wise King Ulysses” and his followers, characterized as “terrible gormandizers,…pretty sure to grumble if they missed their regular meals, and their irregular ones, besides.” The companions think of nothing but food; their desire for homecoming is reduced to a wish to “taste those nice little savoury dishes which my dearest wife knew how to serve

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Ibid. 1310. Ibid. 1310. Ibid. 1336. See Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) 213; Laffrado, Hawthorne’s Literature for Children (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) 110. Hawthorne (1982) 1379. The myth of the sown men also figures as a counterpoint to childhood innocence in The Scarlet Letter. Describing the imaginative life of Pearl, the child born of sin who lacks the purity of ordinary children, the narrator comments, “She never created a friend, but always seemed to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle.” Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: The Modern Library, 2000 [originally published 1850]) 86.

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up.”26 In introducing them, the narrator makes a material connection between gluttonous eating and resemblance to pigs: “From what is related of them, I reckon that their favorite diet was pork, and that they had lived upon it until a good part of their physical substance was swine’s flesh, and their tempers and disposition were very much akin to the hog.”27 Circe’s enchantment does not deform these men but makes them more truly themselves, as she herself proclaims: You are already swine in everything but the human form, which you disgrace, and which I myself should be ashamed to keep a moment longer, were you to share it with me. But it will require only the slightest exercise of magic to make the exterior conform to the hoggish disposition. Assume your proper shapes, gormandizers, and be gone to the sty!28 Hawthorne here subtly complicates the project of turning myths into suitable material for children. The purifying process by which myths shed their classical trappings and spontaneously “re-assume” their innocent original form is echoed and inverted in the countervailing process by which legendary characters shed their respectable exteriors and “assume” their true depraved natures, without much help from magic.29 Hawthorne’s moralizing is unmistakable but characteristically light-hearted. Gluttony is hardly the worst of human sins, as the rather jokey term “gormandizers” suggests.30 The tone of the narrative is

26 27 28 29

Ibid. 1392. Ibid. 1385. Ibid. 1396–97. I owe this point to Miao, “Homer to Hawthorne: Reshaping Myth and Man.” Unpublished paper (2013). On transformation as a key theme linking Hawthorne’s view of art and the myths that he adapted for children, especially those derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, see Staley, “Hawthorne’s Ovidian Transformations,” Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013) 126–143. Hawthorne introduces a character from the Metamorphoses into his version of the Circe episode: the Roman king Picus, who has been transformed into a woodpecker. 30 In The House of the Seven Gables, “a voracious and indelicate appetite” is a sign of weakness and arrested development in the essentially sympathetic character Clifford Pyncheon. Baym (1976) 164. Cf. also the satiric portrait in the “Custom-House” section of The Scarlet Letter of “The Inspector,” a shallow hedonist whose “trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients” were “barely enough measure to keep the old gentleman from walking on all fours.” Hawthorne especially notes the Inspector’s “gourmandism,” and identifies this as a specifically human failing: “One point, in which he had vastly the advantage over his four-footed brethren, was his ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat” (Hawthorne (2000) 16–17).

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exaggerated and satirical, and the narrator takes open delight in the incongruity of epic warriors turned into pigs: It looked so intolerably absurd to see hogs on cushioned thrones, that they made haste to wallow down upon all fours, like other swine…Dear me! what pendulous ears they had! what little red eyes, half buried in fat! and what long snouts, instead of Grecian noses!31 The moral point is nonetheless underscored when Hawthorne fleetingly entertains a possible departure from the plot of his classical model. In striking contrast to his predecessors in Homer and Lamb, Hawthorne’s Ulysses is not eager to have his companions turned back into men. Recognizing them by their greedy scuffling in Circe’s sty, he tells her: They are hardly worth the trouble of changing them into the human form again. Nevertheless, we will have it done, lest their bad example should corrupt the other hogs! Let them take their original shapes, therefore, Dame Circe, if your skill is equal to the task. It will require greater magic, I trow, than it did to make swine of them!32 Returning to their “original shapes,” does not purify these men, since “the swinish quality had [not] entirely gone out of them” as the narrator explains, adding that “When it once fastens itself into a person’s character, it is very difficult getting rid of it.” Ulysses’ companions belong to a general pattern in Hawthorne’s myth books, whereby the fantastic creatures of mythology provide entertainment but also serve as quasi-allegorical illustrations of spiritual deformation. Another example is the minotaur, who also inspires a moral lesson from the perspective of an older and less enchanted narrator. And oh, my good little people, you will perhaps see, one of these days, as I do now, that every human being that suffers anything evil to get into his nature or to remain there, is a kind of Minotaur…33

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Hawthorne (1982) 1397. Ibid. 1406. Ibid. 1333. This passage supports Baym’s claim that “the author of the stories in Tanglewood Tales is not after all the unsophisticated Eustace but the older, disenchanted Hawthorne.” Baym (1976) 214.

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The humorous side of Odysseus’ men as gormandizing pigs is beautifully ­captured in an illustration (fig. 8.1) on the cover of an edition published in 1913, one of the large number of illustrated reprints that extended the popularity of Hawthorne’s works well into the twentieth century. The artist was Milo Winter (1888–1956), illustrator of numerous children’s classics, including a stylistically similar and much-admired Aesop for Children, which appeared in 1906. Winter’s illustration connects the Circe story with Aesop’s Fables, a longstanding form of classically based children’s literature, in which anthropomorphic animals, while morally various, are not inherently problematic, either for the incongruity between human and animal that Lamb highlighted and reversed, or for the congruity that Hawthorne deplored.34 Aesop’s fables represent one element in the rich tradition underlying the most recent retellings of the Circe story for young readers: two book-length works by Paul Shipton, The Pig Scrolls (2004) and The Pig Who Saved the World (2006), ostensibly authored by “Gryllus the Pig,” one of Odysseus’ companions who has deliberately avoided being changed back into a human. Shipton does not retell the Odyssey directly but uses it as a starting point and reworks its events and themes to construct Gryllus’ own story; this involves traveling through the Mediterranean world and saving the cosmos from threats to the Olympian order in the company of a determined young ex-Pythia named Sybil and a pimply teenaged poet named Homer, to whom Gryllus provides the material that becomes the Odyssey. The books resemble other recent narratives in which the freely-invented fantasy adventures of adolescent heroes are given a mythological context, whether transposed to the modern world, as in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, or kept in the world of ancient legend, as in the Corydon books by Tobias Druitt. Odyssean elements in the Gryllus books include, for example, a return visit to the cave of the Cyclops in the second book, which also features a mysterious prophecy according to which “nobody” will save the universe. Placing Gryllus at the center of the narrative, and giving him a voice with which to tell his own story, Shipton combines the Odyssey tradition with the broad phenomenon of children’s books with animal protagonists.35 Many of these involve notable pigs, among them Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland, Freddy in Walter Brooks’ “Freddy the Pig” series, Wilbur in E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, 34 Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. Third Edition, revised by Brian Alderson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 9-31; Lerer, Children’s Literature. A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 35–56. 35 On the roots of this phenomenon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), especially 63–92 on animal autobiography.

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Figure 8.1  Milo Winter, cover illustration for Tanglewood Tales. RAND MCNALLY, 1913

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and Babe in Dick King-Smith’s Babe. Such works vary widely in the kinds of affinities between children and animals that they project; the fictional pig whom Gryllus most closely resembles is perhaps White’s Wilbur, who represents childishness through a combination of hedonism and self-concern, qualities that are well conveyed by a pig’s proverbial love of eating and wellfounded alertness to the danger that he will be eaten himself. Gryllus is constantly thinking about food, especially pies, and is only reluctantly dragged into the heroic role he is destined to play. In keeping with the presumed tastes of a target audience defined as ages 10–14, Gryllus’ self-presentation is thoroughly and gleefully irreverent; he is a constantly joking “smarty pants” (to quote the back cover). We no longer live in such squeamish days as Godwin and Lamb, and Gryllus’ patter abounds in earthiness and bathroom humour. One of his favorite themes is introduced when he first meets Homer and treats him to a limerick in which “Spartan” rhymes with “fartin’” (to be supplied by the reader).36 His constant jokes are exuberantly bad and often depend on deflating juxtapositions of high and low, usually intensified by a comparable mix of ancient and modern, as seen in his request to Homer : “Do you know ‘We All Live in a Yellow Trireme?’ I can hum it for you.”37 Incongruous modern and everyday details crop up in similes such as “A mix of feelings swirled in my brain like a badly made moussaka.”38 Gryllus’ sensibility is mirrored in the fictional circumstances in which he finds himself. When he arrives at the Temple of Apollo, he discovers friezes depicting “Apollo playing the lyre, Apollo dancing, Apollo steering the chariot of the Sun, Apollo feasting, Apollo playing beach volleyball.”39 An entire chapter of the second book is devoted to a farting contest among three Cyclopses. Shipton’s jocular portrayal of Gryllus and his ancient setting answers to current ideas about how to make classical mythology appealing to child readers. Both Lamb and Hawthorne contrasted the romance and wonder of myth to the dryer historical facts taught at school, but now mythology itself is often treated as a ponderous academic subject that can only be redeemed through playful lampooning.40 The Gryllus books take every opportunity to make fun of formal 36 37 38 39 40

Paul Shipton, The Pig Scrolls, by Gryllus the Pig (Cambridge, ma: Candlewick Press, 2004) 33. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 92. Examples include Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books and Kate McMullan’s “Myth-OMania” series. See further Murnaghan, “Classics for Cool Kids: Popular and Unpopular Versions of Antiquity for Children,” Classical World 104 (2011) 339–53, and Murnaghan and Roberts, “Myth Collections for Children,” forthcoming in Vanda Zajko, ed. Blackwell’s Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell).

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learning. Gryllus himself has never learned to read because he spent the money his mother scraped together for lessons on pies,41 which causes him trouble when an accomplice slips him a helpful note. This approach extends to the paratextual material: we learn in the “Acknowledgements” that “Every effort was made to assure the accuracy of the material, although the great library at Alexandria was closed on the Tuesday afternoon when the author tried to go there.” The front of the book reveals that “translating” the Pig Scrolls (found in the basement of the British Museum where they were incorrectly filed as a directory of Ancient Athenian hairdressers) “allowed Paul Shipton to pursue his interests in ancient mythology, even more ancient jokes, and crispy bacon.” There are footnotes to Aristotle on the subject of passing gas,42 silly glossaries of terms “for barbarians who can’t even speak Greek,” and suggestions for further reading, including the Odyssey (“the exciting adventures of some guy who sailed with Gryllus the Pig”). All the same, the books are clearly designed to encourage and reward interest in classical mythology. Over the course of the two narratives, the reader is provided an unorthodox but serviceable grounding in the Odysseus story, the Olympian gods, and a number of other myths, including those of Orpheus, Sisyphus, and Tithonus. Readers who are already familiar with that material gain validation through the pleasure of recognizing Shipton’s allusions and appreciating the way he has reworked traditional material. Like many works for younger readers, these books also speak over those readers’ heads to more knowledgeable adults. In this case, however, that secondary readership is bound to be very small and specialized. The young readers of these books are old enough to choose and read them without adult involvement, and most adults will in any case miss the learned allusions that Shipton, who has an ma in Classics, has introduced in a subtle tribute to the classical tradition. Few are likely to know, for example, that Gryllus the Pig actually derives from a satiric dialogue by Plutarch (imitated by several early modern authors), in which Gryllus, or “Grunter,” a man turned into a pig by Circe, refuses to be changed back and gives Odysseus a well-reasoned account of why animals are better than humans.43 Most will not realize that the names of the three farting Cyclopses actually come from Hesiod’s Theogony or that, when Gryllus meets a 41 Shipton (2004) 45. 42 Shipton, The Pig Who Saved the World, by Gryllus the Pig (Cambridge, ma: Candlewick Press, 2007) 82. 43 Plutarch, “Gryllus” or “Beasts are Rational.” In Plutarch’s Moralia xii, edited by Harold Cherniss and William C. Hembold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957) 489–533. On this dialogue and its subsequent tradition, see Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making:

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wild child whose only word is “bek,” this is a reference to a story told by Herodotus.44 The pervasive jokiness of the Gryllus books does not prevent them from having a strong moral message which, as in the works of Lamb and Hawthorne, is rooted in the Odyssey’s provocative motif of men transformed into animals. Gryllus’ experiences ultimately cause his selfish persona to break down. He find himself feeling unexpected empathy for Sybil, whose earnest attempts to save the cosmos are made much more difficult by the need (imposed by mysterious prophecies) to include an uncooperative talking pig. And when push comes to shove, he summons the will and courage to fulfill his destiny, driving the chariot of the sun in the first book and leading a group effort to push Sisyphus’ rock over a cliff onto the evil villain Thanatos in the second. Towards the end of the first book, Gryllus, who at first defensively deflects the topic, confesses to Sibyl that his decision to remain a pig was motivated by fear (not, as in Plutarch, by the inherent superiority of animals, though he does try to claim that). The experience of nearly being eaten by the Cyclops left him with an oppressive fear of death, but this was alleviated when Circe changed him into a pig. “I was deep in the woods, see, snuffling for roots, and the sun was on my back, and I wasn’t thinking of much at all…For just a few glorious minutes, I forgot and the fear went away.”45 From this he concludes that he would be happier as an animal: Animals don’t spend all their time agonizing about how they will end up. They just are. They don’t dredge up past nightmares or fret about future ones. They just get on with life; they exist in the here and now, and that struck me as a much nicer place to be. That’s all I want, to find my way back to that place.46 As the final words indicate, Gryllus’ attempt to escape into animal ignorance fails. He remains a human, with a human’s inescapable awareness of death. He recognizes this when he finds himself in a group of actual pigs being readied for slaughter. They don’t even seem to notice their danger while “fear swept through me like a tiptop cleaning service…I was denied the animal luxury of

The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 274–91. 44 Herodotus, Histories 2.2. 45 Shipton (2004) 177. 46 Ibid. 178.

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their innocence. I knew what a pork pie was, and I didn’t want to be one.”47 A visit to the underworld gives him a new appreciation of life as something to be fought for. And when he steps up to take responsibility and drive the chariot of the sun, he learns the classic coming-of age lesson that fear is not a disqualification but a precondition for courage. At the end of his journey, Athena asks him what he has learned, and he responds, in a voice that is “strong and true,” “I…don’t want to be a pig any more.”48 Gryllus’ misleading outer piggishness turns out to represent an adolescent’s feigned indifference and a hopeless attempt to cling to childhood innocence. Unlike fictional animals who symbolize a stable conception of childhood, Gryllus represents animalhood as a temporary phase, to be shed with growing maturity. But the plot thickens and the meaning of his pig’s exterior is further complicated in the sequel, which takes its starting point from Gryllus’ quest to find Circe so that she can turn him back into a human. Following a series of adventures, including another chance to save the world, Zeus offers Gryllus a clear path to Olympus where Circe is located, speaking in a divine idiom that recalls the language of Hawthorne: “Begone now, pig. Go to the enchantress, resume your true form, and bother the Olympians no more.”49 But Gryllus turns his back on the radiant stairway and returns instead to the underworld to try to save Sybil from death. At the end of the book, he is still in a pig’s body and is unsure whether he will continue to pursue Circe or not. His ongoing animal state has now become emblematic of the human condition, with its unpredictability and inevitable setbacks. “You know, life’s a bit like that,” I began falteringly. “You try to take something from the Table of Life, but it’s snatched from you, and the Menu of the Future is all smudged with ketchup marks, so you can’t – ”50 At this point, he is interrupted by Sibyl’s decision to order another round of pies. Now freed from anxiety by his philosophical acceptance, Gryllus settles down to enjoy a good meal with his friends. Gryllus’ more mature outlook is spelled out a few pages earlier, when he realizes that pondering the meaning of life is what sets humans apart from animals – and also from monsters and gods – but that doing so leads to a paradoxical insight:

47 48 49 50

Ibid. 198. Ibid. 266. Shipton (2007) 240. Ibid. 255.

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No, being human meant juggling both beliefs: the fundamental sense of your own importance – all your dreams, and hopes and likes and interests – on the one hand, with the cold, hard truth of your cosmic insignificance on the other.51 This balanced celebration of the importance of even insignificant individuals is also an important aspect of Shipton’s message. He reveals in an author’s note to The Pig Scrolls that “I got the idea when I was reading Homer’s Odyssey and got interested in some of the non-heroic characters in the background.” One of his main points is the importance of inclusiveness; this value is reflected in the collective effort that saves the day in the second book, and it encompasses animals as well as unheroic crew members. Faced with the classic exercise in human self-definition represented by the riddle of the sphinx, Gryllus challenges the canonical answer in terms that reflect modern sensitivity to difference and disability. When he points out that he has four legs, the sphinx answers that “You are not even human…You do not count,” but Gryllus persists, Lots of people don’t fit that description. What about my old pal Johnny Hopalong? He only had one leg? And not all old folks use walking sticks either. My uncle Xerxes trained two goats to walk by his side…52 Gryllus’ progression here from defending his pig-embodied self to defending humans who exemplify diversity indicates Shipton’s strategy of using ­animal transformation as a vehicle for teaching humanistic lessons. This is evident also in Gryllus’ first glimmer of moral awakening when, early in the first book, after himself having been sold at market, he encounters some Trojan slaves. It’s only when you spend some time on the outside of a species that you come to see how odd it can be. Of course, there were slaves everywhere, and yet, and yet…[elipses original] I felt a Very Important Thought rise in my mind like a suspicious air bubble in a mud bath. Wasn’t there a better, fairer way? I mean what if humans simply realized that they were all just the sa – “WAARGH!” The rope yanked on my neck and the Very Important Thought was lost to the ether…53 51 52 53

Ibid. 251. Shipton (2004) 157–58. Ibid. 14.

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By making Gryllus the hero of his revised Odyssey, Shipton undoubtedly caters to child readers with their presumed taste for earthiness, irreverence, and parody. But he is also participating in a broader tendency in contemporary Odyssey reception to displace Odysseus as the center of attention and foreground the perspectives of marginal characters.54 One well-known example would be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, which looks at the events of the Odyssey through the eyes not only of Penelope but also of her unfairly punished maidservants. The adventures of a childlike animal protagonist lead ultimately to adult lessons. Some of those are as old as the Odyssey itself: we see Gryllus making the same definitive choice that Odysseus does to accept the human condition despite its constraints and uncertainties. Others are specific to the contemporary world with its prizing of inclusiveness and equality. Despite the many differences in their visions, Shipton is finally aligned with Lamb and Hawthorne in insisting on the distinction between animals and fully adult, morally responsible humans. But he departs from them, and from Homer, and reflects the values of his own time, by declining to draw a moral distinction between Odysseus and his men. 54

This trend is also evident in other recent reworkings of the Odyssey for young adult audiences, such as Adèle Geras’ Ithaka (which foregrounds the experiences of Klymene, one of Penelope’s maidservants), Tracy Barrett’s King of Ithaka (told from the perspective of Telemachus), and Patrick Bowman’s ongoing trilogy Torn From Troy: Odyssey of a Slave (told from the perspective of a Trojan boy captured and enslaved by Odysseus), all discussed in Richards’ forthcoming dissertation. Cf. also Clemence McLaren’s Waiting for Odysseus, which tells the story through the eyes of Penelope, Circe, Athena, and Eurycleia. Shipton’s playful account of the transmission of Gryllus’ narrative recalls the similar treatment of the Odyssey in Zachary Mason’s adult novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

chapter 9

Chasing Odysseus in Twenty-First-Century Children’s Fiction Geoffrey Miles The story of Odysseus has long been regarded as an ideal story for children (earlier generations might have said ‘for boys’). A clever trickster hero, sea voyages and shipwrecks, battles, monsters, a happy ending with the hero’s triumph over his enemies and joyous reunion with wife and son: what could be more child-friendly? As Edith Hall notes, “a reason why the Odyssey has achieved such cultural penetration is because it has been regarded as suitable material for children’s books, and latterly children’s theatre, cartoons and videos. Many people have had their imaginations fired by the Odyssey in childhood [….]”1 Indeed, I still have the battered and much-read copy of Aubrey de Sélincourt’s Odysseus the Wanderer which first introduced me to the story and inspired me  with a love of Greek mythology – and an irrational conviction that De Sélincourt’s was the true version. But Odysseus is a somewhat problematic hero for a children’s story. He is clever, courageous and resourceful, but also a compulsive liar and deceiver; a war hero, but ruthless and bloodily vengeful; a loving husband and father, and a serial adulterer. Odysseus is one particular case of a general problem identified by Stephens and McCallum in Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: “that the metanarratives which informed classical mythology until well into the modern era were grounded in social assumptions which were masculinist, misogynistic, socially elitist, imperialistic, and often militaristic and violent.”2 It is not unreasonable to ask whether this is a character who should be held up for young readers’ sympathy and admiration. Doubts about Odysseus, however, are not merely a product of modern liberal humanism and feminism; as W.B. Stanford’s classic The Ulysses Theme makes clear, he has always been a problematic figure.3 For the Greek tragedians, for 1 Hall, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ (London: i.b. Tauris, 2008) 26. 2 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) 7. Their chapter on classical myth (61–90) does not specifically discuss Odysseus or Homeric epic. 3 Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Reprint Dallas: Spring Publications, 1992) (originally published 1963). The continuing debate over Odysseus

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Roman writers such as Virgil, and for the medieval tradition, he was primarily a cruel and perfidious villain. Dante’s Divine Comedy placed him in the fires of hell, suffering for his fraud and his godless prying into divine secrets. For Dryden, from the perspective of a Christian and rational age, the whole ethos of Homeric epic is barbarous: Homer ‘forms and equips those ungodly Mankillers, whom we Poets, when we flatter them, call Heroes; a race of Men who can never enjoy quiet in themselves, “till they have taken it from all the World.”4 Stephens and McCallum’s fundamental argument, that the function of retelling classic stories for children is to reinforce the set of unquestioned basic values they call ‘the Western metaethic’, seems inadequate to deal with the case of Odysseus.5 Rather than embodying a monolithic ‘Western metaethic’, the Odysseus story is more a site of contestation between rival sets of ‘Western’ values: Greek versus Roman, pagan versus Christian, heroic versus civil, Romantic versus classicist, masculine versus feminine. It is unsurprising that such conflicts play out in contemporary versions of the story for children and young adults. This chapter looks at eight such versions from the twenty-first century, ranging from 2000 to 2013, written (as it happens) almost entirely by female authors, from Britain, the u.s., Australia and New Zealand.6 They range from fundamentally traditional and sympathetic presentations of Odysseus, to versions which in various ways supply alternative perspectives on him, marginalise him in his own story, or subject him to varying degrees of hostile or mocking critique. Geraldine McCaughrean’s Odysseus (2003) falls largely into the tradition of earlier twentieth-century versions such as Alfred John Church’s The Odyssey for Boys and Girls (1906), De Sélincourt’s Odysseus the Wanderer (1950), Barbara  Leonie Picard’s The Odyssey of Homer (1952), or Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Wanderings of Odysseus (1995).7 It is a straightforward and sympathetic

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is strikingly illustrated in the 1992 reprint of Stanford’s book, in which his sympathetic view of the hero is challenged by a vitriolic new foreword by Charles Boer entitled “The Classicist and the Psychopath”. Dedication to Examen Poeticum (1693), in Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, volume 4, ed. A.B. Chambers et al. (Berkeley: University of California, 1974) 374. Stephens and McCallum (2013) 5 and passim. The one male is Robert Harris, co-author of Odysseus and the Serpent Maze. It is worth noting that I did not set out to focus on female writers; in fact, it was quite late in the writing process that I discovered that Tracy Barrett was female rather than male (as the boy’s-story air of King of Ithaka had led me to assume). Page or chapter references for McCaughrean and the other primary texts will be included parenthetically in the text. The writers choose various ways of anglicising names (Ithaca/ Ithaka, Penelope/Penelopeia, etc.); I follow each writer’s individual practice.

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retelling for children, distinguished by its vividly quirky narrative style and its imaginative and witty use of Homeric-style formulae and epic similes (such as Odysseus’ ships bobbing like lemon slices in the gods’ finger-bowl, 337). McCaughrean acknowledges Odysseus’ famous intelligence – “quick of hand, but quicker still of wit” is a repeated formula (327 and passim) – but downplays his caution and emphasises his recklessness. He is “the daring, roguish Odysseus” (415), a “self-willed, headstrong man” (367), repeatedly leaping into trouble. Significantly it is his sensible lieutenant Polites who remembers to tie him to the mast when passing the Sirens, Odysseus having forgotten all about Circe’s advice (368). McCaughrean’s most memorable invention is Odysseus’ cockerel mascot, which rides on his arm like a pirate’s parrot on the shoulder, and acts as an external index of his moods – giving a blood-chilling squawk as he makes landing (325) or “an arrogant, piercing crow” as he mocks Polyphemus (333), or huddling miserably under its wings on the voyage to Hades (357). The cockerel embodies the cocky self-confidence which is this Odysseus’ prime quality – a quality perhaps calculated to appeal more to twenty-first-century children than the Homeric hero’s sly prudence. The driving motive of McCaughrean’s Odysseus is not the desire to get home but the desire for heroic fame and glory, to be “the hero of the Known World” (428) and have his ‘name shared out among the world’s storytellers’ (407). His darkest moment is in Hades, when he faces the prospect of genuinely becoming ‘No Wun’ (360): “one day I must dwindle down into a flag of mist, and live in the dark for ever, and my name be forgotten on the Earth. What terror can compare with what I’ve seen?” Briefly we get a sense of the tragic darkness which underlies a Homeric hero’s quest for mortal glory. But the resilient Odysseus quickly puts this this dark vision behind him – “he shook himself, and the fear flew off him as the water flies off an otter’s fur” (366) – and the story too seems to shake it off. There is no real sense that McCaughrean intends us to criticise Odysseus’ heroic values. On the whole, she invites us to sympathise and identify with her engagingly reckless, indomitable hero – who in spite of his years feels very much like a teenager. Clemence McLaren’s Waiting for Odysseus (2000) takes an apparently different approach which ends up not so very different. Odysseus’ story is narrated successively by four of the female figures in his life: Penelope, Circe, Athena, and Eurycleia. McLaren writes of her desire to focus on the women characters and “how they felt about what was going on” (Epilogue), and the subtitles of the sections (“A Girl Plots a Marriage”, “A Witch Takes a Lover”, “A Goddess Intercedes”, “An Old Servant Recognises her Master”) suggest an intention to put the women in the subject position. Nevertheless, it remains essentially Odysseus’ story.

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McLaren invokes Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ and the notion of the hero who “becomes a better man” by learning to master his personality flaw (Epilogue), thus fitting Odysseus into a typical didactic children’s fiction pattern of the hero-who-learns-better. Odysseus’ flaw, she suggests, is pride. Circe, whose coolly cynical narrative voice is the most individual of the four, scathingly makes that point when Odysseus argues that it was “a matter of honour” to reveal his name to Polyphemus: “Here was this man, driven by a male ego even more monumental than most. Because of it his legendary cleverness couldn’t save him from acts of devastating foolishness” (Circe’s Story, Ch. 1). It is suggested, though not very convincingly demonstrated, that he outgrows this flaw of pride in the course of his journey. His actual turning point is his refusal of Kalypso’s offer of immortality. Athena comments: “I knew that his guile had matured into wisdom, that he had sailed in search of fame and found instead his own humanity. He’d learned that what he most cherished was what he’d left behind – on Ithaca” (Athena’s Story, Ch. 1). At the same time, McLaren suggests that Penelope has her own “Heroine’s Journey” with its own “quiet heroism” (Epilogue). Penelope, who understands that Odysseus must follow “his warrior’s heart [and] his destiny,” stoically accepts that her destiny is “to wait, to become expert at waiting” (Penelope’s Story, Ch. 4). Nevertheless, old Eurycleia suspects that resentment, conscious or unconscious, underlies her stubborn refusal to recognise the returned Odysseus: “Could be she’s making him suffer.” Only when her trick concerning the olive-tree bed provokes him to an explosion of anger (“Who dared move my bed?”) does she finally accept him: “only the real Odysseus would have reacted with such outrage. […] I wanted to know if you could still act from your heart. That you’re not always going to be calculating your next move” (Eurycleia’s Story, Ch. 5). The valuing of spontaneous passion over Odyssean calculation, like McCaughrean’s celebration of a recklessly risk-taking Odysseus, is a very  modern take on the values of the Homeric story. And McLaren finally ­celebrates the equality of Odysseus and Penelope: “Thundering Zeus, he thought he was testing her, and she was getting ready to test him! The only time in all these years anyone outfoxed him – and it was his own wife did it!” (Eurycleia’s Story, Ch. 5). If McLaren takes a step towards seeing the hero through women’s eyes, Adèle Geras’ young adult novel Ithaka (2005) puts the women firmly at the heart of the story. Starting with Odysseus’ departure for war and ending with the events surrounding his return, Ithaka focuses (as the title implies) on events at home, seen through the eyes of Penelope and her young handmaiden Klymene (Eurykleia’s granddaughter). The plot is a somewhat soap-operatic tangle of personal relationships. Penelope, struggling to maintain her belief

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that Odysseus will return, tugged on one side by querulous old Laertes’ demand that she marry one of the suitors and on the other by jealous Telemachus’ demand that she shun them, finds herself (thanks to Aphrodite’s interference) helplessly falling in love with Odysseus’ old friend, the handsome and kindly Leodes.8 Meanwhile Klymene wrestles with her unrequited crush on Telemachus, who is infatuated with treacherous blonde beauty Melantho; later, despairing of Telemachus, she comes to love Antinous’ Trojan servant Mydon, while trying to evade the sexual harassment of Antinous himself. As this summary suggests, Ithaka is very different from the Odyssey in its domestic setting and its focus on the characters’ internal emotional states. The action is strictly confined to the island, making us sharing the female characters’ sense of stasis and entrapment and helpless passivity. Even the repetitiveness of Geras’ writing – we spend an inordinate amount of time trapped inside Penelope’s and Klymene’s heads as they cycle endlessly through the same anxieties and miseries – helps to reinforce the effect. We are made intimately familiar with the routines of the palace, and feel the sense of violation when the suitors move in and turn it into a pigsty. A vivid (if characteristically repetitive) passage describes Klymene scrubbing the suitors’ vomit off the stones of the courtyard: Horrible, Klymene thought. Everything was horrible. Horribleness was never ending. You couldn’t go anywhere to escape it. … One drink too many, and fountains of vile-smelling, lump-filled, yellowish liquid came spewing out over everything, and there was nothing to be done but throw buckets of water over it and scrub it away, over and over again. (215) By the end of the novel one genuinely feels that Odysseus, buffeted around the open seas facing monsters and shipwrecks, had the better of the deal; at least his suffering has an epic scope and excitement to it. The way in which Geras inverts and subverts the values of the Odyssey is epitomised in an exchange at the start of the novel between the child Klymene and her brother Ikarios. Ikarios has built a sandcastle on the shore and wants to play the siege of Troy. Klymene objects:

8 In the Odyssey Leodes is the soothsayer among the suitors, who protests against their behaviour and predicts doom for them (21.144–74), but nevertheless is not spared by Odysseus despite his plea for mercy (22.310–29). Geras reshapes the character and his fate for her own purposes.

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“I hate that story. They set fire to everything and the whole city burned down. Imagine how horrible that must have been.” “But we won!” Ikarios looked at his sister in amazement. “That’s what matters.” “But it’s not all that matters,” Klymene said. “People getting killed and burned matters, too.” Ikarios sighed, and Klymene knew what he was thinking: Girls are weak and stupid and don’t understand about important men’s things. Boys’ things. (10) Implicitly, the novel endorses Klymene’s view of epic war and heroism as destructive ‘boys’ things’, less serious and profound than the female concerns explored in Ithaka. Despite questioning the heroic ethos, Geras does not denigrate Odysseus himself. He is presented as sympathetic, wise and humane. His reunion with his old dog Argos is as touching as in the Odyssey; his relationship with Mydon, whom he “plucked […] out of the flames that he himself had started” at the sack of Troy (142), seems designed to absolve him of guilt for the “horrible” events there; his slaughter of the suitors is kept carefully offstage. Nevertheless, the mere fact that he appears only at the beginning and end of the story tends to marginalise him, and his character is admirable but colourless. The fact that he never finds out about his wife’s passionate love affair with Leodes, or realises how she is having to force herself to be physically intimate with him again at the end of the novel (354–355), puts the reader in the ironic position of knowing and understanding more than the great strategist does; so does the fact that he never knows how his whole story has been shaped by the tapestry Penelope has been weaving (a point I will return to later). Quite gently, Geras moves Odysseus away from both the narrative and moral centre of his own story. Tracy Barrett’s King of Ithaka (2010) displaces him in a more blatant and brutal way. Where Geras focuses her narrative on Penelope, Barrett focuses on Telemachus. There is, of course, Homeric precedent for this: the first four books of the Odyssey (the so-called ‘Telemacheia’) deal with Telemachus’ voyage, accompanied by Athena in the disguise of Mentor, in quest of news of his father. There is also a famous precedent in the field of children’s literature. At the end of the seventeenth century François de la Mothe-Fénelon expanded the Telemacheia into a didactic prose romance in twenty-four books, Les Aventures de Télémaque, designed to educate his seven-year-old pupil the Duke of Burgundy in the art of just and enlightened kingship. How the little duke received the work is unrecorded, but it became one of the best-sellers of the eighteenth century and a landmark in children’s literature. It is possible that

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Barrett consciously emulated Fénelon, since an episode in King of Ithaka in which Telemachus narrowly escapes being sacrificed to the gods (Ch. 16) echoes a similar episode in the first book of Télémaque.9 Certainly King of Ithaka follows in the same genre of didactic Bildungsroman. However, its tone  is very different, turning Homeric grandeur and Fénelon’s prissy highmindedness into something close to comic travesty. Barrett’s Telemachus is a cheerfully undisciplined sixteen-year-old who spends his time running barefoot round Ithaka and spying with his friends on the girls as they bathe. His home is the least epic of any version of Ithaka: a shabby backwoods kingdom, a crumbling manor with a tone-deaf bard and a main hall so small that when the big table is brought in the suitors (here merely a set of over-persistent dinner guests rather than Geras’s brutal occupiers) must squeeze to get around it (Ch. 3). Humiliated to hear a visiting trader pity him – “He’s never been anywhere and he thinks this tumbledown farmhouse is a palace” (Ch. 4) – Telemachus resolves, despite his terror of the sea, to go in search of his adored father. He is accompanied not by a wise older Mentor but by a teenage centaur (not the most convenient seagoing companion) and a friend’s kid sister who stows away on board and becomes the story’s love interest. His visits to the neighbouring kingdoms prove deeply disillusioning. Nestor of Pylos is a fussy middle-aged king with a face “like a sheep”, who proposes to sacrifice Telemachu until he discovers the boy’s identity; his son Pisistratos, to  Telemachus’ horror, hunts the local ‘hairy-backs’ (centaurs, satyrs and nymphs) for sport. Pisistratos (as in Homer) offers Telemachus a ride to Sparta in his chariot, only to steal his precious trade goods as he sleeps and abandon him in the desert to die. Making it at length to Sparta, Telemachus finds Menelaus a squat, grim, blind king dispensing brutal justice, and Helen a ravaged figure, hopelessly mad ever since her lover Paris was hacked to death in bed beside her, and clutching a ‘witless’ little daughter. Sparta has been brought to ruin by its ‘victory’ over Troy. Escaping both these hellish kingdoms, Telemachus returns to Ithaka to find that his father has also returned. His joy is quickly soured by the reactions of his mother and Eurykleia. He discovers that Penelopeia has in fact for twenty years been terrified at the prospect of her husband’s return, for Odysseus was a bully and a brute. “It’s not true,” Telemachus insists. “You’ve always told me he was brave and strong and generous – ” “He was. But did you ever hear me say he was kind? Or that he was loving?” (Ch. 32). Refusing to believe it, Telemachus 9 Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, Patrick Riley, ed. and transl., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) book 1.

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plans to help his father deal with the suitors. But when he discovers with horror that Odysseus means not merely to evict the suitors but to massacre them all, he is forced to take a stand against him. Here the novel’s didactic strain becomes explicit. Before leaving on his journey Telemachus had sought guidance from the ancient oracular cave-dwelling monster known as ‘Daisy’ on how to bring the king back to Ithaka. Daisy questioned him Socratically: what is a king? Why do his subjects obey him? Telemachus answered, “because he is the strongest, the bravest, and the most generous” in rewarding loyalty. Daisy suggested that perhaps “there’s some­ thing else [….] that a king is. Isn’t there?” – but Telemachus couldn’t think of anything else (Ch. 9). Now, after his experiences, he finally realises what the fourth thing is that Nestor and Menelaus and Odysseus lack: Compassion. […] Compassion was something I had and that my father never possessed. Maybe in the old days all a king had to do was rule with a firm and heavy hand and buy his subjects’ loyalty, but something had changed in our world since the cruel war at Ilios. (Ch. 35) He also realises that the ‘king of Ithaka’ whose return was longed for and prophesied is not Odysseus but Telemachus himself. He tells his father, “Your time has passed. […] You are no longer the king of Ithaka.” Odysseus, with “the blindness of a man who refuses to see that the world has changed while he has remained the same”, mocks his claim, but the suitors throw their support behind this new humane and civilised model of kingship, and Odysseus is overthrown. There is a final twist to Barrett’s portrayal of Odysseus. The deposed king declares in sour-grapes fashion that he never really intended to stay “in this little place where peace is prized above honour”; he only came back to gather men for a new voyage through the Pillars of Hercules: Remember where you come from. You are the descendants of great heroes, yet you live on this little rock as though it were the entire world. Come! Your lot is not merely to exist like the beasts and hairy-backs that are born and live and die all on the same miserable acre. You are men! Power and knowledge await you but you must seize them. Come with me! (Ch. 35) The speech, of course, is closely based on Ulysses’ address to his followers in the Divine Comedy (Inferno 26.112–20). And when Odysseus appeals to Telemachus – “Do you stay here to be the king of this backwater, this forgotten

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island? Or do you join me […] and my brave comrades?” – there is an unmistakable echo of Tennyson’s Ulysses, patronisingly commending “mine own Telemachus” as he leaves him behind to rule Ithaka: “Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere/Of common duties [….] He works his work, I mine.”10 At the end of the novel Barrett enhaloes her Odysseus with some of the glamour of the traditional hero. But it is clear that it is a false glamour. Odysseus’ macho, imperialistic brand of heroic endeavour, rooted in contempt for “women and little boys” and lesser breeds like the “hairy-backs”, is placed as irresponsible and escapist; the novel’s didactic purpose is to endorse the responsible, compassionate values of the matured Telemachus. The most radically satiric deconstruction of the hero Odysseus in twentyfirst-century children’s literature is Chasing Odysseus (2011), by the Australian writer S.D. (Sulari) Gentill.11 Unlike King of Ithaka it starts out from a hostile perspective, as its teenage protagonists Machaon, Cadmus, Lycon and Hero are already enemies of Odysseus. They are abandoned children of the Amazons, brought up by the Herdsmen of Mt Ida, the peaceful Pan-worshipping pastoralists who throughout the Trojan War have supplied food both to the b­ esieging Greeks and (secretly) to the besieged Trojans. When Troy falls, the Herdsmen are unjustly accused by the leader of the Trojan survivors of betraying the city (rather implausibly, it seems that no-one knows or suspects the secret of the Trojan Horse); Machaon is flogged and the children’s foster-father killed. Determined to clear their people’s name, and convinced that Odysseus must have been the strategist behind the city’s betrayal, the protagonists set out – in a magical Phaeacian ship provided by their god Pan – to chase Odysseus on his journey home and somehow persuade or trick him into revealing the truth. The main action of the novel has the protagonists repeatedly popping up, Zelig-like, to play an unrecorded role in the adventures of Odysseus. When Odysseus raids the Cicones, for instance, it is Lycon who fetches reinforcements from the interior to counter-attack, while Machaon and Cadmus delay his departure by whipping his men up into a frenzy of competitive sports (books vii–viii). When Odysseus captures them on the island of the LotusEaters, Lycon gets them free by persuading Odysseus that Hero – who is having a bad drug reaction to the hallucinogenic lotus – is one of a dangerous tribe of man-eating witches (book ix). On Circe’s island it is Machaon (dressed in the 10 11

“Ulysses” 39–43, in Tennyson, Tennyson: A Selected Edition, Christopher Ricks, ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 143–144. The novel is divided into 26 ‘books’. This is the first volume of the ‘Hero Trilogy’, but the second and third volumes (Trying War and The Blood of Wolves, both 2012) do not feature Odysseus.

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fine clothes that Aeolus has given him) whom a wine-fuddled Odysseus mistakes for the god Hermes; finding Machaon examining the ground for footprints, Odysseus jumps to the conclusion that Hermes is directing his attention to the moly plant, and plucks this random herb in the belief that it will protect him from Circe’s magic (book xvi). (The fact that it does seem to protect him anyway is one of the unexplained loose ends in the plot.) An introductory “note from the publisher” suggests that “Chasing Odysseus is to Homer’s The Odyssey what Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” There is perhaps a closer classical precedent in the metafictional games played by Virgil and Ovid with the Homeric epic, as Virgil has Aeneas picking up Achaemenides, an abandoned crewman of Ulysses, on the island of the Cyclops (Aeneid 3.588–691), and Ovid in turn has Achaemenides encountering his old shipmate Macareus and hearing from him the true story of Ulysses and Circe (Metamorphoses 14.158–440). In Gentill’s story this literary playfulness becomes outright satiric mockery, as Odysseus is repeatedly bested and made to look ridiculous by the young heroes. At the start of the novel he has some status as a heroic villain: “a tall strong man, who carried his years well and looked out with cunning eyes” (book viii); cruel and ruthless – “Odysseus is not a man of mercy”, and is rumoured to have personally thrown Hector’s baby son off the walls (book vii) – but a master strategist of “legendary wit” (Prologue). But as the novel goes on he is repeatedly revealed as vain, foolish, and gullible, falling for such transparent stratagems as Lycon’s tale of the cannibal witches, or superstitiously mistaking Machaon or Nausicaa for gods come to help him: “He must think the Pantheon follows him around!” (book xxiv). (In the Odyssey, of course, this is more or less true.) When he shouts his name to Polyphemus, Cadmus mutters, “The man’s an idiot!” (book xii); when he boasts to his men that ‘my courage, my clear thinking and agility of mind saved us from disaster’, Cadmus wonders if anyone remembers that they left Troy with twelve ships and have lost eleven (book xix). The boys’ sardonic running commentary reads very much like a classroom of modern teenagers snarking its way through a reading of the Odyssey. Perhaps most destructive of the hero’s dignity is the undercutting of his legendary reputation as a ladykiller. Circe does not take Odysseus as her lover for a year (though she enchants him into the belief that she did), but only for three days, after which she expects to tire of him. “Odysseus is not a young man”, Cadmus comments – “I don’t think he could take more than three days” (book xvi). Calypso, far from forcing Odysseus to remain with her for seven years, is tearfully desperate to get rid of him: “I took him to my bed on a whim – but he is old and his best years were long ago.” Machaon helps her to dispatch

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her “tedious lodger” with a false tale of a command from Hermes that he must head home (book xxxii). Both demigoddesses are far more sexually interested in the teenage heroes – as is Nausicaa, who is “more amused than flattered” by the absurdly extravagant praise of the aging, naked castaway (book xxiv). Gentill’s readers are invited to laugh at the ridiculous self-delusion of a middleaged man who thinks he is still attractive to young women. Finally the protagonists achieve their goal by persuading the Phaeacian bard Demodocus to sing a song which depicts Menelaus as the hero and master strategist of the victory over Troy. Odysseus weeps – not from grief, as in Homer, but from chagrin and wounded ego – and launches into a boastful public statement of how Troy was captured by his genius (book xxvi). All this is an amusing takedown of the epic hero, in the spirit of a classical satyr play or Monty Python’s demolition of the Arthurian legends. Underneath it, though, as in Barrett or Geras, lies a serious critique of the values implicit in the Odyssey. The Greek heroic ethos is constantly being contrasted with the pastoral way of life of the Herdsmen of Mt Ida, or of their kinsmen the Cyclopes, who are not monsters but “a gentle people whose quiet voices belied their fearsome visage” (book x).12 Living an idealised primitivist life in caves in the rock, worshipping the unassuming nature god Pan, sacrificing only fruit and flowers, the Herdsmen define themselves as “defenders” – “We defended the people of Troy and now we defend the name of the Herdsmen” (book xiii) – in contrast with the Greeks” furious aggressiveness. They are bemused by the Greek ‘mad’ and “ridiculous” passion for competitive sports (book viii); “Winning is a Greek obsession” (book xxi). A peaceful, harmonious, communal culture is being contrasted with an agonistic, individualistic one, and there is no question which is being preferred. It is not coincidental, I think, that the main female character is named “Hero” and that the trilogy is named after her: it is the values stereotypically labelled “feminine” which are valorised here. As in McCaughrean’s Odysseus, the critique of Homeric values comes to a head in the Hades episode. Gentill expands upon the Homeric confrontation between Odysseus and the ghost of Achilles (Odyssey 11.465–537). Achilles expresses shame for the atrocities he committed in battle; in Hades he has met his enemies, and “[t]heir dead eyes have a knowledge more terrible than anything they could have done to me on earth.” Odysseus, morally impervious, brushes aside his qualms – “We have all acted fiercely in the throes of battle, Achilles. It is the way we vanquish our foes that has given the Greeks dominion 12

Polyphemus, as the son of Poseidon, is a more formidable and savage figure, but Gentill is careful to point out that he is not a cannibal (“He does not eat his own kind”, book xi), and arouses more sympathy for his loss of his beloved ram than for the Greeks he devours.

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of the worl” – and encourages him with the thought that “Hades is well ­popu­lated because of your great deeds”; but Achilles merely spits and, as in Homer, scorns the idea that posthumous glory is a consolation for death (book xvii). Listening, Hero grieves at the thought of how her beloved foster-father Agelaus must be suffering in Hades. But when Agelaus appears – summoned by Hero’s sacrifice of flowers and fruit rather than by Odysseus’ sacrifice of blood – he tells her that he and the other dead Herdsmen have a happy and comfortable afterlife. It is only the warriors who suffer: “Men who have lived by the sword find Hades a bit tiresome [….] There is not much point in killing a dead man. They find it difficult to occupy themselves” (book xvii). Echoing Dryden’s stricture on “Heroes […] who can never enjoy quiet in themselves,’ till they have taken it from all the World”, Gentill satirically undercuts both the glory and the darkness of the Homeric worldview: it is only those who live by aggression and self-seeking in this world who find the next world one of bleak futility. In these last three novels – Gentill’s, Barrett’s, and to some extent Geras’ – Odysseus is displaced by teenage protagonists who attract more of the young reader’s attention and sympathy than the middle-aged traditional hero. For a children’s or young adult writer who wants to keep Odysseus at the centre of the book, and to treat him in a more sympathetic spirit, one obvious solution is to make Odysseus himself a teenager. This is the strategy adopted by Jane Yolen and Robert Harris in Odysseus in the Serpent Maze (2000) and by the New Zealand first-time novelist Catherine Mayo in Murder at Mykenai (2013), though the novels are in other ways very different. Odysseus in the Serpent Maze is one of the “Young Heroes” series, dealing with the unrecorded early adventures of heroes and heroines from Greek myth. It is a lively, inventive fantasy in which thirteen-year-old Odysseus and his friend Mentor, later joined by spoilt princess Helen and her sensible cousin Penelope, have a breathless series of adventures involving boar-hunting, storms at sea, pirates, desert islands, the smelly satyr Silenus, a mechanical ship built by Daedalus, a savage mechanical watchdog, capture by the tyrannical Cretan king, and finally a battle with the monster at the heart of the Cretan Labyrinth (not the one you might expect). Murder at Mykenai is a historical fiction of the Greek Bronze Age, with no fantasy elements, centred on the friendship between fourteenyear-old Odysseus and his slightly younger friend Menelaos. The title suggests a ‘boy investigators’ story, but the novel goes in a different and more serious direction, showing how the relationship between the friends is affected when Menelaos’ father Atreus, High King of Mykenai, is assassinated by his brother Thyestes, and his sons driven into exile. Both stories begin in a way that suggests they are following the ‘Telemacheian’ pattern: the education of a promising but immature youth into a mature

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­king-to-be. In each case the impression is somewhat misleading. Serpent Maze begins with the boar hunt on Mt Parnassus where Odysseus acquires his famous scar (Odyssey 19.386–475), and with his grandfather Autolycus berating him for recklessness and boastful lying (when he claims to have stolen his grandfather’s spear on direct instructions from the goddess Athena): ‘Oh grandson, you wriggle like a serpent to escape the trap of your own folly’ (Ch. 3). But when it is revealed that Odysseus inflicted a mortal wound on the boar, he is hailed as a hero, and no more is heard of his need for discipline and reform. Instead, young readers are invited to enjoy the reckless energy and unstoppable drive of the young Odysseus, dragging the cautious and nervous Mentor in his wake (there is a nice irony in turning the archetypal wise old counsellor into a befuddled teenage sidekick). They are also invited to enjoy his endless fertility in spinning tales and concocting fake identities, leaving his companions gasping to keep up with the latest fiction. A running joke concerns the crease which frequently appears between his eyebrows, which looks like “a worry line”, but which Mentor warily recognises as “a sign that Odysseus was about to come up with an outlandish excuse – lie, fib, wile – for doing something he’d already decided to do. He’d call it a reason, of course, but reason was the one thing it wouldn’t be” (Ch. 1). Serpent Maze at times feels like a Bronze Age version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Much like McCaughrean’s adult Odysseus, Yolen and Harris’ teenage version is driven by an appetite for fame and glory. Told that he is lucky to be alive after the boar hunt, he snaps, “Alive without glory […] is not alive at all” (Ch. 4). He is impatient with the love-struck Mentor wanting to impress Helen: “You’re supposed to worry about being worthy in the eyes of the gods, in the eyes of your fellow men – not a mere woman. What matters is your courage. Your honour” (Ch. 13). At the end of the story he finally does receive a visitation from Athena, who tells him that he has proved himself a hero and promises him “one great final adventure before the Heroic Age draws to a close”. At the same time, warning him that “Glory is not won cheaply”, she suggests that there are alternatives: “A prince can find joy in seeing his people safe and happy, in the love of a good wife, in watching his baby son grow to manhood.” But Odysseus is firm – “Only glory lasts. The bards’ songs give us that chance at immortality” – and Athena accepts this despite inviting him to “[t]hink carefully […] what you lose by that choice” (Epilogue). There is a certain gravity in this moment, recalling Achilles’ choice between long life and early death with glory. When Barrett posed the same choice of glory-seeking adventure versus peaceful kingship and domesticity, it was clear that readers were meant to approve the latter choice. Here, as in McCaughrean, the moral balance is less clear: young readers are invited simply to recognise that there is a choice, with gains and losses on

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both sides, and to recognise that Odysseus, being the boy/man he is, could not choose otherwise. Murder at Mykenai also starts with a ‘prince in training’ moment. Odysseus is flogged by his father for playing truant in the streets of Mykenai during a festival, endangering himself and his young bodyguard. “Whoever inherits the throne of Ithaka must demonstrate wisdom, justice and compassion”, Laertes tells him. “But your behaviour in the past has shown little sign of these essential qualities” (52). Odysseus stares “in horror” at the threat that he might be disinherited from the throne, and promises to behave more responsibly in future. But again, the Telemacheian theme virtually ends here, not because Odysseus shrugs off responsibility, but because he accepts it: we see almost nothing more of the irresponsible adventure-seeker. Mayo’s Odysseus is the young king and political strategist in waiting. He has many of the characteristics of the older, Homeric Odysseus. He is an imaginative schemer and liar (“I never make things up”, he tells Menelaos at their first meeting, with an ironic Groucho Marx waggle of the eyebrows, 36). He has iron self-control; meeting Menelaos in exile, he realises – “Was it Athena, the dreaded war goddess whose mysteries he’d begun to follow last winter, who plucked at his thoughts?” – that revealing an emotional reaction would be politically dangerous, and so forces himself to pretend indifference (160–161). When he boasts of his wide-ranging ambitions, to be “healer, priest, king, singer, spy – “his mother Antikleia sums up: “Anything with a secret at the core of it”; Odysseus “adores secrets” (223). But the core of this Odysseus’ character is something quite un-Homeric: a fierce and passionate devotion to his friend. From his first meeting in the opening chapter with “this strange new friend, with his shaved head, his quick laugh and his worried eyes’ (36), Odysseus’ thoughts and plans centre around his concern for Menelaos. The friendship leads the novel into what is undoubtedly the darkest emotional territory of any of these texts. Menelaos is psychologically traumatised by memories of his mother’s violent death and his fears about his own parentage (that he may be the product of his mother’s adultery with Thyestes); later in the story he is abused, verbally, physically, and sexually, by his malevolent tutor Palamedes. The scene in which Odysseus confronts Menelaos about his suicide attempt, and learns the truth about the sexual abuse, is one of emotional intensity seldom associated with the cool-headed Odysseus: Odysseus opened his mouth then shut it again, clamping his shaking hands between his thighs. He had to, he had to control himself. What he

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truly wanted to do was scream obscenities, grab Menelaos and shake him till every tooth in his head fell out. And what use would that be? (278) Mayo’s Odysseus, while retaining many of the characteristics of his classical prototype, is placed in the context of a young adult novel dealing with a very twenty-first-century set of psychological and social issues. Mayo is also the first children’s writer to register the significance of the hero’s name, since De Sélincourt in 1950 asked “What’s in a name? Odysseus… the man the Gods were angry with”.13 Mayo interprets it differently, as wrath with mankind. “Why did they call you Odysseus?” Menelaos asks at the first meeting. “It sounds like you’re angry.” Odysseus explains that his grandfather named him when he was feeling cross about being accused of stealing (as in Odyssey 19.440–48). “Anyway, I prefer my nickname, Olesses. The destroyer. You can call me Olli if you like”. “The destroyer? What have you been up to?” “Oh, this and that”. Odysseus twiddled his fingers. (25) The different interpretations of Odysseus’ name by Mayo and De Sélincourt point up an ambiguity noted in a classic essay by G.E. Dimock, Jr.: the name can be interpreted as ‘Trouble’, but is Odysseus one who suffers trouble or one who causes it?14 The ambiguity goes to the heart of the divergence between sympathetic and unsympathetic responses to Odysseus. For all Mayo’s sympathetic treatment of her cool-headed but emotionally intense young protagonist, one feels that he does have the potential to be a ‘destroyer’. It will be interesting to see where she takes the character in future volumes.15 The most recent reimagining of the Odysseus story is also the most radical. Francesca Lia Block’s Love in the Time of Global Warming (2013) is a postapocalyptic fantasy set in an American west coast ravaged by a vast earthquake and tsunami, linked to the emergence of genetically-engineered cannibal Giants. The teenage heroine, Penelope Overland, known as ‘Pen’, is not so much a Penelope as a modern Odysseus, one whose journey lies ‘overland’ rather than over sea. Pen’s repeated readings from a paperback translation of the Odyssey, 13 14 15

De Sélincourt, Odysseus the Wanderer (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1950) 4. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” Hudson Review 9.1 (1956) 52–70. A sequel, The Bow, appeared in 2014, dealing with how Odysseus acquires his great bow and with his first experience of sexual love.

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“the weirdly prophetic book” (69), make the Homeric parallels in her story unmissable. Pen leaves the destroyed home where she lost her family at the urging of a mysterious stranger named Merk (Hermes/Mercury?). Announcing herself as “Nobody”, she fights a one-eyed Giant named Bull and blinds him with a pair of scissors (Ch. 5). She spends time among the drug-addled teenagers at the Lotus Hotel, where lotus flowers grow up through the marble floor (Ch. 6). She escapes from the Sirens of Beverly Hills, former Valley girls who now wallow in swamp water among jewels and clothes and shoes and human skulls (Ch. 8). She is held prisoner by the Circe-like Beatrix, a former tv soap star in a crumbling mansion who keeps her minions enslaved with drugged cake (Ch. 9). She ventures into the ‘Afterworld’ of devastated Las Vegas in an attempt to rescue her dying mother; there she confronts the mad scientist Kronen, creator of the Giants (playing the role of Poseidon the Earthshaker), and submits to have her own eye put out in recompense for the blinding of Bull (Chs. 18–19). In the course of her journeyings (like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, another shaping text for the novel) she picks up three male companions: Hex, Ez, and Ash. The Odyssey holds out to them the prospect of a happy ending: “If we really are on a modern-day odyssey […] we may have the hope of returning “home” as Odysseus did” (145). Finally Pen does make it back to her home, to be reunited with her dog Argos, her younger brother Venice, and – in the very last paragraph of the book – her three companions, to form a new, non-nuclear family. Though it briefly seems at the start like postapocalyptic science fiction, Love in the Time of Global Warming develops into surreal and dreamlike fantasy.16 Its world is a fractured and distorted satiric vision of our own contemporary world, complete with obsessive consumerism (the Sirens), media glamour (Circe/Beatrix), and out-of-control science and technology (Kronen and his Giants). The Odyssey functions as a piece of cultural detritus, a remnant of an older kind of civilisation, amid the wreckage epitomised in Las Vegas: [W]e set up camp behind a large stack of broken Grecian columns, shattered golden Buddhas and medieval candelabras, splintered gondolas, ransacked suitcases, destroyed slot machines, and the now familiar

16

The catastrophe is never given a rational explanation: the idea that the Giants were “too big for this earth … so big that they made the earth crack and shake” (205) is realistically absurd but works as a poetic image for the world-destroying power of science. “Global warming” is literally irrelevant to the plot but, of course, highly relevant to the reality it metaphorically represents.

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human bones. Ash keeps watch from on top of a Louis xvi chair with torn upholstery, his lyre at his side. (162–163) It is the “heap of broken images” of Eliot’s Waste Land; but Ash’s classical lyre carries a hint of Orphic power that might transform the wasteland and bring renewal. Though Block uses the Odyssey as a touchstone of cultural value, the novel also implicitly deconstructs the Homeric view of heroism. None of the protagonists is cast in the mould of the Homeric warrior; all four are sensitive, damaged, sexually ambiguous teenagers. The Odysseus figure, Pen, is a girl, shy and bookish, and a lesbian. Hex, the boy who nevertheless becomes her lover, turns out to have been born a girl, Alexandria (as his/her Horatian tattoo Non sum qualis eram hints). The other two male characters, Ez the artist (“a coward and a sugar addict”, 165) and Ash the male model turned musician, are both gay and conspicuously un-macho. Hex quickly dismisses the attempt to teach them combat as “hopeless”, and leaves them to play and paint while he trains Pen (150–151) – a female learning swordfighting from a female-turned-male. Block is deliberately and mischievously ‘queering’ and feminising the epic hero, suggesting that if a new world is to be built it will not be on the old macho values.17 Block’s novel clearly exemplifies a couple of consistent trends in these contemporary versions of the Odysseus story. One, quite predictably, is a tendency to place women closer to the centre of the story. This is arguably a logical development from the original story, since the Odyssey itself is already an unusually female-centric classical epic (Samuel Butler, who argued in 1897 that the poem was written by a woman, was being deliberately outrageous but not self-evidently absurd). The other, related trend is a critique of traditional Homeric heroism. The masculine code of the Homeric hero, based on the performance of deeds of warrior courage to win glory in life and a lasting memory after death, is one that earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings of the Odysseus story tended to endorse, as broadly in keeping with ‘modern’ codes of heroism and manliness. In the early twenty-first century this appears (from the sampling represented here) to be no longer the case. Those writers who regard Odysseus sympathetically, like McCaughrean and Yolen/Harris, treat his heroism indulgently as a kind of boyish exuberance in adventure and showing off; others, like Barrett and Gentill, subject it to withering satiric attack. Dryden’s view of 17 Block’s The Island of Excess Love (2014) continues Pen’s story, this time taking the Aeneid as its shaping text.

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‘heroes’ as “ungodly man-Killers”, anti-social and destructive, has become an orthodoxy. In a century in which war and the human tendency to violent selfassertion increasingly threaten the survival of the planet, Odysseus seems to have become for children’s writers less a heroic model and more an awful warning. It seems that the ‘Western metaethic’ communicated by children’s literature has, in this respect at least, decisively changed. Early in Love in the Time of Global Warming Hex, showing Pen his battered copy of the Odyssey, offers an idiosyncratic summary of what it is about, emphasising the classical heroic values: “Everything is about the wine [….] The sea, the wine, hospitality, loyalty, courage, kleos. Meaning glory”. He challenges Pen: “What would your book be about?” She responds: “The pink house at the edge of the sea [….] The Giants, the blood, the eyes, the butterflies” (52) – a jumble of half-understood poetic images, elusive in their symbolism but suggesting painful adventure, freedom, imagination, the quest for home. Homer’s story has its own set of interests and values, but Pen and Hex must define what their story is about. To a greater or lesser extent, all these ‘reversions’ of the Odysseus story for young readers claim that right to redefine the meaning of the story, and to assert their own view of the character of Odysseus and the values he represents. Nearly all of them, too, flaunt a metafictional awareness of their own status as receptions and reshapings of an ancient story. Some work the creation of the Homeric poem into their own narrative. McCaughrean’s retelling ends as the old blind bard of Phaeacia and the thin young bard from Ithaca get together to compare the stories of Odysseus that they have heard or witnessed: “Their stories they interwove into a new song” (434). Barrett and Gentill, more mischievously, suggest that their version is the true story of which the Homeric poem is a romanticised distortion. In King of Ithaka Telemachus is astonished when the court bard Homeros sings an unrecognisably glamorised song about the arrival of “the godlike youth” (himself) at Nestor’s court; he is assured that “Nobody expects a poet to tell the truth. It’s a better story this way” (Ch. 19). At the end of the novel he reports that Homeros has composed an equally glamorised version of the story of Odysseus. “But I don’t mind. It’s a better story the way Homeros tells it, and people like good stories” (Epilogue). Such people include Aeolus and his family in Chasing Odysseus, who reject the young Herdsmen’s truthful and brutal account of the fall of Troy in favour of the more heroic and chivalrous tale Odysseus had told them: “Odysseus’ tale made us laugh as well as cry. His heroes were bigger men, who died honourably, and I think his descriptions of battle more exciting” (book xiii). Cadmus comments bitterly that “We may have to work on the way we tell our story … apparently it’s not amusing enough” (book xiv). In a striking piece of literary one-upmanship,

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Barrett and Gentill suggest that those who prefer the Homeric story are indulging in escapist fantasy. The implications contrast interestingly with a twentieth-century use of the same device to the opposite purpose. In Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy (1961), the Greek traitor Palamedes (playing a villainous role as he does again for Mayo a half-century later) is urged to think what the “minstrels” will say about him if he carries out his plot to murder Achilles. Palamedes responds in his “effeminate” lisp: They may sing what they like. […] Minstwels sing such awful lies. But I’ve seen to it that the twuth shall be told: my scwibe Dictys of Cwete is witing an account of the war, a twue historwy which will outlive any lies the minstwels may tell, even if they take bwutes like Achilles or Odysseus as their hewoes.18 Dictys’ Journal (probably in fact written in the fourth century ad) purported to be a contemporary eyewitness account of the Trojan War, undercutting Homeric myth with the “sordid and unheroic” truth (and exalting Palamedes over Odysseus, who jealously murders him). But Green pre-emptively undercuts this undercutting by suggesting that the nobler Homeric account is the truth and the cynical ‘modern’ version the propagandist lie.19 Such metafictional strategies project the struggle over the meaning of the story back into the story itself. Block and Geras introduce a more radical and recursive motif of female authority/authorship, suggesting that the female protagonist is herself (re)writing the story. Block’s protagonist Pen reveals the pun concealed in her name when she declares, “I am the visionary, the one-eyed seer, the storyteller. I am Pen. I can fight with the power of images and words” (203), and overcomes Kronen and his Giant by reshaping their story into her own words. Geras takes inspiration from a poem by the (aptly named) English poet Penelope Shuttle, in which Penelope literally weaves her husband’s story: “All is made by the design of my hand./What I weave is where and how he travels”.20 Geras’ prose chapters about life on Ithaka are interwoven (as it were) with verse passages 18 Green, The Luck of Troy. Reprint (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) 101. 19 On Dictys see Stanford (1963) 149, 152–154 (‘sordid and unheroic’, 152). 20 I quote from the version in Geras’ epigraph, which slightly misquotes or adapts the original, more confrontational poem; see Shuttle, ‘Penelope,’ Manhattan Review (9.1.99), . Accessed 6 December 2013.

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describing Odysseus’ adventures as Penelope creates them in her tapestry. At the end of the novel Athene congratulates her: “Your weaving has kept him alive. The stories you have told in your work”. But Penelope angrily objects: ‘This is no story, Goddess. It’s my life. […] Why are you speaking of stories, as though what I’m going through is some sort of … amusement for children?’ (334). The metafictional joke suggests the paradoxes involved in these versions of the Odysseus story. All the writers are very conscious of what they are doing in reweaving an old story – as an “amusement for children” and young adults, but also as a way of challenging and rethinking the values and assumptions of the classical tale in twenty-first-century terms. Far from inculcating a simple ‘Western metanarrative’, they reveal just how complicated and contested the meanings of the Odysseus story remain.

chapter 10

The Metamorphosis of Ovid in Retellings of Myth for Children Deborah H. Roberts* From the middle of the nineteenth century, following the success of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), children have increasingly encountered Greek myth for the first time in anthologies of stories written specifically for the young.1 Myths for which Ovid’s Metamorphoses is our major or sole source are among those most frequently chosen for these collections and for single-myth picture books; these include the tales of Arachne, Baucis and Philemon, Daedalus and Icarus, Daphne and Apollo, Echo and Narcissus, Midas, and Pygmalion and Galatea. In many instances, however, Ovid goes unmentioned, and these stories are represented simply as Greek myths or folktales and as unmediated expressions of the Greek spirit. This was not always the case. Many of the educational handbooks written for or used by children in the 18th and early 19th centuries regularly cite and quote from Ovid,2 and Thomas Bulfinch’s 1855 Age of Fable, which seeks to give * I am grateful to Sheila Murnaghan and to the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions. 1 My focus here is on the English-speaking world, especially Britain and the United States, but analogous developments may be found in other countries. On myth in English for children see Constant, A Critical Study of Selected Greek Myths as Story for Children. Thesis, Columbia University. (Ann Arbor mi: University Microfilms, 1970), Lines, The Faber Book of Greek Legends (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1973) 18–24, 251–61, Brazouski and Klatt, Childrens’ Books on Ancient Greek and Roman Mythology: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, ct.: Greenwood Press, 1994), Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2013) ch. 3, Roberts “From Fairy Tale to Cartoon: Collections of Greek Myth for Children,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2009) 58–73, Murnaghan, “Classics for Cool Kids: Popular and Unpopular Versions of Antiquity for Children,” Classical World 104 (2011) 339–53, Murnaghan and Roberts, “Myth Collections for Children,” forthcoming in Vanda Zajko, ed., Blackwell’s Companion to the Reception of Classical Myth (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell). 2 See for example Tooke, [Pomey, François] The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes; in a Short, Plain, and Familiar Method,

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mythology “the charm of a story-book” not specifically for children but for readers “of either sex,” declares its reliance primarily on Ovid and Virgil.3 But Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book, which first presented myth purely as pleasure reading for children, mentions no ancient sources at all.4 Eustace Bright, the college sophomore who in Hawthorne’s frame story retells a series of myths to a group of children, calls them “nursery tales that were made for the amusement of our great old grandmother the earth” and speaks with scorn of “musty volumes of Greek.”5 The author-narrator of the frame story gives us this glimpse of Bright’s relationship to his sources just before the young man begins his first story, “The Gorgon’s Head:” Working up his sophomorical erudition with a good deal of tact, and incurring great obligations to Professor Anthon, he, nevertheless, disregarded all classical authorities, whenever the vagrant audacity of his imagination impelled him to do so.6 Hawthorne thus at one blow, on behalf of his fictional narrator, disowns expert  knowledge, acknowledges the use of a handbook (Anthon’s Classical Dic­tionary) rather than originals, and expresses his freedom from all “classical authorities”.7 by Way of Dialogue (London: Bathurst, Rivington, Law, Keith, Robinson, Baldwin, 1781), Monsigny, Mythology, or, a History of the Fabulous Deities of the Ancients; Designed to Facilitate the Study of History, Poetry, Painting, etc. (London: William Richardson, 1794), and Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy: Intended Chiefly for the Use of Students at the Universities and the Higher Classes in Schools (London: Whittaker, Teacher, 1831). On the continuing influence of Ovid in the nineteenth century despite widespread disapproval see Vance, “Ovid and the Nineteenth Century,” in Charles Martindale, ed., Ovid Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 3 On Bulfinch see Cleary, The Bulfinch Solution: Teaching Classics in American Schools (Salem nh: Ayer, 1989), Schein, “Greek Mythology in the Works of Thomas Bulfinch and Gustav Schwab,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2008) 81–89. 4 Charles Kingsley, Hawthorne’s similarly influential British contemporary, speaks with admiration of the Greeks but (except for a passing mention of Homer as the source of a story he only alludes to) omits his sources in The Heroes, or, Greek Fairy Tales for my Children (1855). 5 Hawthorne, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (Oxford, 1996) 19–20. 6 Hawthorne (1996) 20. 7 On the purposes of this acknowledgment see Donovan, “‘Very capital reading for children’: Reading as Play in Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys,” Children’s Literature 30 (2002) 19–41; on Hawthorne’s cited source see Anthon, A Classical Dictionary: Containing an Account of the Principal Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors and Intended to Elucidate All the Important Points Connected with the Geography, History, Biography, Mythology, and

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Many of Hawthorne’s numerous successors, especially the picture-books that have come to dominate the field since the middle of the 20th century, likewise efface Ovid’s role in transmitting and shaping the stories the reader encounters.8 This is, of course, in large part a function of the regular omission of citations in works for children and of the use of previous anthologies as intermediary sources – sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not.9 But the omission of sources in general and of Ovid in particular also reflects a tendency to privilege the idea of the folktale over the literary text in retellings for children, an outgrowth in part of an assumed likeness between child audiences and the popular audiences of traditional stories, especially as orally transmitted – ­and perhaps also of the conception of myth as timeless and thus only superficially the property of any particular writer or era.10 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley, both of whom assimilate myth to fairy story, myths are often “told in  simple, fairy-tale style” or said to represent “old Greek folk stories”.11 In more  recent decades, although the fairy story paradigm as such grows less prominent, we still find a tendency to stress the oral and popular origin of the myths.12 Such approaches, and a regular emphasis on the myths as distinctive Fine Arts of the Greeks and Romans: Together With an Account of Coins, Weights, and Measures, with Tabular Values of the Same (New York: Harper, 1841); on Hawthorne’s use of Anthon see McPherson, Hawthorne as Myth-Maker: A Study in Imagination (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969). 8 Mary Pope Osborne’s Favorite Greek Myths (1989) is a striking exception among recent picture-books; she tells readers in her preface that most of her stories come from Ovid, and uses the opening lines of the Metamorphoses as her epigraph. 9 Stephens and McCallum (2013) note of traditional stories in general that “Even where there is a strong pre-text such as Perrault, retellers are most likely to use intermediate versions – to produce a retelling of a retelling” (2). 10 Murnaghan and Roberts (forthcoming); Stephens and McCallum (2013); on Hawthorne’s association of myth with childhood and the childhood of humankind, see Hoffman, “Myth, Romance, and the Childhood of Man,” in R.H. Pearce, ed., Hawthorne Centenary Essays (Columbus oh: Ohio State University Press, 1964) 197–219. 11 Kingsley, The Heroes, or, Greek Fairy-Tales for my Children (Chapel Hill, nc., 2009) (Reprint of 1894 edition. First published 1855), Kupfer, Stories of Long Ago, in a New Dress (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1897) 3, Peabody, Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), publisher’s preface iii; on Hawthorne and the fairy tale, see Richardson, “Myth and Fairy Tale in Hawthorne’s Stories for Children,” Journal of American Culture 2 (1979) 341– 346, Donovan (2002) 24–25, Roberts (2009). 12 See for example Untermeyer, The Firebringer and Other Great Stories: Fifty-Five Legends That Live Forever (New York: M. Evans, 1968) 8, Kimmel, The McElderry Book of Greek Myths (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008) xi.

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expressions of Greek culture and the Greek spirit, leave little motive to acknowledge literary versions, let alone a sophisticated Roman intermediary. Edith Hamilton, who like Bulfinch wrote for a general audience but was widely read by children, and whose central concern in her Mythology (1940) is with the distinctiveness of the Greeks and their cultural achievement, makes explicit her resistance to Ovid. Although she fully acknowledges him as a source where relevant, she declares that she has “avoided using him as far as possible;” though his versions are “witty and diverting” they are “sentimental and distressingly rhetorical,” and he treats as “idle tales” stories that were serious truth (either “factual” or “religious”) to the earlier Greeks.13 That tales from Ovid are ubiquitous in collections for children is, however, hardly surprising. His Metamorphoses is our chief source for numerous myths, and thus in general indispensible for any complete account; his use in handbooks and in influential versions like that of Bulfinch and his presence (through Anthon) in Hawthorne ensured his effect on the later tradition. But Ovid’s particular importance in versions for children also has to do with the prominence in the Metamorphoses of the kinds of stories that (in addition to hero stories) have historically been regarded as suitable for children: tales with magical elements, including but not limited to the metamorphoses themselves; aetiological tales that explain the origin of some entity or phenomenon; and stories that offer a moral or lend themselves to a moralizing interpretation. We might also say that aspects of Ovid’s approach to the myths he inherits and retells are themselves, directly or indirectly, at play in modern retellings for  children, in spite of the apparent contrast between Ovid’s sophisticated and literate Roman readers and the intended audience (some of whom cannot yet read) of these versions. Although Hawthorne’s narrator, Eugene Bright, describes myths as “nursery tales” from Earth’s childhood, he also takes ancient authors as his example for creative reworking by an active agent: “The ancient poets remodeled [myths] at pleasure, and held them plastic in their hands, and why should they not be plastic in my hands as well?”14 Hawthorne’s retellings of myth, even as they depart from Ovid in other respects, clearly recall his ­versions in their narrative detail, playful anachronism, pathos conjoined 13 14

Hamilton (1940) 15–16; see Murnaghan (2008). Hawthorne (1996) 166. In “Hawthorne’s Ovidian Transformations,” Classical Receptions Journal 5 (2013) 126–143, Gregory Staley, argues that Hawthorne espouses and to some extent exemplifies in The Marble Faun an Ovidian aesthetic of transformation whose governing metaphor is that of sculpture, and points to Hawthorne’s invocation of the same aesthetic in his two myth collections.

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with comedy, occasional articulation of moral judgments, and narrative self-­ consciousness.15 Moreover, even as Hawthorne gives prominence to the child reader – by children’s presence as listeners in the frame, by the narrator’s direct remarks to his child audience, and by the inclusion of child characters or characters treated as children16 – he signals his sophistication by occasional gestures towards the adult reader who is an inevitable presence in children’s literature.17 In these respects, many of Hawthorne’s successors – including the most lively among them – have taken their cue both from him and, directly or indirectly (if rarely explicitly) from Ovid. Most writers, then, who retell myths for children, rely heavily on Ovid as a source, but many of these occlude or play down their debt to him, in part to avoid burdening young readers with information deemed of little interest, in part because they seek to present the myths as either quintessentially Greek or universal. Ovid is, however, essential to their project, both because his are the kinds of stories they envision as most suitable for or appealing to children and because he is (directly or indirectly) their model: they are like him in retelling Greek myths for a different audience in another cultural context with playfulness and inventive freedom. These writers cannot all be assumed to be working directly with Ovid; in many cases they show the influence of earlier anthologies (for children or for adults), and they belong to a tradition of mythology for children that has taken on a life of its own.18 In children’s literature as elsewhere, the widespread reception of Ovid is in part the product of (and determined by) 15

16 17

18

On the characteristics and general direction of Hawthorne’s retellings in A Wonder-Book and in Tanglewood Tales, see McPherson (1969) Part ii, Baym (1973), Laffrado (1992), and Donovan (2002). See Hathaway, “Hawthorne and the Paradise of Children,” Western Humanities Review 15 (1961) 161–72. In the concluding section of A Wonder-Book’s frame story, to take just one example, Hawthorne engages in a bit of metafictional play by having Eugene Bright mention (along with Longfellow, Melville, and other notable writers in the neighborhood) an author who has over Bright and his hearers “a terrible power,” and could annihilate them if he were just “to fling a quire of two of paper into the stove” (Hawthorne 1996: 240). On the role of the frame narrative see Donovan (2002) 27–32, Baym (1973) 37, Horn, “Legends Malleable in his Intellectual Furnace”: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder Book, Mythological Adaptation, and Children’s Literature (Senior Thesis, Haverford College, 2013) 25–46. On the presence and effect of the “hidden adult” reader in children’s literature see especially Nodelman (2008) and the critique of Nodelman’s book in Rudd, Reading the Child in Children’s Literature: An Heretical Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ch. 4. Murnaghan and Roberts (forthcoming).

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earlier receptions. Hawthorne functions both as source and as paradigm because he denies his debt to Ovid (and other authorities) but transforms them in ways that are demonstrably Ovidian. Bulfinch also helps guarantee Ovid’s continued influence by his extensive use of the Metamorphoses and his recognition of the inescapable fact that Hawthorne suppresses – that Ovid is the prototype for retellings that display charm and artful narrative. And Edith Hamilton, writing a century later, expresses an ambivalence that may also have made its mark on retellers of myth for children and contributed to Ovid’s partial invisibility: where Bulfinch sees Ovid as exhibiting “‘exquisite taste, simplicity, and pathos,’” Hamilton admires his wit but finds him “subtle, polished, artificial,” and “often sentimental,”19 and uses him as little as she can. My aim in what follows is to explore the variety and complexity of transformations of Ovid for children, with a look at retellings from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present day.20 Rather than engage fully with any single story or version, I examine a selection of especially significant alterations and their implications in four often-told myths. In particular, I consider instances in which a particular alteration that seems to have an obvious rationale (it will appeal to the child reader, it will shield the child reader) proves capable of a more varied interpretation. And although I will not be centrally concerned with the communication of “metanarratives” John Stephens and Robyn McCallum see as the central function of retold stories,21 my analyses will call upon certain formative cultural preoccupations as at work in these alterations. It is by now a commonplace in the field of children’s literature studies that the child reader is inevitably an adult construction, expressive of adult needs and reflective of shifting cultural contexts, though the scope and implications of this claim are still debated. My use of the term “child reader” should be understood in this way.22 19 20

21 22

Bulfinch (1869) 411, quoting an unnamed “late writer;” Hamilton viii, 15. I have not read every one of the many, many English-language anthologies of myth and single-myth books for children, but my examples are drawn from a large and I believe representative selection. Stephens and McCallum (2013); for their analysis of retellings for children of Ovid’s version of the Icarus myth, see 69–75. For an early and influential formulation of the view that child and the child reader in children’s literature are inevitably adult constructions see Rose 1992 [1984]; for a reconsideration of Rose’s views and impact see Rudd (2013) and Nodelman “Former Editor’s Comments; Or, The Possibility of Growing Wiser,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35 (2010) 230–42, cf. also the other articles in the special issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly in which Nodelman appears. On the construction of the child in children’s literature criticism see the similarly influential Lesnik-Oberstein,

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We start by looking at two myths Hawthorne retells in A Wonder-Book, and by examining two of Hawthorne’s changes and their afterlife and effect (brief and limited in one case, extensive in the other) in the subsequent tradition. “The Miraculous Pitcher” is Hawthorne’s retelling of Ovid’s story of Baucis and Philemon, in which Jupiter and Mercury,23 in disguise, receive the hospitality of a poor and elderly couple, and reward them while punishing their rich and inhospitable neighbors. The story concludes with the metamorphosis of the loving couple, who have asked the gods never to be parted, into trees that stand side by side.24 Hawthorne’s retelling exemplifies his characteristic elaboration of detail, his humorous touch, and the self-conscious voice of his narrator. The divine visitors have a miraculous effect not only on the pitcher of the title, but on the bread “now as light and moist as if but a few hours out of the oven” and on the honey, which gets a paragraph of its own, beginning, “But, oh the honey! I may just as well let it alone, without trying to describe how exquisitely it smelt and looked!”25 The disguised Mercury (“Quicksilver,” as in all of Hawthorne’s stories) provides a comic element with the “queer” behavior of his shoes and of his staff, which takes on a life of its own, with its wings and wriggling snakes.26 And Hawthorne’s narrator addresses his child listeners sometimes with an air of directness (“And now, my little auditors, shall I tell you something that will make you open your eyes very wide”?),27 sometimes with tongue in cheek, as when he expresses view that are in keeping with common sense but not with the mythical reality of the story itself: The staff seemed to get up from the ground of its own accord, and, spreading its little pair of wings, it half hopped, half flew, and learned itself against the wall of the cottage. There it stood quite still, except that the snakes continued to wriggle. But, in my private opinion, old Philemon’s eyesight had been playing him tricks again.28 The surprise to which Eugene Bright calls the attention of his “little auditors” includes Hawthorne’s most striking change in (and elaboration of) Ovid’s story. In Ovid, the divine visitors cause the pitcher of the title (a crater or “mixing Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 23 Ovid uses the Roman names of the ancient divinities where these differ from the Greek; those who retell these stories vary in their practice. 24 Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.616–724. 25 Hawthorne (1996) 187, 189. 26 Hawthorne (1996) 179–80. 27 Hawthorne (1996) 184. 28 Hawthorne (1996) 180.

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bowl” in Latin) to yield an endless supply of wine.29 In A Wonder-Book, this piece of magic is told at much greater length, and what emerges when the pitcher should have been empty is not wine but milk, and milk of such excellent quality that the narrator comments, “I only wish that each of you, my beloved little souls, could have a bowl of such nice milk, at supper-time!”30 This remark points to a reading of Hawthorne’s change as appealing to the presumed taste of the child reader, but it may also be a response (ironical or not) to expectations of temperance in 19th and early 20th century children’s fiction.31 In another innovation, Hawthorne uses the pitcher to further assimilate his story to a fairy tale: it continues to supply milk on demand, but the milk is sweet for the “good-humoured” and sour for the “curmudgeon.”32 As for the pitcher’s afterlife outside the tale: it persists in several of Hawthorne’s earlier successors, but reverts to wine in most versions since 1930.33 Hawthorne’s introduction of a daughter named Marygold into the story of Midas, on the other hand, has become such a regular fixture in retellings of this perennially popular myth that readers encountering Ovid for the first time often 29 Ovid Metamorphoses 8.679–680. 30 Hawthorne (1996) 197, 187. 31 McPherson (1969) 68 describes Hawthorne’s pitcher as a “Band of Temperance” pitcher. We find Dickens exclaiming indignantly, in the October 1853 issue of Household Words, over George Cruikshank’s adaptation of fairy tales “as a means of propagating the doctrines of Total Abstinence, Prohibition of the sale of spirituous liquors, Free Trade, and Popular Education.” Dickens, Selection from ‘Frauds on the Fairies’, Household Words vol. 8, no. 184 (October 1853), in Hunt, Peter, ed., Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) 25. 32 Hawthorne (1996) 197. 33 The pitcher produces milk in Beckwith, In Mythland (Boston: Educational Publishing Company, 1896), Kupfer (1897), Davidson, Wonder Tales from the Greek and Roman Myths (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1915), Cowles, Myths of Many Lands (Chicago: Flanagan 1924), Forbush, Myths and Legends of Greece and Rome (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1928), and Pyle, Tales from Greek Mythology (Philadelphia and London: J.B. Lippincott, 1928) – also in Russell, Classic Myths to Read Aloud (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1989), whose versions are based on earlier authors. It produces wine in Blyton, Tales of Ancient Greece (New York: Scholastic, 1998. Originally published 1930), Coolidge, Greek Myths (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), Ware and Sutherland, Greek and Roman Myths (New York: Phoenix Learning Resources, 1952), Lancelyn Green, Tales the Muses Told (London: The Bodley Head, 1965), and Lewis, “Baucis and Philemon” in Kathleen Lines, ed., The Faber Book of Greek Legends (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1973). (It may be significant that the versions with milk tend to be from the United States, in the period leading up to and during Prohibition.) The story has become markedly less common in recent anthologies.

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wonder where she is.34 In later versions Midas’ daughter sometimes has a different name or goes unnamed; she may be replaced or supplemented by other family members, servants, or pets; in a couple of instances she narrowly escapes the transformation she undergoes in Hawthorne.35 But where she and her fictional descendants occur, they not only offer children a point of contact in the story but also in some instances help effect the transformation of its moral. In Ovid’s version, Midas asks for and receives from Bacchus (as a reward for helping Silenus) the ability to turn everything into gold; when he finds himself with nothing he can eat or drink, he realizes his mistake.36 Hawthorne, as usual, both simplifies and elaborates: he removes Silenus as the reason for gift of the golden touch while giving us many more details of Midas’ life both before and after the transformations that result from the gift, including such playful and explicit anachronisms as Midas’ eyeglasses (“not yet invented” for ordinary people but available to kings).37 But the central innovation, as critics agree, is the addition of Marygold. The lesson in Ovid’s version is evidently that Midas has been a fool, unable to think clearly about the likely effect of his choice. Indeed, judging from Ovid’s 34

Hawthorne marks Marygold as an invention: Eugene Bright notes that Midas “had a little daughter, whom nobody but myself ever heard of, and whose name I either never knew, or have entirely forgotten” (Hawthorne (1996) 64); see McPherson (1969) 56. Cf. Stephens and McCallum (1998) 5 on the inclusion in retellings of the Robin Hood story of details introduced by Howard Pyle. 35 Midas’ daughter is Marygold or Marigold in Beckwith (1896) and Price (1924); she is unnamed in Davidson (1915), Forbush (1928), Blyton (1998), who also includes an unnamed slave, Evslin, Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (New York: Random House, 1966), Lewis, One-Minute Greek Myths (Garden City, n.y.: Doubleday, 1987), Oldfield, Tales from Ancient Greece (New York: Doubleday, 1988), Spires, I am Arachne: Fifteen Greek and Roman Myths (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), and Coats, Atticus the Storyteller (London: Orion, 2002); she has a different name in Ware and Sutherland (1952) and Kimmel (2008). Midas has a son instead of a daughter in McCaughrean, Greek Myths (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and Amery, Usborne Greek Myths for Young Children (London: Usborne, 1999); he has a favorite hound in Pyle (1928), a golden retriever named Dora in Spires (2001), an unnamed cat in Townsend, Amazing Greek Myths of Wonder and Blunders (New York: Penguin, 2010), a dog named Ajax and a cat named Niobe as well as a daughter in Kimmel (2002), and a dog, cook, queen, and princess (all transformed) in McKissack, King Midas and his Gold (Chicago: Children’s Press, 1986). The daughter narrowly escapes transformation in Spires (2001) and Townsend (2010). 36 Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.85–145. For a brief reading of Hawthorne’s Midas in relation to Ovid’s see Anderson, “Ovid’s Genial and Ingenious Story of King Midas,” in Barbara Weiden Boyd and Cora Fox, eds., Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2010) 151–160. 37 Hawthorne (1996) 73.

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sequel, in which Midas’ poor musical judgment earns him ass’ ears, Midas himself seems to have drawn the wrong conclusion; his previous experience leaves him with a hatred for wealth but just as foolish as before.38 In many versions for children the moral is revised only slightly: Midas must usually overcome not only his foolishness but also his greed, which is evident from the start rather than simply implied (as in Ovid) by the request for the golden touch.39 But what Hawthorne’s Midas learns, from the loss of his daughter, is this: “how infinitely a warm and tender heart, that loved him, exceeded in value all the wealth that could be piled up betwixt the earth and sky.”40 In Helen Beckwith’s In Mythland (1896), which is written in easy-to-read language for kindergarten children, the moral is made even plainer and simpler; at the end, Midas declares, “How glad I am I have a little girl to love me. Love is better than gold. Love is the best thing in the world.”41 Several decades later, the story’s moral continues to evolve. In Beckwith’s version, as in Hawthorne’s, Marygold prefers real flowers to golden ones; in Enchantment Tales (1926), Margaret Price develops this implicit rivalry between the natural and the artificial by giving Midas a daughter (here named Marigold) who doesn’t care about “rich presents” and who “loves to wear a short white frock, and to go barefoot” and “to feel the cool wind blow through her curls”.42 As often in children’s fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the child is identified both with what is natural (rather than artificial) and with the natural world, and the child is in this respect the teacher of the adult.43 As the story ends, Midas and 38 Ovid Metamorphoses 11.146–193. 39 See for example the variants in Blyton (1998), Elgin, The First Book of Mythology: GreekRoman (New York: Franklin Watts, 1955), Lancelyn Green (1958/1969), D’Aulaire (1962), Untermeyer (1968), McCaughrean (1992), Coats (2002). 40 Hawthorne (1996) 81–82. On Hawthorne’s moralizing see Billman (1982) 111. 41 Beckwith (1896) 103. 42 Price (1993) 131. Cf. Davidson (1920), whose Midas learns, with his daughter’s help, “the wonderful lesson that the amassing of riches does not bring the greatest happiness, but that the marvels of beautiful Nature and the sweetness of human love are more precious gifts than all the jewels and golden wealth to be found in the world” (228). 43 Notable examples may be found in Heidi and Anne of Green Gables; cf. Hawthorne’s Proserpina, who is depicted in his version as a child who brightens Pluto’s life (“Six Pomegranate Seeds,” Hawthorne 2009). On Hawthorne’s Marygold as redemptive child see Parille, “Allegories of Childhood Gender: Hawthorne and the Material Boy,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 36 (2010) 127–128; for a reading of Hawthorne’s Marygold and other daughters in his works as both a reflection and a critique of nineteenth century representations of childhood, see Brown, “Hawthorne and Children in the Nineteenth Century: Daughters, Flowers, Stories,” in Larry John Reynolds, ed., A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 79–108.

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his daughter take a walk in the woods, where “he found more happiness than he had ever known in his treasure room, and learned to love the white buds of flowers more than the largest pearls in his coffers.”44 In The McElderderry Book of Greek Myths (2008), one of the most recent anthologies, Eric Kimmel offers a contemporary variation that stresses love in the context of social justice. When Midas (who bears a striking resemblance to Disney’s Scrooge McDuck as he wallows in the coins in his treasure house) says he wants as much money as he can get, Dionysius [sic] tells him that he “should think less about getting and more about giving…. Why not use your wealth to help poor, hungry people?”45 After Midas has turned his food into inedible gold and his cat, dog, and daughter Phoebe – who touches his forehead out of concern for his health – into golden statues, he not only regrets his greed, but also realizes “what it means to be hungry, thirsty, frightened, and alone”.46 After all is restored to him, he gives away his money to those who need it, and no one in his kingdom goes without the basic necessities of life; as a result, “Midas was no longer the richest king on earth but he was surely the most beloved. That made him richer still.”47 The emphasis on love as more valuable than riches recalls Hawthorne and Beckwith, but the lesson in this early 21st century version is that love must now be earned by concern for others, and that wealth is of value only when used to help those in need. Note that in each of these myths the Ovidian narrative has been transformed by a specific detail we might simply identify as an obvious accommodation of the story to a child audience: wine becomes milk, a child character is added. But in the first case, there is no single or simple reason for this change, which may reflect either adult assumptions about what children like or adult views about what children should be taught to think about the dangers of alcohol. And in the second, the introduction of a new character brings with it a sequence of changes in different retellings, and the figure of the child is not simply an imagined point of identification for the child but a source of lessons for child and adult alike. Moreover, while the child remains a constant, the lessons change, in accordance with the author’s preoccupations and the cultural moment of writing. In Hawthorne, Beckwith, and Price, in a pattern typical of 19th and early 20th century fiction, the child reader is asked to learn from a story in which an adult learns from a child, who models both unconditional love and a connection with nature.48 In the fourth story, written in the early 44 45 46 47 48

Price (1993) 139. Kimmel (2008) 41–42. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. See note 45, and see Brown (2001) on the reforming child heroine.

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21st century, this motif has largely given way to a concern for the greater good of society, but Phoebe’s less sentimental expression of concern for her father – rather than hug him, she puts her hand on his forehead and asks if he is ill – perpetuates the reversal of the parent–child relationship and anticipates Midas’ newly acquired concern for others. As Hawthorne’s change from wine to milk (a mild and minor instance) reminds us, Ovidian elements considered inappropriate to children tend to be elided or revised in retellings, and bowdlerization is common from beginning to end of our period. This is to some degree concealed (as often) by the process of selection, which excludes the extremes of violence and sexual transgres­ sion;49 collections for children are unlikely to include the story of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus, in which rape and mutilation are succeeded by infanticide and cannibalism, or any of the tales involving incest.50 But a number of the stories most frequently included in collections are also as frequently modified. And these changes, though ostensibly aimed at removing or transforming material thought inappropriate for children, are often (as in the examples above) both over-determined and complex in their impact. In what follows, I focus on the ramifications of what might be termed bowdlerization in the retellings of two stories from Ovid that Hawthorne did not include in either of his collections but that appear regularly in later versions from the 1890s to the early 21st century: the myths of Echo and Narcissus and of Daphne and Apollo. Most writers for children follow Ovid in combining the stories of Echo and Narcissus.51 In his version, we first encounter Narcissus, whose mother receives a prophecy from Tiresias that the boy will be long-lived “if he never loves himself” (“si non se noverit”).52 Narcissus, who is sought after by others but loves no one, meets the nymph Echo one day while out hunting, and we learn that she has been punished by Juno and can only repeat the last words she hears. She falls in love with Narcissus, but cannot explain herself; he scorns her and 49

On the role of selection in expurgation, see Harrison and Stray, eds., Expurgating the Classics: Editing Out in Greek and Latin (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012). 50 Even collections for the general reader found this story problematic at least until the middle of the 20th century. Both Bulfinch and Hamilton transform the rape into a feigned marriage, and Hyde, Favorite Greek Myths (Boston: D.E. Heath, 1904), unusual in including this story, follows Bulfinch. 51 Ovid Metamorphoses 3.339–510. Among versions that tell the tale of Narcissus on its own are Carpenter, Long Ago in Greece: A Book of Golden Hours with the Old Story-Tellers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1906), Crawford, Greek Tales for Tiny Tots (Bloomington, il.: Public School Publishing Company, 1929), and Weil, King Midas’ Secret and Other Follies (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969); Hyde (1904) and Lewis (1987) tell the two stories separately. 52 Ovid Metamorphoses 3.348.

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she gradually fades, becoming only voice. But Nemesis responds to the prayer of another spurned love of Narcissus, and the boy falls in love with his own image in a pool, at first deceived, but finally aware that it is himself he sees. He fades away and dies; in death he watches himself in the waters of the Styx, and only a flower is left where his body was. Although few writers for children follow Ovid’s narrative order precisely, most retain the basic lines of his narrative, and the conclusion, in which the boy turns into a flower, is a constant.53 This is hardly surprising, since the two stories, combined or separate, perfectly represent the type of tale often chosen by adults for children, including as they do a quasi-magical transformation, an example of the consequences bad behavior may bring, and an aetiological explanation of something in the natural world. But each of them also includes elements of what has been considered transgressive sexuality or of sexual violence, traditionally avoided in stories for children.54 In Ovid’s version, the reason Juno punishes Echo is that the talkative nymph has distracted the goddess in conversation and prevented her from finding other nymphs “lying under Jupiter” (sub Iove iacentis).55 No children’s version I have encountered is as explicit as this, and many retellings gloss over or redescribe Jupiter’s behavior, suggesting that he simply wants to be alone, to amuse himself among mortals, or to play with the nymphs.56 Mary Pope Osborne, whose Favorite Greek Myths (1989) is among the few picture books to name Ovid as its source, comes closest to his text – the nymphs “embrace the jovial god” – and more recent writers represent Zeus as “flirting”, “chasing some of Echo’s friends,” and having “a secret girlfriend or two.”57 But another common variant (found in different versions over the past century or so) leaves Jupiter out of the picture altogether, and makes Echo’s chatter in itself the fault for

53

There is some variation in the manner of Narcissus’ death; in most versions he wastes away, but in a few (Buckley, Children of the Dawn: Old Tales of Greece (London: Wells Gardner Darton, 1908), Weil 1969, Lines 1973) he falls into the pool and drowns and in Amery (1999) he kills himself in some unspecified way. 54 This was especially true before the development of the more open category of young adult literature. 55 Ovid Metamorphoses 3.363. (All translations are mine). 56 See for example Kupfer (1897), Pyle (1928), White, The Golden Treasure of Myths and Legends (New York: Golden, 1959), D’Aulaire (1962), Lancelyn Green (1965), Lines (1973); cf. Bulfinch (1869). 57 Osborne (1989) 29, Vinge, The Random House Book of Greek Myths (New York: Random House, 1999) 126, Coats (2002) 103–4, Spires (2001) 38.

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which she is punished: she talks too much, she interrupts, she insists on the last word, she argues, and in some versions she even tells lies.58 Where Echo’s story begins with her indirect implication in Jupiter’s erotic escapades, Narcissus’ story includes homoerotic elements at three points. Ovid tells us that he is pursued by, and uninterested in, both girls and young men: multum illum iuvenes, multae cupiere puellae; sed fuit in tenera tam dura superbia forma, nulli illum iuvenes nullae tetigere puellae. Many young men and many girls desired him, but so unyielding was the pride in that slender body that no young men and no girls could touch him.59 It is an unnamed man he has rejected (aliquis despectus) who calls on the gods for vengeance and is heard by Nemesis (Rhamnusia).60 Finally, in falling in love with his own reflection Ovid initially believes himself to be falling in love with another boy or young man. Almost all children’s versions make the objects of Narcissus’ conceited or self-centered scorn female (women, nymphs, maidens, girls, or shepherdesses), or leave matters vague (“Everyone was in love with his golden curls, his leaf-green eyes, and his pearly white skin. But Narcissus loved nobody back.”)61 Elsie Finnimore Buckley (Children of the Dawn, 1908), writing for older children and probably relying on a broadly inclusive or vague understanding of love, is an interesting early exception: “Narcissus cared for neither man nor woman, but only for his own pleasure; and because he was so fair that all who saw him loved him for his beauty, he found it easy to get from them what he would.”62 In keeping with this almost universal shift of gender in those who pursue Narcissus, the role of the spurned and vengeful man is regularly omitted or given to Echo or another nymph (as also in Bulfinch). But the central homoerotic moment seems less easily elided: the reflection of a boy is, after all, a  boy.  Ovid makes the gender of Narcissus’ phantom beloved quite clear: 58

Variants in Hyde (1904), Elgin (1955), Sissons, Myths and Legends of the Greeks (New York: Hart, 1960), McCaughrean (1992), Amery (1999), Kimmel (2008). 59 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.353–355; cf. 402–403. 60 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.403, 406. 61 Coats (2002) 104. 62 Buckley (1908) 218–219; cf. Lines (1973) who follows Buckley directly and whose “loved by many youths and many maidens” (57) is strikingly close to Ovid.

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he  admires his own traits in his reflection, (“cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse”);63 the image’s hair is described as worthy of Apollo (not, say, of Aphrodite); his youthful, that is, beardless cheeks (“impubes genas”) are standard in ancient descriptions of desirable boys; and Ovid addresses the reflection as “special boy” (“puer unica”)64 I have found two early 20th century versions for young readers that clearly represent the reflection as a beloved boy: Edmund J. Carpenter’s “Narcissus and his Shadow” (Long Ago in Greece, 1906) and Francis Jenkins Olcott’s “Echo and Narcissus,” (The Wonder Garden, 1919). Carpenter’s version (though “adapted from Ovid”) is unusual in several respects: he tells the Narcissus story without Echo, his Narcissus has never rejected anyone, and the encounter with the pool thus emerges as a sad mishap rather than a punishment or an allegory of vanity. In this retelling, Narcissus begins “to feel a love toward the beautiful youth” and tries to kiss him;65 in Olcott’s (“retold from Ovid,” and closer to his version), Narcissus also tries to kiss the youth he think he sees, speaks of his “unrequited affection,” and calls his reflection “dear youth” and “dear lad.”66 Like Buckley, Carpenter and Olcott may be relying on a broad understanding of love, one inclusive of passionate affection, to make their retelling acceptable. Less surprisingly, a few relatively recent versions accept the object of Narcissus’ desire for what it is, without attempting to transform that desire to affection or admiration; in Joan Vinge’s 1999 version, Narcissus “could not hold or caress the beautiful youth,” and in Elizabeth Spires’ 2001 I am Arachne, in which characters narrate their own stories, Narcissus tells us that he saw “a boy, a beautiful boy, looking up at me, his eyes wide with longing and surprise.”67 He falls in love at once with this “perfect stranger,” and begs for a kiss.68 (Recall that these two writers also hinted openly at Jupiter’s infidelity.) Such directness about the object of Narcissus’ desire is, however, rare. Many versions throughout our period are simply evasive, blurring the situation either by emphasizing the fact that Narcissus is in love with “himself”69 or by referring to the reflected image in gender-neutral terms as a “beautiful face” or 63 “He admires everything for which he is admirable himself” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 424). 64 Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.421–422, 454. 65 Carpenter (1906) 108–109. 66 Olcott, The Wonder Garden: Nature Myths and Tales from All the World Over (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 19. 67 Vinge (1999) 129, Spires (2001) 39. Cf. Blaisdell, Favorite Greek Myths (New York: Dover, 1995). 68 Spires (2001) 39. 69 See Untermeyer (1968), Weil (1969), Lewis (1987), McCaughrean (1992), Coats (2002).

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“beautiful person.”70 (Osborne, again following Ovid closely, may be hinting at the gender of “this vision of beauty” when she describes him as having “hair as golden as Apollo’s and cheeks as smooth as ivory,” and the illustration in her text is decidedly masculine.)71 But others, who may in this be following Bulfinch, represent Narcissus as deceived not only about the identity but about the gender of his newfound love: he believes the face he sees is “a water spirit,” “some water nymph,” or “some lovely lady.”72 A few writers further enhance the illusion of female gender by having Narcissus believe that the voice of Echo belongs to the nymph in the pond.73 One curious side effect of this choice is that writers and illustrators sometimes seek to enhance its plausibility by creating a more androgynous version of Narcissus himself; in Guerber’s 1896 retelling, the face in the pool has “curly, tumbled locks” and “a pair of beautiful, watchful, anxious eyes,”74 John Crawford’s Narcissus (Tales for Tiny Tots, 1929) has “such a pretty and adorable little face that the boys called him Sissy,”75 and Rafaello Busoni’s illustration for Nicola Sissons’ 1960 version (Fig. 10.1) depicts a feminized Narcissus in an odalisque-like posture on the edge of the stream; with his pronounced hips, the loose folds of his long tunic over his chest, and his long curly hair held back by a band, there is little to distinguish him from Echo, who peers from the bushes nearby.76 As often with bowdlerization, we see a predictable chronological pattern, but one with exceptions at both ends: through the middle of the 20th century explicit or transgressive sexuality tends to be elided or suppressed altogether, but there are suggestive or partial early 20th century exceptions like those found in Buckley and Carpenter. Some recent decades come closer to Ovid, while in others elision continues – not surprising, since the sweeping changes in the acceptance of the previously taboo since the 1950s do not apply as broadly to literature for children. We may also note that bowdlerization may 70 71 72

73 74 75 76

See Kupfer (1897), Coolidge (1949), D’Aulaire (1962), Lines (1973), Amery (1999), Blood, Greek Myth Mini-Books (New York: Scholastic, 2001), Kimmel (2008). Osborne (1989) 31. Elgin (1955) 31, following Bulfinch (1869) 143; Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome. (New York: American Book Company, 1893) 119; Crawford (1929) 63. Cf. Pyle (1928), Blyton (1998), Sissons (1960), Evslin (1966), Lancelyn Green (1965, 1969). Hyde (1904) has Narcissus think he sees a water nymph who looks like his lost twin sister, following a variant mentioned by Pausanias (Description of Greece 9.31.8). Buckley (1908), Evslin (1966), Lines (1973). Guerber (1893) 119. Crawford (1929) 63. Sissons (1960) 100–101. Compare Oren Sherman’s illustration for Vinge’s version, which pictures a muscular youth with close-cropped hair wearing only a loincloth, Vinge (1999) 128.

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Figure 10.1  “ Echo and Narcissus,” Nicola Ann Sissons, Myths and Legends of the Greeks. (New York: Hart, 1960), illustrated by Rafaello Busoni

produce paradoxical effects: steering clear of a Narcissus who sees and loves a young man in his reflection, some of these texts produce a feminized Narcissus. It may also allow or even enhance the presence of unrepressed subtexts. In Geraldine McCaughrean’s version, it’s women (not men and women) who pursue Narcissus, it’s Echo (not a spurned man) who wishes for vengeance, and the reflection in the pond is just a face. Given, however, that her Narcissus doesn’t “much like women” and doesn’t “want their sickly, syrupy love,” what sort of face is most likely to attract him?77 To describe the changes I have cited simply as examples of bowdlerization would however be to simplify the dynamic of transformation. Changing Echo’s fault to mere talkativeness not only avoids the uncomfortable spectacle of Jupiter’s amours but also assimilates Echo herself to the figure (pervasive in folklore) of the woman who talks too much, and evokes as well, perhaps, the proverbial child who should be seen and not heard. This shift to some extent precedes the omission of Jupiter, though it certainly gains emphasis from that omission: Grace Kupfer (Stories of Long Ago, in a New Dress, 1897) who gives Jupiter’s desire “to be alone” a small part in the story, begins her narration with the words: “This is the story of a maiden who came to grief because she talked 77

McCaughrean (1992) 22.

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too much, and because she always wanted to have the last word.”78 In this respect the retellings of this story resemble other folktales in which a standard moral (often one involving female behavior) is attached to a narrative evidently once shaped by other concerns: obedience, for example, to “Little Red Riding Hood”, and curiosity to “Bluebeard”.79 The omission of the anonymous man who calls for vengeance, or his replacement by Echo herself, is not only an example of bowdlerization; it is also typical of a pattern of plot simplification in versions of myth for children, and present elsewhere in these paired stories as well. A number of retellings omit Nemesis altogether, or replace her with a more familiar and apparently fitting divinity: Venus/Aphrodite (angry on behalf of the scorned) or Diana/Artemis (angry on behalf of Echo or the nymphs); very few versions include either Narcissus’ ultimate self-recognition in Ovid, which would seem to complicate children’s understanding of what is happening, or the glimpse Ovid gives us of Narcissus in Hades, which might seem to conflict confusingly with the idea that he has turned into a flower.80 Finally, to turn Narcissus’ reflection into a water nymph is not only to erase the homoerotic but also to engage in a mode of rationalization that anticipates questions from a logically minded child reader; after all, how does Narcissus suppose his beloved is living under water? We find a similar impulse towards rationalization in efforts to explain why Narcissus doesn’t at once recognize himself, with several writers across our period explaining that he has somehow never seen his own reflection before.81 Crawford (Tales for Tiny Tots, 1929) gives the most elaborate explanation (Fig 10.2);82 his Narcissus (the one nicknamed Sissy) …was so pretty that his mother would never let him look in the lookingglass, because she was afraid he would see his pretty and adorable little face, and fall in love with himself. But he had to wash his face and hands just the same. Only his mother would brush his hair for him, because he 78 79

Kupfer (1897) 41, 28. For a more unusual instance of an appended moral see the version in Liesl Weil’s King Midas’ Secret and Other Follies (1969); her Narcissus drowns largely because he “missed the school chariot” and found himself by a pool. 80 Elizabeth Spires (2001) has Narcissus tell his story from Hades, and elaborates on his life there. 81 Francillon, Gods and Heroes, or, the Kingdom of Jupiter (Boston: Ginn, 1896), Hyde (1904), Carpenter (1906), White (1959). 82 Crawford (1929) 62. The illustration is by Pauline Avery Crawford.

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Figure 10.2  “The Boy Who Saw Himself in the Water,” John Raymond Crawford, Greek Tales for Tiny Tots. (Bloomington, il.: Public School Publishing Company, 1929) illustrated by Pauline Avery Crawford.

couldn’t see where to put the part. And she wouldn’t let him look in the looking-glass – not even to do that.83 Other versions offer a different kind of rationalization, one that makes sense only within the magical context of the world of myth: Roger Lancelyn Green (Old Greek Fairy Tales, 1958) makes the pool an “enchanted pool” in a magical glade; and in Kimmel’s version, the spring in which Narcissus sees himself has been transformed by the touch of Artemis’ arrow to make anything it reflects seem “ten times more beautiful than it really was.”84 Where magic is at work (such additions suggest), the reader need not wonder why Narcissus did not see himself as himself. These retellings of the myth of Echo and Narcissus suggest that what might seem simple bowdlerization may be variously motivated and complex in its effects. In our final example, the myth of Daphne and Apollo, we explore a similar phenomenon; here, retellings that apparently seek to protect children 83 84

Crawford (1929) 63. Lancelyn Green (1969) 146, Kimmel (2008) 27.

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from inappropriate content or to accommodate their understanding simultaneously transform the plot in ways that variously reflect the social mores of the reteller’s day.85 In the Metamorphoses, the story of Daphne and Apollo is the first of three successive and intertwined stories of divine pursuits of nymphs that culminate in the nymph’s transformation. Cupid demonstrates his prowess to a mocking Apollo by shooting the god with a golden arrow and the nymph with a leaden one: Apollo falls in love, Daphne spurns men and marriage, and soon a chase begins. As Apollo is about to catch up, Daphne asks Peneus, her river-god father, to assist her escape by turning her to a laurel tree; Apollo, deprived of his bride, claims the tree as his emblem, and Daphne seems wordlessly to consent.86 It might seems surprising, since the subject matter is essentially intended rape, that this should be another of the myths most commonly retold for children. But Ovid’s version of the story has Apollo speak of love and marriage, and though Daphne remains terrified, the god is at times comically considerate; he introduces himself under his various divine attributes in an effort to calm her fears, and at one point (out of concern that she might injure herself) assures her that if she runs more slowly he will run more slowly.87 Perhaps because of these palliative elements, most retellings for children seem to treat this story as essentially unproblematic, and stay quite close to Ovid’s version.88 Some, however, seek to describe Apollo’s behavior in what might be considered age-­appropriate terms – and in doing so produce a series of narratives that variously configure the story of pursuit to reflect (from a child’s imagined perspective) contemporary concerns with male-female and adult-child relations. Emma Firth’s “Daphne the Dawn-Maiden” (Stories of Old Greece, 1894), includes the usual motif of the arrows of Cupid (here Eros), which here have their effect not because they are made of different metals but because one has been dipped in the Fountain of Content, which makes friends of enemies, and the other in the Fountain of Discontent, which has the reverse effect. In this story, however, Daphne is a little girl who has up until now been a good friend of Apollo’s; they talk and sing by the riverside, and he tells her stories. All this changes as a result of Eros’ arrows. Daphne’s friendship is transformed to 85

On the general reception of the Daphne story, with particular attention to 20th century feminist revisions, see Brown (2005). 86 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.452–567. 87 Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.510–11. 88 Some, like Guerber (1893), seek to explain the myth as a description of natural phenomena.

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dislike and distrust at exactly the moment when Apollo longs “to have Daphne with him always” and “to take her away from her home in the Vale of Tempe.”89 Daphne was very angry that Apollo should ask her to leave the beautiful things which she loved, − her home, the birds, and her kind old father; and when the thought could not longer be endured, she turned and ran away. Apollo followed, for he did not see that Daphne had changed so swiftly.90 Daphne cries out to her father, “I do not wish to leave you. Take me, and send Apollo away,” and Apollo, who has not had time “to ask Daphne the cause of her strange actions,” is “deeply grieved.”91 In this Victorian retelling, the Ovidian Daphne’s rejection of love and commitment to virginity becomes a little girl’s unwillingness to grow up, leave her home and leave her father behind for a friend whose wish to become a lover she cannot tolerate or comprehend. She is reminiscent in this respect of Hawthorne’s Ariadne, who refuses to accompany Theseus to Athens (thus evading her traditional fate) because she will not leave her old father.92 But where Hawthorne’s narrator fully approves Ariadne’s choice, Daphne’s is here described as “strange.”93 In Margaret Evans Price’s “Cupid and Apollo,” (Enchantment Tales, 1925), Apollo’s pursuit is also rewritten as a courtship gone wrong – but for less drastic reasons. Here, Daphne (herself untouched by any arrow) is simply shy, and Apollo just wants to “be with her and talk with her.” When the river-god mistakenly thinks his daughter is “in some terrible danger”94 and transforms her, Apollo (here the pattern of a considerate suitor misunderstood by a father) is grieved because he has brought this change on Daphne, and begs her forgiveness. Toward the end of the 20th century, writing in an era when dating mores have changed, Geraldine McCaughrean (Greek Myths, 1992) has Apollo saying, “I only want to kiss you and hold you close and tell you how much I love you!” Her Apollo, rather than beg for forgiveness, first claims her as his tree and “first love,” then “brushe[s] the leaves out of his hair and look[s] about him for a 89 Firth, Stories of Old Greece (Chapel Hill, n.c.: Yesterday’s Classics, 2009) (originally published 1894) 28. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Hawthorne (2009), “The Minotaur.” 93 Firth (2009) 29. 94 Price (1993) 81, 82.

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more friendly woman – one who would smile at him rather than run away” – an ending that both reduces the stakes from sex to friendliness and is arguably Ovidian in its ironic representation of Apollo’s lack of comprehension.95 I conclude with two versions that offer more extensive transformations of Ovid’s story and of Apollo’s pursuit and that speak in starkly contrasting ways to childhood experience as imagined in different eras: John Crawford’s Tales for Tiny Tots (1929) and Lucy Coats’ Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths (2002). In Crawford’s “The Girl Who Turned Into a Bush,” the erotic element seems to be entirely absent. The young Daphne – evidently a child here, as in Firth’s version – always goes barefoot, “because her mother didn’t care,” and Apollo is both “a beautiful young god” and “an awful tease.”96 And one time Daphne had been walking around in the woods, first by the Long Trail, and then by the Short Trail, and finally out on the Sandy Beach by Faun Lake. And goodness! If there wasn’t that old tease of an Apollo standing as quiet as you like, and nobody else around. So Daphne said, “O!” And Apollo said, in his most irritating and teasing manner, “Now, Daphne, I’m going to catch you and pull your ears.” Whereupon Daphne stuck out her tongue and said, “Just you try, mister.” And off she ran. And Apollo after her.97 Daphne is ultimately transformed by a Water God, who notes helpfully that laurel bushes haven’t any ears; Apollo finds himself grasping leaves rather than ears, and declares, “Well, I’ll be jiggered.” The Water God forgets “to unmagic the Laurel Bush” – which is however “very happy” to remain a bush. “And since it never had any ears, nobody ever pulled them.”98 This version includes a pursuit story vaguely reminiscent in its style of “The Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo,” in Kipling’s  Just-So Stories (perhaps the greatest post-Ovidian compendium of aetiological transformations); the core of the myth is transmuted into a tale of childhood teasing neatly evaded. At the same time, Crawford’s version amuses the adult reader who knows the story behind the story with its translation of virginity sanctioned by the father into bare feet permitted by the mother, and its representation of sex by the pulling of ears. The adult reader may also hear in Apollo’s teasing and Daphne’s response a ring of twenties-style flirtation.

95 McCaughrean (1992) 61. 96 Crawford (1929) 39. 97 Ibid. 98 Crawford (1929) 39–40.

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Coats’ version has a similar title (“The Girl Who Grew into a Bay Tree”) but evokes a different and more frightening arena of childhood experience. We begin with the river-god Peneus, contemplating his “favourite daughter, Daphne,” and then diving underwater to retrieve a present for her (and consequently absent as events unfold).99 Daphne is unaccountably apprehensive, and prays to Mother Earth. But as she is washing her hair in the river, “a stranger” comes out of the woods, holds out his hands, full of jewels he has conjured up from drops of water, says, “For you, my beauty!” and tells her he is Apollo.100 She flung up an arm to cover her eyes, and as she did so, Apollo grabbed her around the waist, and threw her over his shoulder, laughing. He began to run into the woods. Daphne screamed as she felt thorns and twigs catch in her long hair, and she kicked Apollo as hard as she could, and bit his hand, so that he dropped her with a cry of surprise.101 She runs and prays, not to her father the river but to Mother Earth, who transforms her;102 Apollo is sorry, and wears bay leaves to remind him of Daphne. “But her father Peneus wept for seven long years at her loss, until his river kingdom flooded and burst its banks with grief.”103 Without making it at all explicit what there is to be scared of, this version – the most frightening I have found, and without any comedy, Ovidian or other – clearly depicts Apollo as the dangerous “stranger” whose gifts and unspecified menace children are taught to flee. Daphne is saved, as in Ovid – but it is Mother Earth rather than her own father who saves her, and the story evokes not only a child’s terror but a parent’s loss, framed as it is by a description of a parent’s affection and a metaphor for that parent’s broken heart. Both Crawford and Coats, then, reinscribe Ovid’s story in imagined childhood experience, but to very different effect, diminishing the sexual threat to a mild childhood equivalent (teasing) in the first case, and making it, though unspecified, all the more frightening (as an instance of “stranger danger”) in the second. Both invite an adult response as well, but where Crawford looks for knowing amusement as child characters prefigure adult sexuality, Coats elicits 99 Coats (2002) 49. 100 Ibid. 50. 101 Ibid. 102 This choice reflects an alternative tradition found in the brief epitome of this story in Hyginus’ Fabulae, a compendium of uncertain authorship and date. 103 Coats (2002) 51.

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sympathy for the pathos of parental loss. They have in common, however, a stress on the emotional independence and agency of their child heroines. Cupid’s arrows play no role: Apollo – whether merely annoying or truly terrifying –­ acts purely of his own volition, and what Daphne feels, these storytellers suggest, is what any girl might naturally feel. The two stories also incorporate a striking departure: before Daphne takes to her heels she confronts her wouldbe pursuer, inflicting either insult or injury. In all the retellings for children I have cited here – just a few among hundreds and hundreds – Ovid, whether directly or indirectly, whether acknowledged or effaced, provides not only a source of stories and a narrative framework but a model for creative refashioning for a new audience. As I hope to have shown here, the changes we tend to read as making these myths suitable for children are in many instances not just isolated accommodations but occasions for the remaking of narrative to incorporate themes and values that reflect the author’s preoccupations, conceptions of childhood, and cultural moment. And if these recreations of Ovid’s stories inevitably simplify his subtle narratives and complex verbal texture, their own elaborations, responsive to changing conceptions of the child reader, and formative of many readers’ experience of the classical past, are an important and often overlooked part of the varied history of Ovidian reception in the past two centuries.104

104 The reception of Ovid in general has been the object of much recent scholarship; for general assessments of his presence in the literature and art of the past two centuries see Vance (1988), Kennedy (2002).

Part 4 Ancient Rome for Children

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chapter 11

The “Grand Tour” as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion Catherine Butler Introduction The Roman invasion of Britain, which began in earnest under Claudius in 43 c.e. and was completed over the course of the following three generations, has assumed a unique place in children’s historical fiction. It was not the last time that large parts of Britain would face invasion and subjugation by foreign powers, but it is the one that has occasioned by far the most narrative treatments in children’s fiction. The arrival of the Germanic tribes who were to form the English heptarchy, like the later invasions by the Danes, occurred in a more piecemeal and less well-documented fashion, and although some attempts at a historical treatment of them have been made1 the story of British resistance to the invading English tends to slide quickly away from history into the legendary forms of Arthurian tradition. The Norman invasion of 1066 certainly qualifies as a single, well-documented event that fundamentally transformed the nature of life in England, and might seem ripe for fictional treatment, but while there have been some attempts to do so, for example in Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Striped Ships (1991), these have been sparse by comparison with the attention that the Romans have secured from children’s authors. There are numerous possible explanations for this focus. One, which Hallie O’Donovan and I explored at length in Reading History in Children’s Books,2 concerns the ambiguous position of Romans and Britons in British consciousness, with modern Britons perhaps identifying with their ancient forebears in nationalistic or racial terms, but recognizing themselves more easily in the Romans in terms of literature, architecture and culture. This ambiguity manifests itself along other axes too, especially for those readers who like to extrapolate from particular historical periods to a more general sense of history’s 1 For example, Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern Bearers (1959), and more recently Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur (2007). 2 Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). See especially the chapter “The Eagle Has Landed: Representing the Roman Invasion of Britain in Texts for Children” (17–47).

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shape and direction. Children’s novels dealing with this period frequently identify the Roman invaders with notions of progress or modernity, while the Britons are often depicted in ahistorical, static terms, or even as barbarians. While some texts and their readers may approve the coming of the Romans as a necessary step on the road to civilization, which helped drag Britain into the first century c.e., those who prefer to construct pre-Roman British society as an ecologically sustainable idyll will deplore the change. In Reading History in Children’s Books we considered these questions from a number of perspectives, but our discussion was largely confined to Britain itself. In this essay I will examine a selection of novels, ranging in date from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, that depict their protagonists travelling between Britain and the European mainland – in most cases as far as Rome itself. For this common trope I have chosen the convenient if anachronistic label of the Grand Tour. This conveys something of the way in which such journeys are used to educate characters, and introduce them (and, vicariously, the books’ readers) to a variety of cultures and experiences – sometimes occasioning a “conversion” to a point of view more sympathetic to Rome than that with which they set out. The circumstances of these journeys, carried out in the context of the Roman invasion and its immediate aftermath by characters who are usually slaves or hostages, of course contrasts sharply with those in which the privileged youth of Britain made the real Grand Tour in the eighteenth century; but the trope sheds useful light on the questions of identity and cultural education that loom large within this genre. Beric, the Victorian Briton G.A. Henty’s Beric the Briton,3 the earliest of our Grand Tour books, is the work of a man described by his colleague Edmund Downey as “the most Imperialist of all the Imperialists I ever encountered”.4 As such a description may suggest, Henty saw his writing as having an exhortative role in inspiring his readers – his “Dear Lads”, as he frequently addressed them in his prefaces5 – to take up the mantle of empire. His protagonists are models for emulation, and their exemplary adventures generally take them on foreign quests for adventure and glory. Dennis Butts summarizes the pattern of a typical Henty novel:

3 Beric the Briton: a Story of the Roman Invasion (London: Blackie and Son, Ltd., 1893). 4 quoted in Dennis Butts, “Exploiting a Formula: the Adventure Stories of G.A. Henty (1832– 1902),” in Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts and Matthew Grenby, eds., Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershiot: Ashgate, 2008) 152. 5 Ibid. 153.

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After a crisis near the beginning of the book…probably connected with the loss of a fortune or the death of his father, the hero, who has already shown some taste of his mettle by defeating the school bully or catching a thief, sets off on a series of adventures in each of which he triumphs, before a culminating crisis, which again is successfully sur mounted and followed by a prosperous homecoming.6 Henty’s primary territory is the period of British Empire, from its early days (With Clive in India [1884]), through the Napoleonic wars (One of the 28th: a Tale of Waterloo [1890]) and into modern times with such works as With Kitchener in the Soudan (1903). Unsurprisingly, Henty’s imperialism finds a congenial habitat in the story of the Empire’s own growth. Not all Henty’s novels concern the British Empire, however. His secondary aim was to introduce his British readers to the past of their own country, and particularly its military history. His Preface to Beric the Briton sets the book explicitly in the context of this aim: “My series of stories dealing with the wars of England would be altogether incomplete did it not include the period when the Romans were masters of the country”.7 The history of the British Empire and the history of England are far from coterminous, and those points at which the English (or their predecessors) have been in a position of opposing the imperialist enterprises of other nations inevitably form points of ideological tension. When imperialism and patriotism collide, which is to be preferred? Shorn of patriotism, moreover, what justifies the imperialist impulse? Without that penumbra, is it not exposed as (to quote Joseph Conrad’s Marlow) mere “robbery with violence” (72)? In By England’s Aid: the Freeing of the Netherlands, 1585–1604,8 for instance, Henty invites his readers to cheer the resistance of the Dutch and their English allies to the arrogance of imperial Spain. Beric the Briton, published two years later, occupies a more complex ideological and historical territory. It is the patriotic story of a Briton involved in “a desperate effort to shake off the oppressive rule of Rome”,9 as Henty puts it in his Preface. However, it is also the story of the overture to Britain’s own imperial theme, with the Romans being presented as the conduit for principles, technologies and other features (including Christianity) that were to prove prerequisites for Britain’s own future power, as well as providing an archetypal model for the practice of 6 Ibid. 155. 7 Henty (1893) 5. 8 G.A. Henty, By England’s Aid: the Freeing of the Netherlands, 1585–1604 (London, Blackie & son, ltd., 1891). 9 Henty (1893) 6.

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empire itself. Without the example of the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica would lack much of its ideological resonance. Beric the Briton tells the story of Beric, the young leader of a sub-tribe of the Iceni known as the Sarci, living in the 50s c.e. Having grown up as a hostage in the house of a Roman in Camalodunum (Colchester), Beric has an intimate familiarity with the Romans’ customs and has come to admire their justice, organization and literature; but when he returns to his tribe it is at a difficult moment in Roman-British relations, with anti-Roman sentiment running high. Knowing that there are likely to be Roman spies amongst his tribesmen, Beric finds himself steering a tricky course from the beginning – wishing neither to be seen fomenting trouble, nor to appear to have “gone native” during his time as a hostage. In the event, his knowledge of Roman military tactics proves invaluable when Boadicea raises the tribe, and he leads his people to several victories in battle, as well as a successful guerrilla war in the East Anglian swamps after Boadicea’s defeat by Suetonius. Betrayal leads to eventual capture, however, and Beric (with some of his men) finds himself shipped to Rome as a slave. Initially he works as a gladiator, where he gains acclaim by saving a Christian girl from being killed by a lion, defeating the animal unarmed. The Emperor Nero then employs Beric as his private bodyguard, until Beric is again betrayed and forced to flee the imperial palace with his men. Thereafter they live as outlaws in the hills south of Rome, eventually winning a reprieve when Nero is overthrown by Galba. The story ends with Beric (by now married and a Christian) being sent back to Britain in order to rule over his people as a Roman provincial governor. Henty’s presentation of Beric’s eventful career, while it shows his hero as unswervingly principled, capable and heroic, nevertheless describes a startling reversal of loyalties. Near the beginning of the book, his mother Parta admonishes him: I need not tell you not to let them Romanize you. You have been brought up to hate them. Your father has fallen before their weapons, half your tribe have been slain, your country lies under their feet. I will not wrong you then by fearing for a moment that they can make a Roman of you.10 By the end of the narrative, however, Beric has become a functionary of the Roman state; and although he rules his people with justice and wisdom he does so under Roman authority. Indeed, it is made clear when he takes up the post that Rome’s choice of a native governor is in itself partly a tactic aimed at 10

Ibid. 17.

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ensuring the continued subjugation of Britain. His Roman friend Muro, who proposes him for the role, explains that he has stressed to the Emperor that Beric “would in all things be faithful to Rome” and use his “influence to the utmost to reconcile the people to [Roman] rule”.11 On Beric’s arrival back in Britain, the propraetor Trebellius expands on this point: I am convinced that it is the best policy to content a conquered people by placing over them men of their own race and tongue, instead of filling every post with strangers who are ignorant of their ways and customs, and whose presence and dress constantly remind them that they are governed by their conquerors.12 Not only is Beric an instrument of Roman power, he is a particularly insidious instrument that allows the Britons to be seduced into subjection more effectively than naked oppression could do. Trebellius’ sentiments complement Tacitus’ observation in the Agricola that conquered tribes such as the British, in adopting Roman luxuries and customs, forget that these are the trappings of their own slavery13 – a thought earlier echoed by Beric’s friend Boduoc on ­seeing the Romanized Gauls: “they appear to have adopted the Roman dress and tongue, but for all that they are slaves”.14 Trebellius on the one hand and Boduoc on the other describe two of the primary ways by which Rome encouraged conquered peoples to become reconciled to their position: first by believing they have retained their native identity, and then by believing that they have gained Roman identity. Romanized native rulers such Beric smooth the transition from one belief to the other; but in both the subject peoples are deceived. The conundrum posed by Beric is that of a character who turns from being a patriotic warrior devoted to expulsion of the Roman invaders from his homeland into a loyal servant of Rome working to maintain and entrench its power over his people, but who does so without any sense – either from his own point of view or that of the narrative – that he has been inconsistent. Beric undergoes no dramatic conversion to the Roman point of view (he already admires them at the beginning of the novel), nor is he ever presented other than as a fit character for readerly admiration. How can this circle be squared? Ultimately 11 12 13 14

Ibid. 375. Ibid. 379. Compare the Agricola 1.21: “Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset”. Henty (1893) 183.

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it cannot, the contradictions in Beric’s presentation reflecting unresolved conflicts at the heart of Victorian imperialist ideology. However, the text adopts several strategies in order to soften the sense that an inexplicable volte-face has been performed. In doing so, it draws on a number of existing cultural ideas that were in wider circulation in Henty’s time, aimed at justifying empire in general and British imperial rule in particular. In so far as the question of Beric’s changing attitude to Roman power is addressed explicitly by the text, it is in terms of pragmatism. An accommodation must be reached with Rome, simply because Roman power is effectively invincible, and the alternative to doing so is annihilation. It is in this context that the trope of the Grand Tour comes into play. When Rome is perceived in terms of a few thousand legionaries stationed far from home, victory seems conceivable; but once Beric and his friends find themselves in the city itself, the futility of their task is borne in upon them: Beric rejoined his companions. “Well, Boduoc, what think you of Rome?” “I have been thinking how mad our enterprise was, Beric. You told me about the greatness of Rome and from the first predicted failure, but I thought this was because you had been infected by your Roman training; I see now that you were right.”15 Significantly, Henty gives this observation not to Beric but to his passionate friend Boduoc, who has been established from the book’s opening pages as the more virulently anti-Roman character. Here is someone who cannot be accused of Roman bias, but who now accepts not only that defeat was inevitable but that even the attempt at resistance was, rather than being noble or heroic, simply “mad”. This pragmatic recognition of the realities of military power is not elsewhere a prominent feature of Henty’s book, which tends to glorify risky feats of derring-do such as fighting a lion unarmed, and depicts daring enterprises as both successful and admirable, but that discourse of heroism takes place within the parameters of a broader political narrative far more respectful of political and military reality. Henty also finds various ways to efface the distance between Beric and Rome. Most obviously this is achieved by giving Beric experience of life in a Roman household, which makes him from the beginning a culturally hybrid character. Not only has he learned (and learned to admire) Roman customs, language, and military technique, but he is a keen reader – an accomplishment baffling to Boduoc and the other illiterate Britons. More subtly, the Britons’ 15

Ibid. 199.

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sensibility often appears to recall Roman models and values. Beric’s mother Parta is portrayed as a stern matriarch in the tradition of Volumnia or Portia, given to voicing such Horatian sentiments as “He can but die once; he cannot die in a nobler effort for his country”.16 The tribal elder Aska shows that, like Boduoc, he has let neither illiteracy nor anachronism be a bar to familiarity with the Agricola when he remarks that “Rome cannot wish to conquer a desert”.17 In general, Henty makes little effort to construct or evoke a specifically British worldview distinct from that of Rome. Points on which the differences between Roman and British sensibilities might be expected to be particularly stark, notably in the matter of religion, are generally underplayed. When asked about native religious practices, for example, Beric deflects the conversation, remarking that “These mysteries are known only to the Druids”.18 Although Henty occasionally draws attention to areas in which the ancient world differs from his own he typically does so in order to highlight ways in which the Romans and British resemble each other: “In the age in which [Beric] lived feelings of compassion scarcely existed. […] Beric, being by birth Briton and by education Roman, felt no more compunction at the sight of blood than did either Briton or Roman”.19 This anthropological note surfaces only rarely in Beric the Briton, however: more often, Beric has the accent and temperament of a Victorian British officer – and so in most cases do the Roman characters with whom he has to deal. The melding of Roman and British characters may be an authorial strategy, but it is also a political policy within the text, which Beric himself espouses. On his way back to Britain to take up his governorship, he and his followers obtain clothes that are a deliberate “mixture of that of the Britons and Romans, having the trousers or leggings of the British and the short Roman tunic”.20 This unlikely garb functions as a visible symbol of the cultural hybridization to which he aspires. Cultural and indeed racial hybridization was a perennial theme of Victorian (and later) writers about the British at the time Henty was writing.21 Given the “mongrel” nature of Henty’s British readership, most of whom had some mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman in their heritage, it was necessary to construct ways of recounting British history that 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ibid. 93. Ibid. 163. “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: Agricola 30. Ibid. 187. Ibid. 251. Ibid. 378. Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 94–95.

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made positive use of its multiple invasions and mass migrations, while still claiming for the British a distinct, indeed unique, character and position within the modern world. One way of doing this was to suggest that this racial mixture constituted the ingredients in a recipe that resulted in the modern British, who were able to draw freely on the strengths of the all their disparate ancestors. Another strategy was to write of the challenges of history as constituting a kind of training. The latter approach can be seen clearly in a text such as C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling’s A History of England,22 in which English defeat at the hands of the Normans, for example, is presented as a prerequisite for future achievement: The Battle of Hastings decided, though not even William knew it, that the great, slow, dogged English race, was to be governed and disciplined (and at first severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world.23 Fletcher and Kipling take a similar line when addressing Britain’s earlier subjugation by the Romans, suggesting that it was a “misfortune” that the conquest did not extend to the whole island and contrasting Britain’s subsequent fate with that of unconquered Ireland, “which never went to school, and has been a spoilt child ever since”.24 Although Henty too notes that the Britons have much to learn from the Romans, his emphasis is not only on education but also on the effects of interbreeding. In his account, the advantages and disadvantages of mixing the British race with that of the Romans and of the foreign traders and craftsmen who came to Britain in their wake are quite finely poised. The British warriors, it is stressed throughout the narrative, are physically superior – tall, blond, muscular men, whose strength and size make them individually more than a match for their Roman conquerors. However, Henty suggests that sacrificing these qualities through intermarriage may have been a price worth paying: Although [intermarriage] in the end had the effect of diminishing the physical proportions of the British, and lowering the lofty stature and size that had struck the Romans on their landing with astonishment, it 22 23 24

C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, A School History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911). Ibid. 43. Ibid. 21.

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introduced many characteristics hitherto wanting in the race, and aided in their conversion from tribes of fierce warriors into a settled and semicivilized people.25 Henty is probably referring here to the acquisition of desirable racial characteristics rather the trappings of civilization alone, but he does not specify which physical or mental features lacking in Beric and his compatriots were supplied by the Romans. Indeed, his vagueness on this point may be strategic. Rachel Johnson has pointed out that several of Henty’s books about the British Empire include “characters whose views, although initially opposed to English rule, change after personal contact with the colonisers”, and who become “advocates for what is perceived as the more advanced civilisation and for an integration of aspects of that civilisation, just as Beric does”.26 This is fair comment, but Beric the Briton is not purely a conversion story, since Beric is already well disposed to Roman civilization at its inception. Although Roman power and military dominance are driven home by Beric’s sojourn in Roman, there is no need for Henty to spell out lessons about Roman cultural superiority, and indeed his narrative is fairly nuanced on this point. While Beric admires Roman literature and the Stoicism of individuals such as his future father-inlaw, he maintains a studied neutrality with regard to most aspects of Roman life. Rather than praise or condemn Nero he exhorts his men to stand aloof from domestic politics: “it is no business of ours, strangers and foreigners here, to meddle in the matter”.27 The enthusiasm for Rome evident in some postSecond World War texts is muted here. Nevertheless, Henty’s book establishes a number of tropes that will recur in later texts featuring British protagonists who find their way (willingly or otherwise) onto the Continent. The visceral impression made by Rome’s vastness, magnificence and power, a visit to the arena (preferably involving a fight with a lion) and a telling encounter with the  Emperor were amongst the features that would recur in later Grand Tour novels.

The Grand Tour in the 1950s

If any decade can be identified as the age of novels of the Roman invasion, it is  the 1950s. The number of books devoted to this topic reflects the general 25 26 27

Henty (1893) 383. Johnson (2010) 78. Henty (1893) 286.

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prominence of historical fiction at this time, and the appearance of such classics as Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth28 no doubt inspired emulation. It is also worth noting however that this decade was one in which Britain’s relationship with the idea of empire was at a particular crisis, and that Roman Britain offered parallels through which to explore the issue in historical fiction. In the 1950s Britain found itself on both sides of the imperial equation: an imperial power in its own right (if a declining one), but also a nation attempting to reconcile itself to a diminished status in the world and to forge new relationships with larger political blocs, be they the United States (the world’s new “Roman” power), the fledgling European Community, or even the wraith of Empire in the form of the British Commonwealth. Books could provide psychological models for this transition in status, showing how one could maintain psychological and moral integrity in a changed world, and combine self-respect with the recognition of the realities of politics and power. For an example of a narrative that really does show the protagonist “converted” from an anti-Roman to a pro-Roman position we cannot do better than Henry Treece’s Legions of the Eagle,29 written some sixty years after Beric the Britain. This novel tells the story of the young Briton Gwydion, who is captured after the Romans’ initial assault on Camulodunum and taken as a servant to Gaul. Like Beric, Gwydion sees his home and way of life destroyed by the invading Romans; like him he loses a parent in the process; like him he is sent in captivity to the Continent. Gwydion is understandably antagonistic to the Romans at the start of the novel; however, Legions of the Eagle shows a change of heart far more wholesale than that of Henty’s protagonist. Once settled in Lugdunum (Lyon), Gwydion draws a stark comparison between the British and Roman ways of life, much to the latter’s advantage: So much of Britain was a wilderness, where wild beasts roamed, and where people almost as wild as the beasts held their festivals of blood and suffering. […] As the boy speculated on the land of his birth began to wonder why the Romans had even bothered to come to Britain. What he had seen of Roman Gaul was good; it was a well-regulated land, with good roads, inns, and houses; a land where men paid their taxes in money, not in blood – and where, in return for those taxes, they were given something of value, the protection of the greatest army the world had ever known.30 28 29 30

Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1954). Henry Treece, Legions of the Eagle (London: The Bodley Head, 1954). Ibid. 140.

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In Legions of the Eagle Gwydion’s conversion to the Roman cause is set off by an almost wholly hostile estimate of the British, who in the book’s latter half are portrayed as untrustworthy savages. The Silures of South Wales in particular are singled out as sullen ingrates who, unlike Gwydion himself, are insusceptible to civilization. Treece even has a Roman character refer to them as “black-faced cannibals”,31 recalling the way that the racist iconography of European “first contact” in Australia and Africa was was co-opted by earlier writers about the Roman invasion, Henry Ford’s illustration of the Kent coast in 43 c.e., which appeared in Fletcher and Kipling’s A History of England (Fig. 11.1), being a striking instance. Ford’s cringing, dark-skinned Britons are a world away from Henty’s noble blond giants, and it is to Ford’s tradition rather than Henty’s that Treece is committed in Legions of the Eagle. By the book’s conclusion Gwydion is comfortably established as a small farmer in Gaul, and has come to consider British resistance to the Romans, such as that of his former clan chief Caratacus, as the recklessness of a “madman”,32 a word that in his mouth carries a weight of moral condemnation very different from Boduoc’s estimate of resistance to Roman power as “mad” because of its futility. Most invasion texts written in the 1950s are broadly sympathetic to the Roman cause, although few are as extreme as Treece’s. We will briefly consider two others, Lydia S. Eliott’s Ceva of the Caradocs33 and Geoffrey Trease’s Word to Caesar,34 in order to show something of the range of purposes for which the Grand Tour trope could be used at this period. Both establish or assume a proRoman view, and both have the striking feature that the protagonists spend much of the book seeking justice through a private audience with the Emperor Hadrian, although in other respects the attitude to European adventure is strikingly different. Ceva of the Caradocs concerns a great-great-granddaughter of Caractacus, who at the time of the novel’s opening is facing the decision of whether to stay on in a hill fort on the Wrekin with her grandfather Gaelan, the local chief, or join her parents in the new Roman town of Viroconium (Wroxeter). Her love for her grandfather notwithstanding, Ceva’s preference is clear: she is a close friend of the Roman governor’s daughters, and longs to share in the amenities of the city. Ceva’s politics are summarised by a question that she asks of her horse early in the narrative: “Is it awful of me to be glad […] that the Romans

31 32 33 34

Ibid. 149. Ibid. 163. Lydia S. Eliott, Ceva of the Caradocs (London: Frederick Warne, 1953). Geoffrey Trease, Word to Caesar (London: Macmillan, 1956).

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Figure 11.1 Henry Ford, ‘The Landing of the Romans’ from a history of england (17).

have made Britain a part of their marvellous Empire?”.35 When the Emperor Hadrian visits the settlement she is thrilled to be one of the girls chosen to dance before him, an act that that prompts the jealous Druids to order her kidnapping and – through a series of mischances – occasions her being taken as a prisoner across the Channel. 35

Elliot (1953) 9.

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Like Legions of the Eagle, this is a notably pro-Roman text, but the trope of the Grand Tour functions quite differently. Although Ceva of the Caradocs includes a conversion narrative it belongs not to Ceva herself but to her grandfather. The events of the narrative prove to Gaelan that his attachment to the old ways and resentment of the Romans are both misplaced. Although Gaelan begins the novel by paraphrasing Tacitus (“Though he calls it bringing us civilization, it is his way of enslaving us”36) and is understandably reluctant to compromise with a state that hunted down his grandfather and put a price on his own father’s head, he comes during the course of the book to understand that the Romans are a force for good, and that in the words of the Caradoc family motto he should move “Forward, not backward”37 – a decision made easier by the dishonesty and benighted superstition of the Druids. The catalyst for this change of heart is Ceva’s kidnapping, which occasions an affecting if unlikely interview between local chieftain and Roman Emperor: They were both great men and in their greatness understood each other, and they talked freely together of the problems of both Britons and Romans. … “Do not call me great,” Hadrian had said. “It is you, Chief Gaelan, who have the greatness of spirit, and I shall not be happy till your granddaughter is found and brought back to her home in safety.”38 Eliott is not meticulous with respect to historical accuracy, and although she demonstrates some knowledge of Roman dress and customs her text is steeped in the world and popular fiction of the 1950s, which tend to bleed through the Roman narrative at times. The kidnappers who take Ceva prisoner betray their class origins through their uncouth speech (“‘What yer want?’ he bawled”39) as surely as any Enid Blyton villain; Gaulish characters have names such as “Master Antoine”; and characters say things like “Matild’s a saint to put up with you”,40 in a way that sits awkwardly with Ceva’s belief in the Druidic “Unseen One”. Ceva’s lot in Gaul and Italy is certainly harder than that of the average 1950s debutante sent to a Continental finishing school, but the primary effect of her European sojourn is to teach her personal values of self-reliance and 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid. 19. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 157.

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courage, and generally to hasten her growth into maturity, rather than to introduce readers to the world of the second century c.e., let alone explore broader issues about culture and imperialism. Although she spends much of the book trying to get to Rome to find Hadrian, this is purely part of her personal escape plan, for she is sure he will recognize her and send her safely home. Thus, while the desire to reach the centre of Empire is passionately expressed it is only ever a stepping stone on the road to Shropshire: “Rome! I shall get there. I will get there. Home! Grandfather, Matild, Mamma Carola! Oh, do help me to get there!”.41 Ceva eventually does arrive in Rome, or rather at a villa on its “outskirts” (249), but there is no indication that she ever ventures further in, and Eliott provides no description of the city. Even Hadrian is absent (though he sends a friendly letter from Spain), and within two pages Ceva is on her way back to Britain. The climax of the book comes not with the arrival in Rome or the everdeferred meeting with Hadrian, but with a marriage proposal from the handsome son of the Viroconium governor, which takes pride of place in the last lines of the book. Unlike Eliott, Geoffrey Trease was, from the beginning of his career, a selfconsciously political writer, who made his name with books such as Bows Against the Barons,42 in which the socialist class struggle of the 1930s is transplanted into Robin Hood’s greenwood. Over time Trease drew back from the kind of overt didacticism that characterized his earliest work, however. The impetus behind Word to Caesar, as he describes it in his 1974 memoir Laughter at the Door, was internationalist but not specifically socialist in spirit. Rather, it was an attempt to get beyond what he saw as the insularity of British historical fiction: When I planned the book, I was anxious to get away from the national bias which, in so many stories of that epoch, seems to suggest that the Romans are interesting only as the invaders of Britain. I wanted to tell children about the Romans in Italy, the Romans of the Silver Age of classical literature (I worked in an exiled poet, another Ovid with altered dates) and above all the Romans of a peaceful, efficiently united Europe, the empire of Hadrian. But in dealing with an apparently remote period and setting one must establish a bridge, so I felt it best to open the tale with Hardknott and Ravenglass in Britain, and then set the plot moving that would carry my hero to Arles, Ostia, Rome and the Bay of Naples.43 41 42 43

Ibid. 224. Geoffrey Trease, Bows Against the Barons (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934). Geoffrey Trease, Laughter at the Door: A Continued Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1974) 24.

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Writing barely a decade after the end of the Second World War, and on the eve of the founding of European Economic Community in 1957, Trease’s wish to conjure for young readers saturated in the literature of conflict the idea that Europe need not be a cockpit for war is understandable. A narrative about the joys of a stable political settlement and a “peaceful, efficiently united Europe” do not make for the kind of action-packed adventure in which Trease specialized, however, and like Eliott’s his novel is largely a personal rather than a political story. It begins with a battle (a British rising against the Ninth Legion at Hardknott in Cumbria, on the fringes of the Empire) but it is impelled not by military or political considerations but by the need for the narrator, Paul, to clear an innocent man’s name and defeat a master criminal – something he can accomplish only by gaining the ear of the Emperor himself. The Empire, as the background to Paul’s life, is as inevitable and unquestionable as the sky, and some 80 years after the Claudian invasion it is viewed by Paul as an irrevocable fact. “Is empire a good thing?” muses one of the other characters early the book, a question to which Paul responds with bemusement: “I gasped. Was empire a good thing? I could not imagine life without the Empire”.44 The matter is not raised again. Paul is however aware of himself as a product of Empire. The son of a Roman soldier from Spain and a British mother, he is an embodiment of the kind of intermarriage that Henty’s narrative had anticipated – “a bit of a mixture, with Father’s dark eyes and sharper features but Mother’s lighter hair and skin”.45 Paul is also international in outlook: he leaves Britain, where he has spent all his life, early in the story, but there is no sense of deracination. Rather, he is curious to see other parts of the Empire, and even at the story’s conclusion is preparing to accompany Hadrian on his forthcoming journeys to its outer reaches, rather than thinking of a return to his birthplace. Rome itself, which he has longed to see all his life, does not disappoint, and he surveys it with the slack-jawed wonder suitable to a provincial youth: Here I was in the city I had dreamed of all my life, and even in my wildest dreams I had never seen anything so vast, so magnificent. Ten massive bridges spanned the river, four hundred temples sent their spiced incense floating up to Heaven, triumphal arches framed the view down every street (or so it seemed to me then), the public parks and gardens made a countryside within the city, hundreds of acres of grass and woodland… and converging on Rome like marching columns of soldiers came the

44 45

Trease (1956) 39. Ibid. 3.

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aqueducts, lofty and proud upon their striding arches, bringing fresh water from the hills, ten, twenty, thirty, even forty miles across the plain.46 In Word to Caesar, this magnificence is not significantly undercut even by the admission that thieves and corrupt officials are numbered amongst Rome’s citizens, for these are shown to be adequately dealt with by the power of law as personified in Hadrian. Trease’s novel shares with Eliott’s not only its focus on private criminality rather than war or imperial oppression as the engine of the plot; it also uses the figure of the Emperor as the ultimate guarantor of order and justice. In Trease’s case, this is a strategy that he had already employed in his earlier novel set in sixteenth-century England, Cue for Treason.47 In that book, the protagonists Peter and Kit spend much of the narrative attempting to bring a plot against Elizabeth I’s life to her attention, and are duly rewarded with the restoration of Peter’s family’s fortunes and the favour of the queen. In Word to Caesar we find a similar pattern: Hadrian’s power is both absolute and benevolent, and once convinced of the innocence of Paul’s friend Severus he does not hesitate to recall him from exile and accept Paul into his entourage. “Don’t thank me for justice, child,” he tells Paul. “That is what I am here to do. Justice.”48 The Hadrian of Eliott’s book too is a paragon of civic duty and benevolence, who takes a good deal of time out from running the Roman Empire in order to direct the search for the missing British girl. Ceva gushes at one point, “I wonder he doesn’t spend his life living in [his lovely villas] and being happy himself instead of travelling from end to end of his Empire, trying to make things safe and happy for the Gauls and the Britons and lots of other people”.49 The rhetoric resembles the kind of sycophantic coverage traditionally afforded to the British royal family by their admirers – and is an endorsement not just of Hadrian the man but of the institution of imperial power that he embodies – an endorsement from which neither text significantly diverges. For all his vocal commitment to imperialism, of the authors we have so far considered it is Henty in Beric the Briton whose text is the most ideologically intricate. His novel, being set at the time of the Roman invasion and told from the point of view of one of the Britons, inevitably asks more searching questions of the realities of imperial power than texts set several generations later when that power has become a fait accomplit, as with Eliott and Trease; and although it is sympathetic in its attitude to Roman civilization it has none of 46 47 48 49

Ibid. 174. Geoffrey Trease, Cue for Treason (London: Blackwell, 1940). Trease (1956) 278. Elliot (1953) 19.

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Treece’s fierce animus against the Britons and their culture. Moreover, in prominently featuring a notorious tyrant such as Nero, Henty gives imperialism a face that is harder to reconcile with good government or a “civilizing mission” than is the case with Hadrian, the third of the five so-called “good emperors” under whom (in Gibbon’s famous phrase) “the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom”.50 However we might quibble with Gibbon’s assessment there is no denying that Hadrian is a stronger contender than Nero or indeed Claudius to be the acceptable face of imperial autocracy. Indeed, as the passage from his memoir quoted above suggests, Trease appears to have chosen him with that consideration in mind.

The Anti-Imperial Theme

In Reading History in Children’s Books we noted a tendency for children’s books published in recent decades, and particularly since the turn of the twenty-first century, to adopt a far more sceptical and even hostile attitude towards the Roman invasion and occupation of Britain than was the case in the past. This hostility has a number of different facets. It may for example take an environmental cast, with the Britons being identified as a people in tune with nature and identified with their land through their spiritual beliefs, a depiction clearly influenced by modern paganism, although the notion of Druidism as a naturebased religion goes back much further.51 The hostile framing of Rome may also draw on scepticism about international capitalism and multinational corporations, with the Romans’ perceived obliviousness to the local landscape and culture (straight roads cutting through sacred groves, identikit forts replicated from York to Palestine) being parsed as arrogance and wilful blindness rather than admired as evidence of efficiency, organization and engineering skills, as might have been the case when mass production and Brutalist architecture were more in vogue in the middle of the twentieth century. Most importantly, the ideology of empire itself has long since ceased to be acceptable. Post-colonial perspectives in both literature and politics have made the voices of subaltern populations far louder, and modern treatments of the

50

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Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Other Selected Writings [1776]. Abridged and edited H.R. Trevor-Roper (Chalfont St Giles: Richard Sadler & Brown, 1966) 85. Ronald Hutton, The Druids (London and New York: Hambledon, 2007) 79–92.

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Roman invasion are far more likely than before to see it in terms of military aggression rather than as a conduit for civilization. Pauline Chandler’s The Mark of Edain52 is a good example of a modern antiRoman book that uses the trope of the Grand Tour for rather different purposes than Henty or his 1950s successors. Its protagonist is the British girl Aoife, who is a niece of Caradoc (Caratacus) and has lived for several years as a ­hostage in Rome, along with her brother Madoc. On the eve of his invasion, Claudius – here depicted unsympathetically, as a vain and cruel dictator – decides that it will be politically useful to take them to Britain with his army. Aoife finds herself travelling with the invasion fleet, and on the way she befriends one of Claudius’ war elephants, with whom she comes to have a preternatural affinity – something that gives her a reputation for witchcraft and magic amongst the Roman troops. Aided by various Celts amongst the soldiery and traders she meets en route, Aoife (who by now has inherited the leadership of her tribe) eventually escapes and finds her way to the stronghold of Caradoc, who is leading the struggle against Rome. The novel ends, as did Ceva of the Caradocs, with its heroine embracing a Roman soldier – but in this case the officer, Justinian, has cast aside his Roman identity and reverted to his original name of Huw. We have already alluded to one of the most significant ways in which The Mark of Edain differs from the earlier books we have considered. Rome’s invasion is here presented not as the coming of civilization, nor even as the inevitable way of things at a period when war was a universal way of life, but rather as the selfish project of a capricious ruler. Although Chandler makes customary reference to the efficiency and training of the Roman army,53 the Roman soldiers she actually depicts are superstitious and rather incompetent, and cruel in the way they lord it over the peasants on the coast near Massilia (perhaps a little anachronistically) as an army of occupation.54 Even Rome itself, in contrast to the breathless description of Trease’s Paul, appears unimpressive from Aoife’s viewpoint, as she floats away from it down the Tiber: The city looked small, insignificant, as Aoife looked back from on board the raft she was riding with Bala. Slowly the great hub of the wheel of the Empire shrank and disappeared round a bend in the Tiber. Her spirit

52 53 54

Pauline Chandler, The Mark of Edain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Ibid. 10. Ibid. 86.

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shook itself free like a bird. Great Rome was, after all, only buildings, dusty streets.55 Inverting the trope of “Great Rome” is one part of the rhetorical repositioning carried out in The Mark of Edain’s use of the Grand Tour topos. The other is the invention of a pan-Celtic nationality and culture, of which Aoife’s own tribe is but a small part. Aoife and Madoc (the combination of Irish and Welsh names is significant in this context) view themselves, and are viewed by the Romans, primarily as Celts rather than as Britons, contrary to the linguistic practice of the ancient world. Moreover, Chandler’s Roman characters regularly employ the neologism “Celtish” as a general adjective, implying an overarching cultural or ethnic identity amongst Celtic peoples that might provide a counterweight to the Mediterranean culture of the Romans.56 Despite its anti-Roman position, however, The Mark of Edain retains some elements of those earlier books in which a pro-Roman point of view is normative. Like the British characters in Beric the Briton, for example, Aoife and Madoc partly adopt Roman habits of speech and thought, with Aoife dropping a casual “ergo” into conversation early in the book.57 Even the word “Celt”, as they are aware, is of Greek origin, and Aoife thinks of her home island as Britannia, a notably Latinate eponym. More significantly, those British who are resisting the Roman invasion, including Caradoc, are consistently described by Aoife and everyone else in the book as “rebels” – a usage that concedes the Roman claim to dominion over Britain from the start. The Mark of Edain resembles the other texts we have considered in evincing a complex and contradictory attitude towards the cultures it represents. In the case of this text we may say that its apparent ideology – its unflattering portrait of the Roman emperor and state, and by extension of the oppressive practices of empire, as well as its emphasis on respect for nature, exemplified in Aoife’s care for the elephant Bala – is to an extent problematized and even undermined by its adoption of language and attitudes that tend to legitimate Roman and imperialist viewpoints. To avoid this entirely would be a difficult task, though, given the extent to which Roman culture and language permeate the modern West, and the inevitable indebtedness of novels such as The Mark of Edain to a

55 56

57

Ibid. 70. Compare the narrator of Jim Eldridge’s Roman Invasion (My Story) (London: Scholastic, 2008) 50: “We Britons are Celts from the great Celtic race, whether Brigante or Trinovante or Caledonian, or from across the water to the west where the Isles lie.” Chandler (2008) 9.

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long tradition of fiction about the Roman invasion in which views broadly sympathetic to the Empire were entrenched. The trope of the Grand Tour is by no means universal in books about the Roman invasion, but it is common and its widespread nature reflects its obvious utility in providing a comparative view of two or more cultures. However, within that broad remit, as we have seen, it can be employed for numerous purposes. In Beric the Briton, Henty both contrasts the Briton and Romans, particularly in terms of their physique and general appearance, and also makes a case for the universality of humanity. As the philosophical Roman Norbanus puts it: “Human nature is the same everywhere, […] fair or dark, great or small. It is modified by climate, by education, by custom, and by civilization, but at bottom it is identical”.58 To find uniformity of human nature is not, however, to espouse equivalence between civilizations – and one implication of Norbanus’s words, as of Henty’s book, may be that nowhere should be considered off limits for imperialism’s civilizing mission. This is a view prosecuted in a rather more simplistic way by Henry Treece’s Legions of the Eagle, although that book appears at times rather more sceptical of the ability of some Britons to appreciate the Roman gift of civilization. Henty had used Beric’s journey from Britain to Rome as a way of convincing his men of the practical inevitability of Roman victory; but for Treece, providing his protagonist Gwydion with the opportunity to travel to Gaul (even though he goes as a slave) is a way of opening his eyes to the superiority of Roman culture and indeed the repellent nature of the British way of life. The effect of the Grand Tour is different again in Trease’s Word to Caesar and Eliott’s Ceva of the Caradocs. Trease’s book contains no significant British characters beyond the early appearance of a native girl, Barbara, who flatters the protagonist into betraying his father’s fort, thus making it vulnerable to a native uprising. The woman who seduces the hero into revealing the secret of his strength is an old trope that bears more examination than there is space for here, but while this incident leaves a negative impression of the Britons as brutal and sly the book swiftly moves leaves them behind as it moves into its main project of providing its Romano-British protagonist with an eventful tour of early second-century Gaul and Italy. Similarly, while Roman-British relations are a major theme of Ceva of the Caradocs, Ceva’s continental adventures play little part in forming her opinions, which are decidedly pro-Roman from the start. Finally, The Mark of Edain gives us yet another British prisoner, but in the case of Aoife too her opinions are only confirmed – in this case in their contempt for Rome – by her time at the centre of Empire. 58

Henty (1893) 197.

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The Grand Tour is a flexible trope. It is of course a vehicle for ideological contestation and display, but also for travel stories, especially those written when foreign travel was the preserve of the few; and a natural backdrop for stories of pursuit, danger and hairbreadth ’scapes. In itself it cannot give us a conclusive insight into the relationship between Roman and British identities within fiction of this period, but it offers telling points of comparison, and a useful prism through which to view the variety of ways in which British writers have attempted to make sense of empire, identity, and their own nation’s ambiguous relationship with both.

chapter 12

“Wulf the Briton”: Resisting Rome in a 1950s British Boys’ Adventure Strip Tony Keen Even within the field of children’s literature, comics are a relatively neglected area. This is largely due to persistent cultural prejudice against comics as a medium. They are felt to be not proper literature – indeed comics are considered in some circles to be sub-literate, and discounting of comics contributes to the widespread notion that boys do not read.1 Within the area of comics, British comics are particularly neglected. As James Chapman explains, there are a number of reasons for this lack of attention.2 For the most part, British comics lack the iconic cultural cachet of their American cousins, from which emerged widely recognisable brands such as the various superhero titles, or “Peanuts.”3 Nor are comics taken as culturally 1 For an introduction to academic study of comics, see Joe Sutcliff Sanders, “Comic Studies 101,” sfra Review 284 (Spring 2008) 4–7, and for an introduction to the reception of antiquity in comics, see George Kovacs, “Comics and Classics: Establishing a Critical Frame,” in George Kovacs and C.W. Marshall, eds., Classics and Comics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 3–24. The notion that comics are sub-literate is illustrated in Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993) 3. Farah Mendlesohn, The InterGalactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction (Jefferson, n.c., and London: McFarland, 2009) 22–48, usefully explodes the idea that boys don’t read, pointing out that it is based on discounting reading of non-fiction, comics, and even some types of books; thus “boys don’t read” actually means “boys don’t read those novels that are part of the prescribed canon for children.” My own childhood provides anecdotal support for Mendlesohn’s thesis: I voraciously devoured comics, books on railways and military equipment, and the novels of Ian Fleming, but could not be made to read “classic” works such as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) or Captain Frederick Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest (1847), as a result causing some consternation for my mother and teachers. 2 James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011) 7–15. 3 The literature on American comics is voluminous. Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, m.d.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), is a good place to start. There are, of course, British exceptions to this general absence of cultural cachet, most notably Judge Dredd, who has been the star of 2000 ad since 1977, and has widespread recognition such that he has been the subject of two Hollywood movies (in 1995 and 2012). See Colin M. Jarman and Peter Action, Judge Dredd: The MegaHistory (Luton: Lennard, 1995).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi 10.1163/9789004298606_014

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seriously in the United Kingdom as they are in Europe (especially in France).4 Discussion of British comics, therefore, is mostly to be found not in academic work, with a few exceptions such as Chapman’s 2011 book British Comics, but in fanzines and online fan pages, and in the work of writers who have emerged from fandom, such as Paul Gravett.5 The British boys’ adventure comic of the 1950s and 1960s is even more rarely discussed, even in comparison with other British comics. The boys’ adventure comic, though extremely popular and widely-read, had little cultural cachet until the late 1970s, when 2000 ad blended the format with elements of the British punk aesthetic, and gained a degree of acceptance within the counterculture.6 As a result, a significant number of strips from 2000 ad have been reprinted in various formats – primarily “Judge Dredd,” but also stories such as “Nemesis the Warlock,” “Strontium Dog,” “abc Warriors,” “Rogue Trooper,” etc. Little else in the way of British comics from the same period has been reprinted (though some strips from 2000 ad’s 1970s stablemate Battle Picture Weekly, such as “Charley’s War” and “Johnny Red,” have been collected). For the 1950s and 1960s the position is even worse. A few key works are accessible, especially those connected with particular television franchises, such as Doctor Who and the various television series produced by Gerry Anderson. Frank Hampson’s iconic “Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future” strips from Eagle of the 1950s (1950–1959) are also relatively easily to find, and have a reasonably large critical bibliography.7 Other works have been released, but often in collections that are very expensive, if aesthetically extremely pleasing – this fate has befallen Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence’s influential “The Trigan Empire” (1965–1976).8 4 On French and European comics, see Bart Beaty, Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Ann Miller, Reading Bande Desinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect, 2007). 5 For Gravett’s work on British comics, see most notably, Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury, Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes (London: Aurum Press, 2006). Note also Graham Kibble-White, The Ultimate Book of British Comics: 70 Years of Mischief, Mayhem and Cow Pies (London: Allison & Busby, 2005). 6 On 2000 ad, see Chapman (2011) 144–71. 7 E.g. Alastair Crompton, The Man Who Drew Tomorrow (Bournemouth: Who Dares Publishing, 1985); Tony Watkins, “Piloting the Future: Dan Dare and the 1950s,” in Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins, eds., A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children’s Popular Culture (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000) 153–75; James Chapman, “Onward Christian Spaceman: Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future as British Cultural History,” Visual Culture in Britain 9/1 (2008) 55–79; British Comics (2011) 60–69. 8 The strip continued to 1982, but without Lawrence, and this material is not included in the reprints. For the influence of “Trigan Empire,” see Neil Gaiman, “Deja late. Also Some

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Despite the lack of critical attention, many of the comics produced in this period deserve study.9 Through a complicated process, the British boys’ adventure comic emerged from the Victorian “penny dreadfuls.” Initially, weekly illustrated story papers, such as The Boys’ Own Paper, were published. Gradually funny comic strips, and then adventure strips, appeared in the pages of the various illustrated story publications. After the Second World War, weeklies entirely composed of comics appeared, the defining moment being the launch of Eagle in 1950.10 The subject matter of these comics reflected other subject matter thought to appeal to young boys. These included science fiction and war stories, but also tales of sportsmen, policemen, and, importantly for this chapter, historical adventures.11 It was inevitable that these historical adventures would include stories set in Roman times. As Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan show, Romans have an appeal to modern audiences, though their “knowability” (a product of their leaving written records and substantial physical monuments), and the investment the British have in being the heirs of Roman culture.12 The earliest Roman-based comics series of which I am aware is “Road to Rome,” drawn by Reg Perrott and appearing in Mickey Mouse Weekly in the 1930s.13 It is my intention in this chapter, however, to take a look at one particular example of the Rome-based comic from the 1950s, “Wulf the Briton,” as drawn, and later written, by Ron Embleton (1930–1988). This series has not really received the attention it deserves. Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury have written about it briefly in Great British Comics, and it warrants an entry in Gravett’s 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die.14 But often it is overlooked.15 Again, the lack of availability 9 10

11 12 13 14

15

Nudity,” 2003, accessed December 15 2014, . For an overview of the 1950s and 1960s boys’ adventure comic, see Chapman (2011) 76–107, and Gravett and Stanbury (2006) 156–85. For a more detailed history of this process, see Chapman (2011) 16–44. On the virtues promoted in the story papers (and hence inherited by the comics), see Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Again, see Chapman (2011) 76–107. Catherine Butler and Hallie O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 17–18. Gravett and Stanbury (2006) 161. Ibid. 160, and 179; David A. Roach, “Wulf the Briton,” in Paul Gravett, ed., 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die: The Ultimate Guide to Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Comic Strips, and Manga (London: Cassell, 2011) 192. Chapman (2011) does not mention it, for instance.

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of the work will be a factor here; however, in 2010 an almost complete collection was published (omitting the very beginning of the strip, before Embleton began drawing it, and a revival of the strip after Embleton had departed).16 “Wulf the Briton” was published in Express Weekly, a rival comic to Hulton Press’ famous Eagle, published by Express Newspapers from 1954.17 “Wulf” began in 1956, as a strip entitled “Freedom is the Prize,” written by Jenny Butterworth18 and drawn by Italian artist Ruggero Giovannini. At this point, it was an ensemble strip, set in the Rome of the emperor Nero (a.d. 54–68), about a group of gladiators attempting to escape from the arena, their master Lucullus, and the oppression of Rome.19 Rapidly, one of the characters, the Briton Wulf, came to dominate the strip, and it was renamed after him at the beginning of 1957. In the spring of 1957, Giovannini fell into dispute with his London agent, as did several fellow Italian artists working in British comics at the time. They were not being paid promptly, and as a result they stopped working for Express Weekly.20 After a brief and unsuccessful period in which the strip was drawn by Alan Pollack, the artwork was taken over by the twenty-six year old Ron Embleton (credited as “R.S. Embleton”), with Jenny Butterworth continuing as the writer.21 Embleton had already acquired a reputation as an artist comfortable drawing historical subjects, and had previously drawn another Roman strip, “The Singing Sword,” for Hotspur in 1953.22 However, “Wulf” was the first time that he produced full-colour painted artwork. The strip became very 16

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Ronald S. Embleton, ed. Peter Richardson, Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton: The Complete Adventures (London: Book Palace Books, 2010). As with recent reprints of “The Trigan Empire,” the republication of “Wulf” is in a beautifully-printed but expensive collectors’ edition. I am grateful to David Howarth from providing me with access to this material. Despite being, in the words of Roach (2011) 192, one of the most successful clones of Eagle, Express Weekly has been so overshadowed by Eagle in its subsequent reputation that Kibble-White (2005) omits it. Chapman (2011) also does not mention Express Weekly, though he does note another Express Newspapers title, the science fiction-themed Rocket (70–71). Jenny Butterworth was a prolific writer from the 1950s to the 1970s, and was married to “Trigan Empire” writer Mike Butterworth; see “Jenny Butterworth,” Women in Comics, accessed December 15 2014, . Peter Richardson, “Introduction,” in Ronald S. Embleton, ed. Peter Richardson, Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton (London: Book Palace Books, 2010) 6 (see also Gravett and Stanbury (2006) 179). Richardson (2010) 6. Embleton’s first story was in Express Weekly 140, May 25 1957. Richardson (2010) 8.

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­ ell-known for Embleton’s lush paintings, including some magnificent fullw page panels, such as that on the front cover of Express Weekly 260 (October 24 1959). Embleton went on to specialise in full-colour painted artwork, in such strips as “Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons” for tv 21 (1967–1968) and “Oh, Wicked Wanda!” for the soft-core porn magazine Penthouse (1973–1980). At the point at which Embleton took over the art, Wulf and his companions had finally escaped Roman slavery, and embarked on a series of adventures around the Mediterranean. At this point, the stories in “Wulf” resembled a typical television series, in that every few weeks he would arrive at a new port or island, where there would be a new adventure.23 Embleton, however, was unhappy with this direction, and wanted to bring the story back to Britain.24 Possibly he felt that a shift of location to Roman Britain would provide the audience with something with which they could more readily identify. Whilst children would have been taught about the Roman empire as a whole at school, Roman Britain was always a significant element within the curriculum, not least because of the relative ease of access to sites that could be visited. The 1950s do seem to have represented a peak in children’s literature about the Roman invasion.25 With Jenny Butterworth wanting to move on anyway, it was decided that Embleton would take over the writing of “Wulf” as well as the artwork. Butterworth wrote a final story that took Wulf back to Britain,26 and Embleton took full control of the strip almost a year after he had begun drawing it.27 Relocated to Roman Britain, “Wulf” became a story of British resistance to Roman invasion. Wulf rises to become (somewhat reluctantly) a leader of the Britons against Rome, and the number one target of the Roman administration 23

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This format is probably now most familiar in the “planet of the week” formula of the original Star Trek (1966–1969), but was already a staple of American television in the 1950s, especially in Western shows such as The Lone Ranger (1949–1957), and later Maverick (1957–1962), Wagon Train (1957–1964), and Rawhide (1959–1966). The 2012 television series Sinbad unconsciously replicated very closely the approach of this period of “Wulf.” Richardson (2010) 10. See Catherine Butler’s contribution to this volume, “The ‘Grand Tour’ as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion.” It is also worth noting that the trope of a Briton taken from his homeland, sent into the wider Roman empire and then returned is a common one, as Butler shows. Express Weekly 174, January 18 1958, to 188, April 26 1958. The story is referred to in the collection as “The Long Way Home,” though no story titles appeared in the original publication. See Peter Richardson, “The Long Way Home,” in Ronald S. Embleton, ed. Peter Richardson, Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton (London: Book Palace Books, 2010) 55. Express Weekly 189, May 3 1958.

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in the province. In the strip’s most famous sequence, Wulf takes part in the fight of the Brigantian king Venutius against his wife Cartamandua (the spelling Embleton adopts in favour of Tacitus’ Cartimandua or Cartismandua).28 After this event, the Romans are even temporarily driven out of the province, though they rapidly re-invade under the general Agricola. That brief description gives some idea of the nature of Embleton’s attitude to history. Embleton had strong historical interests, and went to some length to get visual details correct.29 He made use of genuine Roman place names such as Deva (Chester) and Aquae Sulis (Bath). He rightly places Cartamandua’s fall in the context of the death of Nero, and the subsequent chaos that rendered Rome unable to immediately intervene.30 Yet Embleton was quite prepared to ignore strict historical accuracy where it suited his story. In reality, the Romans were not temporarily expelled from Britain after the reign of Nero. The real Gnaeus Julius Agricola did not arrive in Britain until a.d. 77,31 nearly a decade after the fall of Cartimandua. Embleton also has Hadrian’s Wall already existing at the time of his story,32 a half-century too early. The strip is resolutely anti-imperialist. Wulf is a blond muscular figure, physically more than a match for individual Romans,33 who is meant to be admired by the readers, and is free of much in the way of psychological flaws. The Roman soldiers are smug bullies; the nearest that are seen to good Roman 28

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I use “Cartamandua” to refer to the character in the comic, and “Cartimandua” for the historical individual. The Cartamandua sequence began with Express Weekly 236, March 28 1959 (towards the end of a story entitled in the collection “The Revenge of Marius Actus”), and ran through to Express Weekly 263, November 14 1959 (the story titles in the collection are “The Wrath of Vellocatus,” “The New Centurion,” and “The Fall of Cartamandua”). The main ancient accounts of Venutius and Cartimandua (which are very brief) are to be found in Tacitus, Annals 12.36–40 and Histories 3.45. Embleton’s interest in the Romans was subsequently to serve him in illustrations for two Osprey volumes on Roman military history, Michael Simkins, The Roman Army from Hadrian to Constantine (Oxford: Osprey, 1979), and Michael Simkins, The Roman Army from Caesar to Trajan (Oxford: Osprey, 1984), and in illustrations for a series of pamphlets about life on Hadrian’s Wall published in the 1970s and 1980s by Frank Graham and Butler Publishing, and a related book, Ronald S. Embleton and Frank Graham, Hadrian’s Wall in the Days of the Romans (Newcastle upon Tyne: Frank Graham, 1984). Express Weekly 243, May 16 1959. Anthony R. Birley, “Iulius (re 49) Agricola, Gnaeus,” in Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth, and Esther Eidinow, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 755. Express Weekly 192, May 24 1958. Compare with this the similar physical characterisation of Britons in G.A. Henty’s Beric the Briton (1893), discussed in Butler, “The ‘Grand Tour’.”

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soldiers are those that serve under Wulf when he is pretending to be a Roman centurion, whose loyalty he wins by marching and eating with them, and generally refusing to ask them to do anything that he is not prepared to do himself.34 Roman governors are usually fat, lazy, and wallowing in luxury. Almost all Britons want freedom from Roman rule – even those who collaborate with Rome are sometimes given a chance to redeem themselves (e.g. Vellocatus, Cartamandua’s lover, who dies luring Romans into a trap).35 There is also a sense that the end of evicting the Romans justifies the means employed; at one point, finding that the southern Iceni have agreed with the Romans to be peaceful, as long as they receive tribute from Rome, Wulf tricks the Romans into thinking that the Iceni have gone back on their word, and tricks the Iceni into thinking that the Romans have stopped paying.36 “Wulf” is devoid of the serious tensions over how to respond to Rome that are found within many popular British presentations of the Roman occupation of Britain. Most notably seen in the reception of Boudicca in British culture,37 the question is whether the audience’s sympathy should be led towards the resistance to Rome, or toward Rome. Is Rome the evil European invader that must be fought, by the likes of Boudicca and others? Or is it the civilizing empire to which the British Empire is heir? This question exercised many thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.38 In literature, this ambivalence is perhaps best embodied in the Roman sections of Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 novel Puck of Pook’s Hill.39 This is evidently not a question that seems to have bothered Embleton. The last words he gives to Wulf are “There will never 34

Express Weekly 256, September 26 1959 (part of “The New Centurion”). These are virtues that, in boys’ comics, were presented as intrinsic to good British officers. 35 Express Weekly 249, June 27 1959. 36 Express Weekly 200, July 9 1958. 37 See Carolyn D. Williams, Boudica and Her Stories: Narrative Transformations of a Warrior Queen (Newark, d.e.: University of Delaware, 2009). 38 For comprehensive discussions of this, see Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen: The Imperial Origins of Roman Archaeology (London: : Routledge, 2000), Mark Bradley, ed., Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Sarah J. Butler, Britain and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome: The Reception of Rome in Socio-Political Debate from the 1850s to the 1920s (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 39 On Puck, see Philip Burton, “Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill: A Study in Reception,” Illinois Classical Studies 31/32 (2006–2007) 28–54, Deborah H. Roberts, “Reconstructed Pasts: Rome and Britain, Child and Adult in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rosemary Sutcliff’s Historical Fiction,” in Christopher Stray, ed., Remaking the Classics: Literature, Genre and Media in Britain 1800–2000 (London: Duckworth, 2007) 107–23, and Butler, “The ‘Grand Tour’,” in this volume.

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be peace while the Romans remain here.”40 In taking such a view, Embleton is not merely avoiding the nuances and questions of some other treatments; he is actively pushing in a different direction from that chosen by most fiction and non-fiction about Roman Britain in the 1950s. The general trend in these works was to be ultimately pro-Roman, even in those that admitted a high level of nuance, such as Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth.41 It is often the case in these stories that when Britons come back from touring the Roman empire, they generally return convinced of the benefits of Roman rule.42 Not so Wulf. There is a similarity between this depiction of the Roman occupation of Britain and the Robin Hood legend. In both stories the ordinary people, Britons or Anglo-Saxons, are oppressed by the bullying soldiers and greedy administrators of the conquerors, Romans or Normans. The only difference is that in the Robin Hood story, there is an ultimately decent authority at the top of the system, symbolised by King Richard the Lionheart, who can restore justice when the corruption of his servants has been exposed (though there is the threat that when Prince John ascends to the throne, that decency will go).43 Embleton had drawn a Robin Hood-style medieval strip, “Strongbow the Mighty,” for Mickey Mouse Weekly from 1954 to 1957,44 and there are evident thematic similarities between this material and his later writing for “Wulf.” Instead of the bullying baronial tax-collectors of “Strongbow,” “Wulf” gives the reader bullying Roman soldiers.45 There were, however, comic strips published in the 1950s and 1960s that were the polar opposite of the anti-imperialism of “Wulf.” These were stories in 40 41

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Express Weekly 306, September 10 1960. See Butler and O’Donovan (2012) 22–34. They cite a number of works, such as Lawrence du Garde Peach’s non-fiction Julius Caesar and the Romans (London: Ladybird Books, 1959), that are far less equivocal than Sutcliff about praising Rome. See Butler, “The ‘Grand Tour’,” in this volume. On Robin Hood, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca, n.y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). An ultimately decent figure at the top of the political structure is often found in other treatments of the Roman invasion, with a good emperor such as Hadrian acting as the ultimate source of justice; see Butler, “The ‘Grand Tour’.” Robin Hood strips were very popular in the 1950s; see Chapman (2011) 86. It is probably going too far to suggest that Embleton’s use of the young Clint Eastwood as a facial model for Agricola (see Richardson, “Guerilla [sic] Warfare,” in Ronald S. Embleton, ed. Peter Richardson, Ron Embleton’s Wulf the Briton (London: Book Palace Books, 2010) 256) was a comment upon increasing American cultural imperialism. For an example of the image, see Express Weekly 279, March 5 1960 (Richardson gives the page reference in Embleton (2010) as 266, but it is actually 268).

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which the occupying empire was the British, not the Roman. In these stories, which had titles such as “The Wolf of Kabul” and “Action in the Khyber,” the occupying imperial power was progressive, and making everyone’s life better. The rebels – the equivalents of Wulf and Venutius – are wicked tyrants, whose objection to British rule is that the British prevent them from exploiting their subjects; they are the villains, and the servants of the empire the heroes.46 This is worth mentioning, as it shows that “Wulf” is not necessarily representative of attitudes in 1950s British comics; this is not unexpected, given, as shown already, that “Wulf” was untypical of children’s literature of the time in its attitudes towards the Roman occupation. The strip’s anti-imperialism also contrasts with later Rome-inspired strips, such as Tom Tully and Frank Bellamy’s “Heros the Spartan” (1962–1963)47 and “The Trigan Empire.” In both of these, there was a more positive attitude to the concept of Rome and the idea of empire; “Trigan Empire” in particular enshrined the idea that empire is fine, as long as there is a wise and responsible man on the throne. The important contemporary event to which “Wulf the Briton” reacts is, of course, the Second World War. Where most books about Roman Britain from the 1950s are articulating issues relating to Britain’s loss of empire, and the need to reposition the nation on the world stage, “Wulf,” uncompromisingly hostile to the Roman incomers, is specifically engaging with the threat of invasion by Germany. The British have always been concerned about being invaded from the continent of Europe, even though the last time it was done successfully was in 1066 (if one chooses not to include William of Orange’s landing as part of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which most British school history books do not count as an invasion); events such as the failed attempt of the Spanish Armada of 1588 and the threat posed by Napoleon in 1803 are important parts of the British national story. This element of the national psyche produced a strain of stories speculating on the consequences of invasion, which got going significantly with George Tomkyns Chesney’s story “The 46

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“The Wolf of Kabul” began as a prose feature in The Wizard in 1930, and became a comic in Hotspur in 1961. “Action in the Khyber” ran in Battle (a different publication from the 1970s Battle Picture Weekly) in 1960. Both are concerned with British actions in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, a period celebrated on film in Kim (usa, dir.: Victor Saville, 1950), and mocked in Carry On Up the Khyber (uk, dir.: Gerald Thomas, 1968). On these comics, see Chapman (2011) 88–89, and on attitudes to India in children’s literature, see Supriya Goswami, Colonial India in Children’s Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2012) especially 1–13. Collected in Frank Bellamy, Frank Bellamy’s Heros the Spartan: The Complete Adventures (London: Book Palace Books, 2013).

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Battle of Dorking” in 1871.48 The genre soon span off into science fiction, with H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898). In 1940 Britain came as close as it had done for a long while to actual invasion, at least in the popular imagination,49 and this sparked a resurgence in invasion literature, in various media. Though there were some stories clearly about German invasion, such as the 1942 movie Went the Day Well? (uk dir.: Alberto Cavalcanti), post-war very often concerns about invasion were displaced to make them more palatable, most often into science fiction, such as John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951).50 But as well as displacing such concerns into the future, one could displace them into the past, and Britain under the Roman occupation might seem to be an obvious setting. That it is not used much is probably due to the ambivalence about the relationship of the reader to invader and invaded, mentioned above. “Wulf,” therefore, is a good example of displaced invasion literature of the 1950s, but using a background that was not often employed in these circumstances. Of course, one might ask why such issues could not simply be engaged with in stories set in the Second World War. It is true that such stories existed in British comics of the 1950s. However, there was a still a reluctance in the early part of the decade to engage with war stories as the only way of telling stories about the war. As the decade progressed, war comics came to be more and more important, and dominated the adventure comic through the 1960s and 1970s51 – indeed, “Wulf” was taken off the cover of Express Weekly in April 1960 to be replaced by real-life Second World War adventures, drawn by Embleton, and when Embleton left “Wulf” later that year, it was to draw the war comic 48 49

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Reprinted in I.F. Clarke, ed., The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-Come (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). In practical terms, this threat was never very real; the Royal Navy was never reduced to a sufficient degree to make German invasion feasible; see Stephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2009) 109–15. But for the present argument all that matters is that the threat was believed at the time to be real. On the invasion motif in early science fiction and science fiction cinema and television, see Matthew William Jones, “The British Reception of 1950s Science Fiction Cinema” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2011) 98–172; Tony Keen, “‘Went the Day of the Daleks well?’ An Investigation into the Role of Invasion Narratives in Shaping 1950s and 1960s British Television Science Fiction, as shown in Quatermass, Doctor Who and ufo,”  Academia.edu, accessed December 15 2015, . On war comics of the 1950s and 1960s, see Chapman (2011) 95–103.

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“Biggles.” So “Wulf” can be seen as a late foray into a genre of comics that was slowly disappearing from the boys’ adventure comic. (Though Embleton did later draw the ancient Greek-based “Wrath of the Gods” for Boys’ World in 1963.) Where Britain had only been threatened with German invasion, France had actually been occupied. And like Britain, the French had comics that told stories of resistance to Rome. The most famous example here is, of course René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s Asterix the Gaul. Similarities are to be noted in the basic set-up between “Wulf” and Asterix, which first appeared in 1959, a year after Embleton took Wulf back to Britain. It is not impossible that René Goscinny was aware of comics work going on in Britain, though of course his and Uderzo’s approach was entirely different. And whether Asterix engages with the German occupation is a question that is up to debate. The strip is more commonly argued as being about American cultural imperialism and its rejection by the French.52 But whilst this is clearly true of the later volumes, the shadow of German occupation still hung over France in 1959. In any case, Asterix can be seen as a comedic version of some of the themes of “Wulf,” perhaps acknowledging the absurdity of a comic in which the hero was engaged on the impossible (both because Rome’s power was hard to defeat, and because historically we know it did not happen) task of expelling the Romans. As noted, “Wulf” was demoted and then brought to an end in 1960, as the editor of Express Weekly judged (probably correctly) that his audience would appreciate better a Second World War strip on the cover, and then that Embleton’s skills were better employed on a war story. It has been little seen since then. But those who have read the strips, either at the time of publication or subsequently, continue to speak with affection about “Wulf.” And from a Classical reception studies point of view, it stands as an interesting example of how Rome was engaged with for a children’s audience. 52

See Andrew Clark, “Imperialism in Asterix,” Belphégor: Popular Literature and Media Culture 4/1 (November 2004).

chapter 13

Bridging the Gap between Generations: Astérix between Child and Adult, Classical and Modern Eran Almagor “If anyone were fool enough to write the story of our village, you can bet they wouldn’t call it The Adventures of Vitalstatistix the Gaul!”1 The metaleptic worries of Impedimenta/ Bonnemine about the way history might be represented in the distant future, after two thousand years, in a comic series form, closely parallel the concerns of ancient figures and authors with the right manner of presenting myths and stories of the distant past. Ps.-Plutarch (On the Education of Children = De liberis educandis, 13, 9e) argues that parents should not forget that the branches of instruction which involve memory contribute to the practical activities of life and that the memory of the past “serves as a pattern of good counsel for the future”. Cato the elder endeavoured to write his country’s past with his own hand and in large letters for his son.2 The canon of historians and historical works was constructed in antiquity also with an eye to what should be remembered and what should be discarded.3 The ancients were indeed aware of the importance of what is transmitted to the young and even of the need to occasionally adapt stories and make them suitable for children.4 The most famous example is that of Plato in his Republic on the influence of Homer and other myths, and the sections that should be censored in the education of the guardians in his ideal state (2.377e–383a).5 Centuries later, several Christian authors continued to deal with this question, out of care for the 1 “Eh bien, si des imbéciles écrivent un jour l’histoire de notre village, ils n’appelleront pas ça les aventures d’Abraracourcix le Gaulois !”, La Zizanie (= The Roman Agent ) 14.10. Henceforth, the names of the albums are given in French. See the appendix for the English titles. References to the albums include number of page and panel. 2 Plut. Cato Mai. 20.7. 3 See D. Mendels, Memory in Jewish, Pagan and Christian Societies of the Graeco-Roman World (London: T & T Clark, 2004) 1–29. 4 See Quintilian, 1.8.4–12 on the proper reading for young boys: lyric poets should be excerpted, even Horace. See H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. G. Lamb. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956) 277–78. 5 See Marrou (1956) 69–72; J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) 79–101; S. Scolnicov, Plato’s Metaphysics of Education (London: Routledge, 1988) 112–19.

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impact of these stories on the soul of the child.6 Modern awareness of what has to be highlighted or suppressed in works intended for children can be regarded as another form of these debates and arguments.7 It is against this background that Astérix might be viewed, i.e., as an adapted version of ancient historical texts for children,8 with a tongue in cheek reference to the ancient concerns about the texts that should be disseminated to the young.9 In a recent paper on Astérix and the way Goscinny and Uderzo used comics or the French Bandes Dessinée (henceforth bd) to transform and remodel ancient texts,10 I have argued that this specific medium, placed between the written and the graphic, and which is in fact defined by the special relations between

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See Tertulian, De Idol. 10.5–7; St. Basil, Advice to the Young on Reading Greek Literature, 1–2; St. Augustine, On Christian Teaching (= De doctrina christiana) 2.139–46. See G.L. Ellspermann, The Attitude of the Early Christian Latin Writers toward Pagan Literature and Learning (Washington, dc: Catholic University Press, 1949) 23–42, 174–247; T.D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 186–210. See M.G. McKeown & I.L. Beck, “The assessment and characterization of young learners’ knowledge of a topic in history,” American Educational Research Journal 27 (1990) 688– 726; idem, “Making sense of accounts of history: Why young students don’t and how they might,” in G. Leinhardt, I.L. Beck, & K. Stainton, eds., Teaching and learning in history. (Hillsdale, nj: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994) 1–26; H. Claire, Reclaiming Our Pasts: Equality and Diversity in the Primary History Curriculum (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 1996); J.L. Zornado, Inventing the Child: Culture, ideology, and the story of childhood (New York: Garland, 2001) 171–199 [Maus and the holocaust]; D.A. Ellermeyer & K.A. Chick, Multicultural American History through Children’s Literature (Portsmouth: Teacher Ideas Press, 2003) ix–x, and 137; J. Nichol and J. Dean, “Writing for Children: History Textbooks and teaching Texts,” International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 3 (2003) 1–30; D. Stevenson, “Historical Friction: Shifting Ideas of Objective Reality in History and Fiction,” in A.L. Lucas, ed., The Presence of the Past in Children’s Literature, (Westport, ct and London: Praeger, 2003) 23–30; T. Watkins, “History and Culture,” in P. Hunt, ed., International companion encyclopedia of children’s literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 76–98 (with bibliography); C. Allan, “Memory: (Re)imagining the past through children’s literature,” in K.M. Mallan, M. Kerry , Y. Wu & R. McGillis, eds., (Re) imagining the World: Children’s Literature’s Response to Changing Times (Heidelberg: Springer, 2013) 127–139. See M. Corbishley, Pinning Down the Past: Archaeology, Heritage, and Education Today (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011) 137. Especially among the Celts. See Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6.14 on proper ways of training to remember verses and the ways some tenets are imparted to the young. E. Almagor, “Re-inventing the Barbarian: Reshaping Classical Ethnographic Perceptions in Goscinny’s and Uderzo’s Astérix,” in G. Kovacs and T. Marshall, eds., Son of Classics and Comics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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word and image,11 can be described as a liminal art which depicts liminal heroes. As such, it has been claimed, this is the perfect medium to render the ancient imagery of Gauls in a new cast. I have also tried to show how the imaginary world of Roman Gaul in Astérix is built as a juncture of two view points, that of classical literature, in which Gauls are depicted as representing the barbaric way of life, and a reverse position, in which the Gauls treat the Romans as “others”.12 Here I would like to explore two other dimensions of this liminality and Astérix’s position at two other crossroads: the classical and the modern, and works directed at adults and literature intended for children. It would be a partial portrayal of the significance of Astérix to claim that it only offers its modern (French) readers playful references to contemporary themes and items by anachronistically placing them in Roman Gaul.13 The comic series also provides children and youths of today the opportunity to be acquainted with some of the images of the ancient world, mainly ethnological ones, regarding the Gauls. Thus, Astérix disseminates a portion of classical knowledge to an audience otherwise unfamiliar with it. So great is the success of the strip that today, instead of the real historical narrative, Gaul is linked with a faraway fantasy located in the timeless year of 50 bce.14 11

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See S. McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993) 46–7, 92, 96–7, 138–161 on the language of Comics as composed of pictures and words. Comics “show” as much as they “tell”. Cf. P. Fresnault-Deruelle, La Bande dessinée: Essai d’analyse sémiotique (Paris: Hachette, 1972) 41–8; W. Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art (Tamarac, fl: Poorhouse Press 1985) 10–24, 26–7. Goscinny and Uderzo both defy the classical tradition and accept it, while introducing a completely new ethnographic perception. In the format of comics, the ancient Greek and Roman texts undergo a transformation which not only visualizes them, but also literally turn the classical expressions into floating utterances, “winged words” (the Homeric epea pteroenta) in speech bubbles, which are taken out of context. The bd, on its part, requires the ancient texts to set a premise for the construction of a world. See C. Pinet, “Myths and Stereotypes in Asterix le Gaulois,” Canadian Modern Language Review, 34 (1980) 149–162.; R.B. Nye, “Death of a Gaulois: Rene Goscinny and Asterix,” Journal of Popular Culture 14 (1980) 181–195 [184–5, 191–1]; J. Steel, “Let’s party! Asterix and the World Cup (France 1998),” in C. Forsdick, L. Grove, and L. McQuillan, eds., The Francophone Bande dessinée (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) 201–218 [205, 214]; E.B. Dandridge, Producing Popularity: The Success in France of the Comics Series ‘Asterix le Gaulois’, ma Thesis (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2008) 3; M.T. Dinter, “Francophone Romes: Antiquity in Les Bandes Dessinées,” in G. Kovacs and T. Marshall, Classics and Comics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 183–192 [186]. See A. King, “Vercingetorix, Asterix and the Gauls: Gallic symbols in French politics and culture,” in R. Hingley, ed., Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age (Portsmouth, ri: Journal of Roman Archaeology

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Is Astérix properly speaking part of children’s literature? This is certainly the way it is seen and treated in both scholarly accounts and popular descriptions,15 inferred also from the manner the series is recently published and advertised.16 The live action movies based on the series17 can surely be interpreted as marketed in particular for children.18 There are children characters within the bd series, though admittedly not too many. Sometimes children and young characters are heroes of the respective albums. The most obvious example is Pepe,

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Supplementary Series 44, 2001) 113–125; Nye (1980), 183; M. Dietler, “‘Our ancestors the Gauls’: archaeology, ethnic nationalism, and the Manipulation of Celtic Identity in Modern Europe,” American Anthropologist, 96 (1994) 584–605. See A. Bell, “Translator’s Notebook,” in N. Chambers, ed., The Signal Approach to Children’s Books (London: Kestrel, 1980) 129–139 [131–3]; eadem, “Children’s Literature and International Identity? A Translator’s View-point,” in M. Meek, ed., Children’s Literature and National Identity (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2001) 23–30 [28]; P. Pinsent, The Power of the Page: Children’s Books and Their Readers (Roehampton: David Fulton Publishers in association with the Roehampton Institute, 1993) 93; P. France, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 111; R. Mitchell, Nurturing the Souls of Our Children (Bloomington, in: Author House, 2005) 133; P. Brown, A Critical History of French Children’s Literature, 2 vols. (New York and London: Routledge, 2007) 2.219–221; E. Bird, Children’s Literature Gems: Choosing and Using Them in Your Library Career (Chicago: American Library Association, 2009) 35; G. Lathey, The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers (New York and London: Routledge, 2010) 147–8, 186, 192; H. Lovatt, “Asterisks and Obelisks: Classical Receptions in Children’s Literature,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16 (2009) 508–522 [509, 511]; C. Butler & H. O’Donovan, Reading History in Children’s Books (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012) 38. E.g., in English the first twenty four albums, from Asterix the Gaul (1969) to Asterix in Belgium (1980) were published by Hodder Dargaud, while thereafter the albums from Asterix and the great divide (1981) till very recently have been specifically published by Hodder Children’s books. They are currently published by Orion Children’s Books. Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar (Astérix et Obélix contre César) 1999; Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (Astérix & Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre) 2002; Asterix at the Olympic Games (Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques) 2008; Asterix and Obelix: God Save Britannia (Astérix et Obélix: Au service de sa Majesté) 2012. All of them G-rated, that is, suitable for all audiences. See P. Simpson, The Rough Guide to kids’ movies (London: Rough Guides, 2004); A. Bell, “Astérix on Screen” in F.M. Collins and J. Ridgman, eds., Turning the Page: Children’s Literature in Performance and the Media (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006) 133–45. Cf. their inclusion in lists of children’s movies, composed in blogs such as (accessed 31 December 2013). This is not to deny that adults are also perceived as potential viewers.

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the Spanish Chief Huevos Y Bacon’s young son (Astérix en Hispanie), taken as a hostage to Gaul and brought back to his village by Asterix and Obelix. Pepe typically behaves like a spoiled child, wishing to play with the Romans and Gauls (9–10, 15, 17.4, 33.6, 40.6). The other obvious instance is the album Astérix et les Normands, where Justforkix/Goudurix, the teenage nephew of the Gaulish chief, arrives in the village from Lutetia so that the Gauls could “make a man out of him” (5.6). This teenager stands out by comparison with the village people, especially because he displays fear (in view of the coming Normans: 11–22, 38). Some children only appear as minor characters merely advancing the plot. For instance, the young Picanmix/ Keskonrix, hunting wild boars with bow and arrows witnesses the bard being kidnapped by a Roman patrol and immediately informs Asterix (Astérix gladiateur, 8.1–2, 7–8).19 Some children figures are completely marginal, though named; for instance, little Prawnsinaspix/ Catédralgotix (Le combat des chefs), who appears to be raising his right arm as if he is still saluting the legionary who had entered the classroom (and ostensibly indicating the success of the attempts of Cassius Ceramix/ Aplusbegalix at Romanization, in fact simply wishes to leave the classroom (15.5–7)). Let us examine briefly the nature of children’s literature and see how Astérix can be seen as part of it. Superficially, this literature is classified as aimed for children and the young, or as the Library of Congress’ definition goes, it is “material written and produced for the information or entertainment of children and young adults. It includes all non-fiction, literary and artistic genres and physical formats”. Bearing in mind, however, that the definition of ‘children’ is not fixed, this description runs the risk of being circular.20 This is the reason why several scholars attempt to examine this literature without exploring its audience. These attempts trace specific categories or themes,21 styles22

19 Cf. Astérix en Corse, 29.5. 20 “Children” is not a given category, as children differ with regard to gender, ethnicity, race, religion etc. Cf. L. Paul, “Feminism Revisited,” in P. Hunt, ed., International companion encyclopedia of children’s literature (London: Routledge, 2004) 140–153 [150] on constructions of children and children’s literature. See P. Nodelman, The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 242–243. 21 See D. Rudd, “Theorising and theories: the conditions of possibility of children’s literature,” in P. Hunt 29–43 [39], who finds in these texts “an awareness of children’s disempowered status (whether containing or controlling it, questioning or overturning it).” 22 See M.H. Arbuthnot, Children and Books (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1947) 44 on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London, 1865). See also N. Tucker,

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or language23 supposedly unique to this type of literature. Another distinctive mark is said to be the narrative structure. The stereotyped image of children’s literature is of a simple story, a clear plot without digressions, with a limited number of “flat” characters easily described by one feature, and an omniscient narrator, whose reliability cannot be questioned.24 Yet, one aspect noticeable in recent studies of children’s literature is the presence an internal tension within it, in contradistinction to the oversimplified picture of its narrative. Rose highlights the relation of adult and child.25 O’Sullivan insists on two defining characteristics which distinguish children’s literature from other types: firstly, a body of literature which belongs simultaneously to literary and pedagogical systems (being a literature into which the dominant educational norms are inscribed); secondly, it is an asymmetrical communication (as at every stage of literary communication we find adults acting for children) and within the text it has an implied (adult) author addressing an implied (child) reader.26 Nikolajeva stresses the discrepancy between the cognitive level of the sender (adult) and the implied addressee (child). The uniqueness of children’s literature as a genre may be related to this inner tension, evidenced by its narrative and plot.27 Indeed, Nodelman lists forty-five “qualities” typical to children’s stories, most of them imply some binary tension.28 To the last point may be attached further studies on the way humour functions in children’s literature through the fact of

The Child and the Book: Psychological and Literary Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 9, 13 (generally, direct speech and less complex vocabulary). 23 See J. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction 2nd edn. (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992) 78: “The history of children’s fiction should be written, not in terms of its themes or the content of its stories, but in terms of the relationship to language which different children’s writers establish for the child.” 24 See Nodelman (2008) 243. 25 According to Rose (1984) 1, children’s literature is about that “impossible relation between adult and child”: “If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.” 26 E. O’Sullivan, “Internationalism, the universal child and the world of children’s literature,” in Hunt (2004) 13–25. 27 M. Nikolajeva, “Narrative theory and children’s literature,” in Hunt (2004) 166–167. 28 Nodleman (2008) 76–81, 227–232, and esp. 242–243: children’s literature “is binary and oppositional in structure and in theme. Its stories tend to have two main settings, each of which represents one of a pair of central opposites.”

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incongruity.29 This incongruity is effected when certain expectations are frustrated given the input of situational elements, generating a cognitive contradiction which produces surprise. Incongruities (such as physical discrepancy; distortion, exaggeration; violation of expectations; deviation from the norm; violation of rules; violation of conceptual thought) are thought provoking for children.30 Structurally, the same tension is perceived by scholars who study classical reception and the way modern depictions and images adapt the ancient world.31 It is not that the “the classical tradition” is merely disseminated in modern children’s literature, but, as in other media of reception, it is rather transformed, and in constant change.32 There is a reciprocal dimension between the ancient and modern that exists in the reception of the classical world, by which the gap between the two worlds in diminished.33 Moreover, it would seem that at some level, the artists are aware that their act of reception is part of the tradition.34 We shall see how this works within Astérix. Astérix interconnects the present with the past and the child with the adult by displaying various incongruities in the comic book form. In this respect, the plot of Astérix definitely implies some tension and produces a certain break in expectations, which forms the basis for its humour and the appeal the series 29 30

31

32 33

34

See P. McGhee, Humor and Children’s Development: A Guide to Practical Applications (New York: Haworth Press, 1989) 17–19. Cf. M.R. Koller, Humor and society: Explorations in the Sociology of Humor (Houston: Cap and Gown Press, 1988) 21. Cf. A.J. Klein, “Introduction: A Global Perspective of Humour,” in eadem, ed., Humour in Children’s Lives: A Guidebook for Practitioners (Westport, ct: Praeger, 2003) 4–9 on humour as used as a technique to arouse children’s curiosity, get their attention or motivate them to learn. For instance, this can be found in the ludic approaches observed in modern “alternative history” of the ancient world. See S. Annes Brown, “’Plato’s Stepchildren’: sf and the Classic,” in L. Hardwick and C. Stray, eds., A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2008) 426–427. Cf. E. Hobsbawm, and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See C. Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); See I.J. Porter, “Reception studies: Future prospects,” in L. Hardwick and C. Stray, eds., A Companion to Classical Receptions (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2008) 474, who speaks of the constant change of the objects of reception: “Traditions of reception are dynamic processes that flow in two directions at once, both forward and backward”. Cf. I. Sluiter, “The dialectics of genre: some aspects of secondary literature and genre in antiquity,” in M. Depew and D. Obbink, eds., Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society (Cambridge, ma and London: Harvard University Press, 2000) 183–203.

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has for children. Turning harsh history, found in classical texts, into a popular tale that attracts young people necessitates the omission of expected items. Hence, Asterix and Obelix do not live with female partners,35 in contrast to the classical pictures of licentious and outdoor sexual behaviour among the Gauls (cf. Diod. 5.32.7, Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6.14). Whereas the Celtic practice to sacrifice living human beings is found in some classical authors (Diod. 5.31.3),36 in Astérix this sort of brutality is attributed to either the Romans (the arena, e.g., Astérix gladiateur, passim; Le Gaulois, 48), Goths (Les Goths, 39), Vikings (La Grande Traversée, 44) or Egyptians (Cleopatra, 13, 29). Although the threat to execute in such a manner is occasionally voiced, no one actually experiences it.37 In works for children as well, sex and violence are often omitted.38 The omissions are largely done within a pedagogical or didactic intent. One of the functions of children’s literature accepted for ages is the teaching of values that the adults believe should be applicable to their young.39 This was certainly true in the case of the ancient historical texts, on which Astérix is based, with their didactic aim and moralistic content and message.40 Along these lines, it might be seen that Astérix teaches his young readers values like love of one’s family (even distant: chez les Bretons, 9.2), self-sacrifice for the sake of one’s friends, the honour involved in returning a debt (le chaudron, 11.1–4), the

35

Cf. the infatuation Asterix and Obelix experience in Asterix Legionnaire, or Le Devin, 20. This feature has probably more to do with the 1949 French law governing children’s literature, especially article 2. See Dandridge (2008) 18–21. Cf. Goscinny’s interview in Anne Manson, “Grâce à ‘Astérix, le nouveau rival de Tintin,” L’Aurore 22 Mar. 1966. 36 Cf. Caesar, De Bello Gallico 6.16; Athenaeus, 4.160e; Lucan, 1.444–6. See D. Rankin, Celts and the Classical World (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987) 264–265, 285. 37 Nye (1980) 187. 38 See M. Nikolajeva, “‘A Dream of Complete Idleness’: Depiction of Labor in Children’s Fiction,” Lion and the Unicorn 26 (2002) 305–321 [306: “a genre full of innocence”]; Nodleman (2008) 19, 42, 129 (“This is a world without sex and almost without violence”) 152, 161–162, 200–203, 219. Although cf. K. Pizzi, “Contemporary Comics,” in Hunt (2004) 385–95 [387]. 39 See Rose (1992) 59–60; M. Nikolajeva, The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature (Lanham, md: Scarecrow Press, 2002) x; Nodelman (2008) 81, 152–154, 157–158, 161, 212, 233, 238. 40 For Diodorus’ belief in the moral and didactic purpose of history and history writing, as found in both his prefaces and narrative, see, e.g., 1.1.2–5, 1.2.4–7, 4.1.2–3, 11.3.1–5, 11.46.1, 15.88.1, 18.59.5–6, 23.15, 30.15, 31.15 etc. See P.J. Stylianou, A Historical Commentary on Diodorus Siculus Book 15 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 3–4, 9–10, 14–15. Cf. P. Green, Diodorus Siculus Books 11–12.37.1. Greek History, 480–431 bc – the Alternative Version (Austin, tx: University of Texas Press, 2006) 3, 16–17, 24.

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importance of unity (Obélix et Compagnie, 42) and so forth.41 Like the function of the ancient texts, therefore, they are useful in turning the young into functioning adults within society. Another purpose of children’s literature, however, is to delight or entertain.42 This is clearly true of the series, since Astérix is not wholly didactic. In the series itself, comics (as “comix”) are seen marketed as entertainment for children (Le combat des chefs, 38.6). In general, it lets the characters break loose, and allows them to behave in an unbound manner, not as role-models. Social order breaks down, as the Gauls are all prone towards solving their differences by fighting with each other, a “running gag” and an indispensible part in the series. Not surprisingly, this is the point where entertainment for children becomes entertainment for adults as well. Almost by definition, as we have seen, children’s literature involves an adult perspective.43 Properly speaking, the Astérix albums are not works intended for children alone.44 Like many other contributions to the magazine Pilote, where this BD series first made its appearance, Astérix aimed at an adult audience as well.45 Astérix appeared in the first issue 41 42

43

44 45

See Brown (2007) 221. See P. Nodelman, “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 17 (1992) 29–35; id., “Pleasure and Genre: Speculations on the Characteristics of Children’s Fiction”, Children’s Literature 28 (2000) 1–14; id. (2008) 179–188, 252–256, 268–271. Cf. C. Sarland, “Critical tradition and ideological positioning,” in Hunt (2004) 56–75; Watkins (2004). See U.C. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 6, 9. See also Nodleman (1992) 30: “…child psychology and children’s literature are primarily for the benefit of adults… we write books for children to provide them with values and with images of themselves we approve of or feel comfortable with.” Indeed, some scholars exclude comic books from the type of children’s literature; see N. Anderson, Elementary Children’s Literature (Boston: Pearson, Allyn and Bacon, 2006) 2. The magazine aimed at adolescents and adults. See Dandridge (2008) 31–32. According to Goscinny, it was created “avec l’arrière-pensée d’en faire plus tard un journal pour adultes” (“with the ulterior motive of creating a magazine for adults later on”). See C. Guillot and O. Andrieu, René Goscinny (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2005) 171. The magazine also had articles dealing with current events. See Dandridge (2008) 32–36 for adult reader mail and the section called “Pilotoramas”, an illustrated pedagogical tools at the journal’s centerfold. The Pilotoramas featured illustrations of submarines, ships, houses, castles, the battle of Alexander at Arbela [no. 497], Roman Limes [no. 191], a Roman house [no. 257], Roman baths [no. 488], even the siege engines at Masada [no. 481]. See W. Michallat, “Pilote Magazine and the Teenager Bande Dessinée,” Modern and Contemporary France 15 (2007) 277–292. Yet, see M. Horn, “Comics,” in P.L. Horn, ed., Handbook of French Popular Culture (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) 23, who

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of Pilote (October 29, 1959),46 and the albums continued to be included in the magazine till 1973.47 From issue no. 92 (1961) it was placed in the back cover of Pilote as the acknowledged highlight of the magazine. Taking Astérix as a case in point, it was admittedly hard for children to grasp all the puns, jokes and literary allusions.48 There are also some cultural contemporary references in Astérix, such as to the orgy scene in Fellini’s Satyricon (chez les Helvètes, 7.1–2) or the Moulin Rouge (La serpe d’or, 28.4) that would presumably not be understandable by children, as also the cry “Orgies, orgies, we want orgies!” (“Orgies ! Orgies ! Nous voulons des orgies”; le chaudron, 31.5) or the references to drinking and hangover (Les lauriers de César, 10, 13.11, 19.4, 23.4). Apropos of these cultural and social references, one should also note that not every time a child is seen, it necessarily means an indication of the fact that children are conceived of as an audience. For instance are the allusions to the Mannekenpis (Astérix chez les Belges, 33.7–9, 34.1, 4, 9–10), who is suspected of drinking beer To be sure, as a work intended for young people, children are conspicuously absent, even in situations where we would assume their presence (like the Le Devin album, for instance, when the entire population of the village runs away).49 While specifically modern adult-oriented innuendos are inserted, certain ancient references to Gaulish children which could have been integrated are omitted. For instance, nothing is made of Diodorus’ claim (5.28.4) that the service of the meals is done by the youngest children, both male and female. No allusion is made to Caesar’s assertions (bg, 6.18) that the Gauls do not permit their children to approach them openly until they are grown up or that they believe it is inappropriate for a young son to stand in public in the presence of his father. Although ironically, by generally keeping children away from depictions in the series, Astérix is true to the sentiments Caesar mentions. As part of the adaptation of ancient texts, Goscinny and Uderzo insert well known Latin

46 47 48

49

claims that in the 1970s Pilote curiously converted into an adult (or at least adolescent) monthly from the children’s weekly it had been previously. An extract appeared on issue no. 0, as it was called (1.6.1959). The last issue to feature an album was 708 (31.5.1973) and the last cover to feature Asterix before Goscinny’s death is 711 (21.6.1973). Dandridge (2008) 64–5. Cf. Pizzi (2004) 386. Not surprising, perhaps, is the very recent interesting observation of J. Copping, The Daily Telegraph (26 December 2013) that according to a new study based on lending data from British libraries, “children fall out of love with Asterix” together with books by J.K. Rowling and Roald Dahl, books that are said to have “defined childhood.” It may be the case that Asterix was never intended for children alone. There are also no children on the beach in Le tour de Gaule d’Astérix, 29.4, 7.

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phrases, somewhat inappropriately. A recurrent use of this device are the sayings of the old pirate Triple Patte (pegleg) to the dismay of the captain (e.g., Cleopatra, 10.7 ; La Zizanie, 11.4; La grande traversée, 13.3). At one point we expect the Gauls to utter the Latin (“Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant”, “Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you”) but we only get “Hi, Julius” (Astérix gladiateur, 41.2, 42.5). If these passages and the incongruity they entail were not intended for the adult readership at the outset, they increasingly made sense only to adults who remembered their childhood learning, as Latin was gradually disappearing from French schools. Indeed, Goscinny and Uderzo themselves admitted that Astérix was to be set against the background of their own bygone school days or even designed to recall them. In his May 1967 address to the Rotary Club in Paris, Goscinny said that they had elected to tell the story of ancient Gaul, “souvenir des premières leçons d’histoire de notre enfance”.50 Uderzo himself claimed that going through the great periods in history, they both stopped at the Gauls, remembering the history classes of their youth.51 Echoes of this education are clearly seen throughout the series. For example, at the beginning of the album La serpe d’or (5), the bard Assurancetourix/ Cacofonix is instructing some children, who are puzzled by his question (“qui etaient nos ancêtres?”/ “who were our ancestors?”).52 It would seem that the writing on the rock behind him (“iii + i = iv”) alludes to the famous opening of the De Bello Gallico, in which Gaul is divided into three parts (Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres) with the addition that the fourth part is the famous village, unconquered by Julius Caesar. If the allusion is correct, in fact it perplexes the external audience as well as the internal one. Another class is seen in the album Le combat des chefs (15.4–7), where the class depicted is a language course (ironically given by a professor for “modern languages”). There are also allusions to the perception of the value of Latin itself within ancient times in this educational and cultural system. The very first panel of the series (later in the album Le Gaulois, 5.10) alludes (in the box of the récitatif ) to Naevius’ 50 51

52

Guillot and Andrieu (2005) 208, (“memory of the first history lessons in our childhood”). “René m’a dit “Récite-moi les grandes périodes de l’histoire”. J’ai commencé à l’époque du paléolithique et quand je suis arrivé aux Gaulois, il m’a arrêté. Nous nous sommes rappelé la leçon d’histoire de notre enfance (…)”. See A. Uderzo, Uderzo, de Flamberge à Astérix (Paris: Philippsen, 1985) 127. See M.-A. Guillaume, J.-L. Bocquet, and A.-E. Botella, René Goscinny: biographie (Arles: Actes sud, 1997) 51–52. See P. Gaumer and C. Moliterni, eds. Dictionnaire mondial de la bande dessinée (Paris: Larousse, 1994) 29. See A. Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip (Bristol: Intellect, 2007) 158 on the bafflement of the school children in the scene.

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celebrated inscription that the Romans will fail to recall how to speak Latin,53 but now this is attributed to the harshness of Asterix’s bashing. Some Latin allusions contain a subtle reference to the process of learning itself, like “Errare humanum est” (en Corse, 19.8; et les Goths, 6.9), “Bis repetita don’t always placent” (Le bouclier Arverne, 42.9, a take on Horace, Ars Poetica = ep. 2.3, 365), “Qui habet aures audiendi, audiat” (Le cadeau de César, 4.1) from Mark 4:9, and even the famous Greek saying on the temple of Apollo in Delphi Gnôthi seauton (Le domaine des dieux, 12.2). Echoing the fact that Astérix stands at the thresholds of ancient texts on the one hand and their modern adaptation on the other are several plays within the series, in which adulthood and childhood appear to be conflated. These plays are supposed to indicate that Astérix appeals to the two types of readerships at once, and to point at the ostensible two factors that make up the basis of the comic series, namely, the ancient texts coming from the world of the adults and the modern adaptation which has children as one of its intended audiences. Some of the figures either remember their childhood or else have it mentioned to them by others. The most obvious case is that of Obelix, who as a child fell into a cauldron filled with magic potion and hence is permanently affected by it. This running gag has turned into a full feature in Pilote issue 291 (20.5.1965) and a full album in 1989 as a text story with illustrations (“Comment Obélix est tombé dans la marmite du druide quand il était petit”/“How Obelix Fell into the Magic Potion When he was a Little Boy”). This album shows the heroes as children, and it is the first time Asterix’s and Obelix’s parents are seen. Obliscoidix, Obelix’s father, appears to behave in a manner later practiced by his son (i.e., collecting the helmets of Roman legionaries). Elsewhere, the characters’ children appear as emulating their elders and behaving as childishly as the adults of the village (en Corse, 5.1–8), for they engage in a fight in the same way their parents do and over the very same topics (the selling of rotten fish). The question thus arises as to who emulates whom? Note the use of Latin by the Gaulish children (“Alea Zacta Eft”), just like the Latin modern French children have to learn (and perhaps just as relevant to them). In general, the adults behave without responsibility or logic, a discrepancy that appeals to children. Irrefutably, except for the Druid and Asterix, the 53

Aul. Gel. na 1.24.2: “Immortales mortales si foret fas flere || flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam. || Itaque postquam est Orchi traditus thesauro, || obliti sunt Romani loquier lingua Latina,” (“If it were right for the immortal ones to mourn for mortals, then for the poet Naevius would mourn the Goddesses of Song. And so when unto Death’s own treasure-house he was delivered, Romans no longer did remember how to speak the Latin tongue”). Loeb Classical Library translation.

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­characters are not depicted as particularly brilliant.54 Even Getafix/ Panoramix the Druid loses his restrained demeanour and authority (Le combat des chefs) at one point, as a consequence of a head injury (13–14, 16–22.1, 25–27, 34–5, 41.4–6). Yet, this childish behaviour has already been described in the classical texts of the adults. That our heroes settle disputes by violence rather than conversation and discussion matches the typical classical pictures of northern nations (from Aristotle, Pol. 7.1327b18-33 onward) as brave but lacking in intelligence.55 The Gauls’ tendency to fight is exaggerated to appeal to the young readers; but this item also comes from the classical authors.56 Concerning the confrontational trait of the Gauls, the ancients sources are in no argument. Strabo (4.4.6) says: “all Celts are given to strife…” and Ammianus (15.12.1) pictures the Gauls as “fond of wrangling” (…avidi iurgiorum…). Indeed, there is a thin line between the behaviour of the adult Gauls and children. The young influence the behaviour of adults; Pepe inspires Obelix to hold his breath as a tactic to get what he wants (en Hispanie, 25.7); elsewhere Obelix (and others) dances to the tunes of Justforkix/ Goudurix (les Normands, 8.2,6). In the story world, besides the recurring depiction of Obelix as infantile, who is unable to delay gratification or to control his urges, we can also see other adults acting out as children: e.g., the gladiators play instead of fighting (Astérix gladiateur, 33.2–5, 9–10, 36.5, 43.1–4), others are moved into action by rage, envy or irrational fear. The village’s eldest person Geriatrix/Agecanonix (said to be 93 year old in Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques, 27.7) behaves and is seen like a child, with a childish stature of his own, matching that of Asterix. The connection is pronounced, for instance, in Le cadeau de César, when upon running for the office of chief of the tribe, the only ones attending his election rally are two children (29.1–3). The attitude shown towards him by his nameless wife (e.g., Le domaine des dieux, 35.6) resembles that of a mother to her child, with an allusion to mature age as a second childhood. The recurrent motif of the series, indeed its raison d’être is the way authority is eschewed in it. For instance, the authority of the village’s chief is repeatedly broken (e.g., Le Devin, 13.5; Le combat des chefs, 20.5 etc.). Most importantly, it 54

55 56

See Derrick de Kerckhove’s remark during the Celtic Consciousness Symposium in February 1978 in Toronto, quoted in A. Clark, “Imperialism in Asterix,” Belphegor, 4 (2004). Cf. Strabo, 4.4.2: “otherwise [they are] simple”. Cf. 4.4.5. Opposed to the eastern nations, who are wise but are effeminately cowards. Cf. De aër. aqu. et loc. 22. Diodorus (5.28.5) characterizes them as querulous: “And it is their custom, even during the course of the meal, to seize upon any trivial matter as an occasion for keen disputation and then to challenge one another to single combat…”. The single combat features as the subject of an entire album, namely, Le combat des chefs (6.8).

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is the Roman political authority that the Gauls Resist. As I have claimed elsewhere, this resistance is similar to the manner Astérix breaks the authority of the classical texts.57 Goscinny and Uderzo themselves struggle to challenge the authority of the classical texts in both the graphic layout of the series and in the plot and storyline. From the first gag (in the second panel), in which vanquished Vercingetorix lays his arms ‘on’ and not ‘at’ Caesar’s feet, it is evident that the world of Astérix gives a deliberate incorrect image of the pictures found in ancient literature while still residing very much within the context of classical texts and associations. The Gauls of the village are not conquered, they are strong and they are able to beat the Romans. As comics is a visual medium, the grotesque element also directs its arrows of ridicule against wellknown Greek and Roman plastic works of art, for instance “Diana on the hunt” (chez les Bretons, 21). Corresponding to this constant subversive approach to the classical texts, there are also some artistic devices, which break conventions and rules. For instance, the reader sees a graphic presentation of a metalepsis (or a violation of narrative levels), in the form of a break of the fourth wall, in a straight approach of one character (mostly Obelix) to the audience, expressing the well-known motto “Ils sont fous ces Romains” (“these Romans are crazy”) or variants of it.58 This vivid violation of conventions is coherent with the sort of the breakdown of the ancient texts Astérix advances and the inconsistencies it hosts.59 Closely connected with the types of authority mentioned as broken is that of parental authority.60 The childlike stature of Asterix is an illustration. Compared with the size of Obelix, Asterix’s image appears to intentionally undermine the Greek and Latin depiction of the Gauls as enormous.61 Ancient authors depict the Gauls as beautiful and immense. In Diodorus (5.28.1) we find the Gauls as “tall of body” and in Strabo (4.4.2) their might “is partly caused by their huge figure…”62 Ammianus (15.12.1) claims that

57 58 59 60 61

62

See Almagor (forthcoming). The phrase appears for the first time in Astérix gladiateur, 29.1. On the metaleptic breach of the diegetic world in bd see Miller (2007) 134–138. See Tucker (1982) 20, on children’s attraction towards stories that mirror both positive and negative feelings towards mother or father figures. Cf. Goscinny’s insistence on this portrayal: A. Du Chatenet and O. Andrieu, eds., Le dictionnaire Goscinny (Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 2003) 116. One might claim, however, that this image also seems to conform to the presentation of Barbarians as infantile persons, impulsive and culturally backward. Cf. Polybius, 2.15.7: “Of the numbers, stature, and personal beauty of the inhabitants, and still more of their bravery in war, we shall be able to satisfy ourselves from the facts of their history”.

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“almost all the Gauls are of tall physique and good-looking…”.63 By electing to present Asterix as child who defies the world of the Romans/adults and subverts the classical image, whose parentage of this series is undeniable, Goscinny and Uderzo were able to reach out from the world of ancient texts and touch a modern younger audience. All three forms of authority, namely, textual, political and paternal are combined in Astérix in the figure of Julius Caesar. An expression of the fact that Caesar’s works are to a degree at the foundation of the series, his ultimate authority within it is largely admitted, almost in a presidential manner.64 Caesar is nearly a fatherly figure, ridiculed65 but never really reviled by the Gauls. Still, his effort to overcome the disobedient village is unsuccessful. One would presume that he is accepted as a text, but repelled as a character. An instance for this is the renowned declaration of Caesar at the beginning of the De Bello Gallico, that the Belgians are the bravest of all Gauls (horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae: 1.1; cf. 8.54 and Strabo, 4.4.3). The Gauls in Astérix respond to this assertion by challenging Caesar himself to fight with both nations and determine which one is more courageous (Chez les Belges, 31–8). Here the authority of Caesar’s account is granted, but his particular description is defied. The album Le Fils d’Astérix adds another layer of significance to Caesar. The child whom Asterix finds at his doorstep, and who is given the magic potion so that he overpowers everyone, turns out at the end to be Caesar’s son (46.8, 47.2–4). It would not be farfetched to see this toddler as symbolizing the comic series itself – an offspring of Caesar (the text), as it were, but one which grows independently of its parent, raised by the Gauls and assuming power of its own. This child allegorizes the point where fiction is based on fact, not unlike the manner which hbo’s Rome presents Caesarion: he is thought by all to be the son of the historical Julius Caesar, but is in fact the offspring of fictional Pullo.66 Again, a child is made to symbolize a forceful incursion of fiction into history or the complete appropriation of history by this fictional narrative. 63

64

65 66

Celsioris staturae et candidi paene Galli sunt omnes… This representation of the Gauls’ huge dimensions is not discarded through the figure of Obelix, but is made to be literally adopted from the ancients and ridiculed, by distancing large physique from being a symbol of beauty and casting it oftentimes as shameful. To quote G. Woolf, Et Tu, Brute? A Short History of Political Murder (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2007) 177. Yet, cf. Clark, “Imperialism in Asterix” for an interpretation that the Asterix stories reflect the French dislike for authority figures. “Ces Gaulois me ridiculisent” (Obelix et Compagnie, 12). See E. Almagor, “Cicero’s Death Scene in Rome,” in M.S. Cyrino, ed., Rome, Season Two: Trial and Triumph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) 61–73.

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Many of the plays I have addressed here only seem to take place in children’s literature. A child who can be seen as an “other”, an outsider to the world of the adults, can easily identify with the story of barbarians who face a formidable enemy in the form of a world Empire, and yet succeed in resisting him.67 The Gauls are generally seen as “others” in the ancient literature (which is known to many a French from the school textbooks) and Astérix can very well appeal to youths, who feel patronized by adults, by somehow re-writing this history. Even Asterix’s height can attract many young children as the small anti-hero who finally wins the day every time. The childish physique of this figure may point to the status of classical texts in this series. While subverting the image, found in Greek and Latin texts, of the Gauls as huge men, it also seems to ­conform to the presentation of Barbarians as childlike persons, impulsive and irrational. Thus, while subverting these ancient texts, Astérix in some sense agrees with them and even adapts them in a presentable manner to a modern audience. At the same time, while advancing a hero who might attract children, both by his appearance and by the very notion of effectively resisting authority – in violation of certain conventions and rules – Astérix is still very much within the world and language of ancient texts that it allegedly defies. It would seem that one of the keys to understanding the phenomenal success of the series is in this ability to bridge the generation gap of its audience. Another facet of this ability lies in its achievement to connect two other distant generations – the modern and the ancient, without favouring one at the expense of the other.

67

Cf. Nodelman (1992).

Bridging the Gap between Generations: Astérix



Appendix: List of Asterix Albums (1961–2013)

Asterix the Gaul (Astérix le Gaulois), 1961. Asterix and the Golden Sickle (La serpe d’or), 1962. Asterix and the Goths (Astérix et les Goths), 1963. Asterix the Gladiator (Astérix gladiateur), 1964. Asterix and the Banquet (Le tour de Gaule d’Astérix), 1965. Asterix and Cleopatra (Astérix et Cléopâtre), 1965. Asterix and the Big Fight (Le combat des chefs), 1966. Asterix in Britain (Astérix chez les Bretons), 1966. Asterix and the Normans (Astérix et les Normands), 1966. Asterix the Legionary (Astérix légionnaire), 1967. Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield (Le bouclier Arverne), 1968. Asterix at the Olympic Games (Astérix aux Jeux Olympiques), 1968. Asterix and the Cauldron (Astérix et le chaudron), 1969. Asterix in Spain (Astérix en Hispanie), 1969. Asterix and the Roman Agent (La Zizanie), 1970. Asterix in Switzerland (Astérix chez les Helvètes), 1970. The Mansions of the Gods (Le domaine des dieux), 1971. Asterix and the Laurel Wreath (Les lauriers de César), 1972. Asterix and the Soothsayer (Le devin), 1972. Asterix in Corsica (Astérix en Corse), 1973. Asterix and Caesar (Le cadeau de César), 1974. Asterix and the Great Crossing (La grande traversée), 1975. Asterix Conquers Rome (Les 12 travaux d’Astérix), 1976. (usually excluded from the canonical list of Astérix volumes.) Obelix and Co. (Obélix et Compagnie), 1976. Asterix in Belgium (Astérix chez les Belges), 1979. Asterix and the Great Divide (Le Grand Fossé), 1980 Asterix and the Black Gold (L’Odyssée d’Astérix), 1981 Asterix and Son (Le Fils d’Astérix), 1983 Asterix and the Magic Carpet (Astérix chez Rahàzade), 1987 Asterix and the Secret Weapon (La Rose et le Glaive), 1991 Asterix and Obelix All at Sea (La Galère d’Obélix), 1996 Asterix and the Actress (Astérix et Latraviata), 2001 Asterix and the Class Act (Astérix et la Rentrée gauloise), 2003 Asterix and the Falling Sky (Le Ciel lui tombe sur la tête), 2005 Asterix and Obelix (L’Anniversaire d’Astérix chez les Pictes), 2009 Asterix and the Picts (Astérix chez les Pictes), 2013 [actually by Jean-Yves Ferri et Didier Conrad]

307

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Index 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die 282 2000 ad 280–1 Abbot, Ellen Jensen 11, 139, 159–61, 167 “ABC Warriors” 281 Abramovic, Marina 129 Acculturation 107 Acernus 64 Achilles 77, 117, 140, 141, 144, 223–4, 225, 231 “Action in the Khyber” 288 Activision 107 Adams, Ernest 119 Adventures of Telemachus, The 197 Adventures of Ulysses, The 12, 196–8 Aegeus 71–2 Aegina 72 Aeneas 17, 18, 66, 141, 222 Aeolus 222, 230 Aesop 20, 56, 178, 179n33, 205 Age of Empires 114 Age of Mythology 114–120, 126, 127, 129, 135 Ages of Man 186 Agricola 263, 265, 285, 287 Aktion Gehsperre 81 Albrecht, Michael von 61 Alcott, Louisa May Little Women 21, 28 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 10, 17–19, 20, 21, 26, 295n22 Amazons 221 Ammianus Marcellinus 303, 304 Amphidromia 66 Anabasis 17, 21 Ancient Conquest 117 Anderson, Gerry 281 Androgeos 72 Anglo- Saxons 42, 287 animal studies 161–167 animals in children’s literature 195–212 anthropomorphism 161, 205 Antigone 72 Antikleia 226 Antinous 217 Aphrodite 116, 117, 120, 217, 247, 250

Apollo 26, 53, 66, 115, 116, 120, 141, 207, 247–248, 302 and Daphne 66, 175, 233, 244, 251, 252–6 Apuleius 177, 178n30, 190n69 Golden Ass 180n37, 183n48, 185, 186n60, 191 Aquae Sulis See Bath Arabian Nights 183 Arachne 13, 117, 233 Arcadia 25, 53, 56–7, 59, 63, 67, 74, 82 Ares 116, 120, 121 Argo 116 Argonauts 71, 73, 109, 111, 120, 127 Argos (dog) 218, 228 Ariadne 77, 97, 98, 99, 202, 253 Arkadia (Polish classicist palace complex) 80 Art Game 129 Artemis Fowl See Colfer, Eoin Artemis/Diana 66, 116, 120, 141, 250, 251, 304 Artist is Present, The 129 Asclepius 76, 141 Aslan 146, 147, 162, 172–4, 176, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184–5, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Astérix 290, 291–307 adult readership of 293–301 allusions in 300–302 authority 303–306 childlike stature of 303 Getafix/ Panoramix 303 Movies 294 Normans 295 Obelix 295, 298, 302, 303, 304, 305 running gag 299 The Son of Asterix 305 violence in, 298, 303 Atalanta 117 Athena 107, 117, 120, 121, 210, 212n54 215, 216, 218, 225, 226 Pallas Athene 71, 121 Athenaeus 298n36 Athens 43, 69, 71, 73, 99 Athenians 73, 74 Atlantis 31, 32, 35, 36, 39–41, 130 Atreus 224 Atwood, Margaret Penelopiad 212 Autolycus 225

Index Babe See King-Smith, Dick 207 Babylon 27, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39n25, 40, 41, 46n49, 51, 52 Bacchus 171, 173, 174, 176, 241 Bandes Dessinée 292 Barbarians 48, 160, 183n47, 208, 260, 304n61, 306 Barr, Pippin 128–9 Barrett, Tracy 212n54, 214n6, 218–221, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230–31 King of Ithaka 218–221, 230 Barrie, J. M. 23, 25 Bath 285 Batman 135 Batman: Arkham Asylum 135 Battle for Troy, The 107, 117 “Battle of Dorking”, The 289 Battle of Olympus, The 122 Battle of Warsaw 68 Battle Picture Weekly 281, 288n46 Bavaria 68 Beat Games 109 Bellamy, Frank 288 Beric the Briton See Henty, G.A. Berlyn, Mike 127 bestiary 145 Bible 132 Biggles 289 Bioshock 106 Blackford, Holly 19, 22 Block, Francesca Lia 227–230, 231 Blow, Jonathan 122 Blurst 111 13n. Bolshevik Revolution 70, 74 War 68 Boreas 69 Boucher, François 57 Boudica/Boudicca 42–3, 286 Bowman, Patrick 212n54 Boys’ Own Paper, The 282 Boys’ World 290 Braid 122 Brigantes 277, 285 Britain, ancient 20, 31, 32, 36, 41–3, 259, 262–279, 284–5, 286–7, 289 Britons 42, 47, 259–60, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 271, 274–5, 277, 278, 284, 286, 287 British Empire 47, 52, 261, 267, 286

337 British Museum 26, 36, 38, 44, 50–52, 53, 54, 208 Brooks, Walter “Freddy the Pig” series 207 Bruegel, Pieter 58, 66 Bryla, Karen 118n24 Budge, Wallis 50–51 Bulgakov, Mikhail 68 Bullfinch’s Mythology 135 Burnett, Frances Hodgson The Secret Garden 24–5, 28n9 Butler, Samuel 229 Butterworth, Jenny 283, 284 Butterworth, Mike 281 Cadmus 73, 74, 117, 186n59, 202, 221, 222, 230 Cadre, Adam 127 Caesar 43–49, 50, 184n51, 292n9, 298, 300, 301, 304, 305 Calypso/Kalypso 216, 222 Campbell, Joseph 216 “Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons” 284 Caratacus 269, 276 Carroll, Lewis 17, 18, 21, 28 Cartimandua 285 Cato the Elder 291 Cavalcanti, Alberto 289 Cavanagh, Terry 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 133, 134 Celts 276–7, 292, 298, 303 Centaurs 60, 139–168, 183, 187, 219 and animal studies 161–167 as hybrid 162, 163, 166, 167 bestial nature 142–3, 144–5, 150, 153, 167–8 Centauromachy 142, 168 esoteric knowledge 147, 150, 163 in classical myth 139–143 in C.S. Lewis 146–8 in Diana Wynne Jones 156–158 in Ellen Jensen Abbot 159–161 in Eoin Colfer 158–159 in J. K. Rowling 148–152 in Rick Riordan 152–155 liminality of 165, 168 medieval 143–146 Cerberus 123 Ceres 180, 187n63 Ceva of the Caradocs 269–272 Chandler, Pauline The Mark of Edain 276–278

338 Channel 8 Software 112 Chapman, George 197, 199n13 Chapman, James 180–81, 282, 283, 287, 289 Charles x Gustav (King of Sweden) 78 Charley’s War 281 Charlotte's Web 207 Chesney, George Tomkyns 288 Chester 285 children’s literature as cultural history 8–9 as entertainment for adults 80, 108, 164, 208, 293–95, 299–305 definition of 295–7 didacticism of 4, 20, 33, 216, 218–9, 220–1, 272, 298–9 Chiron 139, 140–41, 142n14, 143–44, 148, 152–54, 155, 158, 159, 164, 167 Christ 66, 162 Christianity 24, 25, 52, 132, 162, 175n21, 177, 187, 201, 214, 261, 262, 291, 292 Church, Alfred John 196 Cicero 46, 59, 81, 172n11 Cicones 221 Cimon 74 Circe 116, 181n39, 195–212, 215, 216, 221–2, 228 Clash of the Titans 113 Classical Pantheon 27 Classical Reception Studies 3, 4–7, 19, 86, 104, 290 and children’s literature 7–9 Claudius 43n34, 259, 275, 276 Cocteau, Jean 62 Cold War 76 Colfer, Eoin 11, 158–59, 166–67 use of technology 158–159 Combrzyńska 81–82 comics 138, 280–90, 292–3, 298 38n, 299, 304 comics, British 280–90 concepts of childhood 10, 28, 56 Conrad, Joseph 261 Coolidge, Susan, What Katy Did 21, 22, 26, 28 Cratylus 126n34 Creon 72 Crete 40n27, 65, 72, 74, 97 Crystal Palace 53 cultural formations 86–87, 95, 100, 104 Cupid and Psyche 177, 186n60

Index cyclops 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 121, 129, 199, 205, 207, 209, 222 Polyphemus 116, 215–6, 222, 223n12 Czarkowska, Iwona 80 Day of the Triffids, The See Wyndham, John D. H. Lawrence 170n6 Daedalus 13, 65, 66, 73–4, 75, 77, 81, 97, 99, 100, 111, 224, 233 Dan Dare 281 Danaids 78, 128 Dante 143–4, 152, 178n31, 190, 214 Davis, Bob 109, 111 DC Comics 135 De Sélincourt, Aubrey 213, 214, 227 Deep Secret See Jones, Diana Wynne Demodocus 223 Depression Quest 111n13 Desilets, Brendan 110n11 Deva See Chester Diana See Artemis Dictys 231 Diodorus 298 40n, 300, 303n56, 304 Dionysus 23, 115, 116, 120, 141, 155 Disney 107, 130, 243 Disney’s Hades Challenge 107 Disney’s Hercules Action Game 107 Doctor Who 281, 289n50 Don’t Look Back 122–24, 125, 126, 127, 130, 133 Donkey Kong 122n29 Donlan, Chris 128n37 Donut County 132n43 Downey, Edmund 260 dragon 74, 105, 111, 177–8, 186, 202 druids 265, 270, 271, 275, 302–3 Druitt, Tobias 205 Dryden, John 214, 224, 229 Eagle of the Ninth, The See Sutcliff, Rosemary eagle 1, 3, 36, 128, 146, 186n60 ecology 161, 165 educational agenda 86, 95–100 Egypt 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 46, 50, 51, 54, 114, 298 Eldridge, Jim 277n56 Electra 117 Eliot, T.S. 59, 63, 229

Index Eliott, Lydia S. 269–272, 274 Embleton, Ron 282–84, 285, 286–7, 289–90 Enchanted Castle, The 10, 26–28, 30, 53, 54 Entertainment Software Rating Board 108, 109, 114, 133 Erechthides 71 Esposito, Ben 132n43 Europe 13, 52, 59, 63, 70, 71, 108, 144, 148, 269, 271, 273, 281, 286, 288 geography 260 European Community 268, 272, 273 European Game Information 108, 133 Europa/Europe (mythology) 74, 176 Eurycleia/Eurykleia 212, 215, 216, 219 Eurydice 122–24, 126, 127, 130, 134 Express Newspapers 283 Express Weekly 13, 283, 284, 285, 286, 290 Fabian Society 31, 37, 39, 52n71 Fénelon, François 67, 197, 218–9 Firenze 149–152, 164 Fletcher, C.R.L. 266, 269 Flisak, Jerzy 76 Foaly 11, 158–9, 166 Fortugno, Nick 127–8 France 281, 290 “Freddy the Pig” series See Brooks, Walter “Freedom is the Prize” 283 Galen 139 game art 107, 126–129 graphical adventure 113 platformer 122, 123,124, 125 puzzle 109n9, 111, 112, 113, 125, 133, 136 real-time strategy 107, 114–119 role-playing 120–122 text adventure 107, 109–112, 127, 135 tower defense 119 game jam 126 Gansiniec, Ryszard 60, 62 Gates of Troy 107 Gaul 43, 47, 268, 269, 271, 278, 293, 295, 301 Gauls 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19 gender 28, 46n48, 86, 100–103, 117n21, 161, 175, 180, 197n8, 242n43, 246, 247–8, 295n20 Gentill, S.D. 221–224, 229, 230, 231 Geras, Adèle 212, 216–8, 219, 223, 224, 231

339 Germany 68–9, 288 Germans 62, 82 Getafix/ Panoramix 303 ghetto 81–2 Gibbon, Edward 275 Giovannini, Ruggero 283 Glorious Revolution 288 God of War 109 Godwin, William 198, 207 Golden Ass See Apuleius Goldhill, Simon 6, 7, 8, 9, 19, 31n8, 33n11 Goscinny, René 13, 290, 292, 293, 298n35, 299n45, 300, 301, 304, 305 Grahame, Kenneth 10, 23, 24, 28 The Golden Age 23 The Wind in the Willows 10, 23, 24 grammar of visual design 87 Graves, Robert 78 Gravett, Paul 281, 282, 283n19 Green, Roger Lancelyn 231, 251 Hades 17, 77, 115, 116, 119, 124, 134, 215, 223, 224, 250 Hadrian 269–75, 287n43 Hadrian’s Wall 285 Half-Real 105 Hall, Edith 6, 7, 8n28, 195n4, 213 Hampson, Frank 281 Hardwick, Lorna 4n15, 5, 6, 7n27, 297n31n33 Harris, Robert 214, 224–6 Harry Potter See Rowling, J. K. Hawthorne, Nathaniel 12, 75, 200–205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 233, 234, 236–8, 239–242, 244, 253 The House of the Seven Gables 201, 203n30 The Scarlet Letter 201–202, 203n30 Tanglewood Tales 12, 75, 200–201, 204n33, 233, 237n15, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys 200–1, 233–4, 237, 239–41 HBO’s Rome 305 Heath, Quentin 113 Helen of Troy 219, 224, 225 Henry (Justice) Ford 269 Henty, G.A. 260–67, 268, 269, 273, 274, 285, 276, 278 Beric the Briton 260–67 By England’s Aid: the Freeing of the Netherlands 1585–1604 261

340 Hephaestus 116, 120 Hera 115, 120, 141, 142n13 Heracleitus 126 Heracles/ Hercules 20, 60, 72, 73, 107, 117, 141, 142, 154 Hermes 112, 115, 116, 120, 121, 195, 199, 222, 223, 228 Herodotus 209 “Heros the Spartan” 288 Hesiod 186, 209 Hi Res Adventure #4. See Ulysses and the Golden Fleece Hippolyta 117 Home 127 Homer 12, 61, 71, 75, 78, 94, 111, 141n9, 195n2, 196, 198, 199, 204, 205, 207, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 291 Hopkins, David 7, 8n30 Horace 181, 291, 302 Hotspur 283 Housman, A.E. 181 “How Obelix Fell into the magic Potion When he was a Little Boy” 302 Hughes, Thomas: Tom Brown’s Schooldays 20–21, 26, 28 Hulton Press 283 Hunicke, Robin 136 Hunt, Peter 4, 240n31, 292n7, 295n20n21, 296n26, 298n38, 299n42 Hyacinthus 66 Hydra 60, 143 Hygieia 76 Hymettus 72 Icarus 13, 58–59, 60, 64, 65, 66, 73, 76–77, 81, 97, 99, 100, 117, 233, 238n21 Icarian Sea 66 Iceni 262, 286 idealisation of childhood 10, 20, 23, 24, 28–29 image combination 85, 86, 87 Imagine Studios 107 Imagineer 122 Infidel 127 Infocom 112, 127 intellectual property 132 Interplay Entertainment 117 Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus 117, 120n27, 127 Iron Curtain 59, 63n21

Index Iser, Wolfgang 5, 74 Islands of the Blessed 74 Ithaca/Ithaka 212n54, 216–21, 226, 230, 231 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 57–60, 63 Ixion 141–42, 144, 145 Jason and the Argonauts 111 Jason 109, 120–21, 141 Jauss, Hans Robert 5, 74 Jews 38n22, 63 Johnny Red 281 Jones, Diana Wynne 1, 11, 139, 156–58, 164–66 Joyce, James 62 Judge Dredd 280, 281 Julius Caesar, see Caesar Juul, Jesper 105, 106 Kantian aesthetics 6 Kasdepke, Grzegorz 80 Kass, Sam 118n24 katabasis 17–22 Kiciński, Bruno 77 Kicker 129 Kid Icarus 107 King of Ithaka, see Barrett, Tracy King-Smith, Dick: Babe 207 Kipling, Rudyard 20, 254, 266, 269, 286 Puck of Pook’s Hill 20, 286 Klonowic, Sebastian Fabian 64 Kniaźnin, Franciszek Dionizy 64 Kochanowski, Jan 64–65 KOEI Ltd 107 Komornicka, Anna M. 75–79 Kongregate 133, 136 Koster, Raph 136 Krawczuk, Aleksander 67n37, 68n39, 69, 70n51, 73 Kümmerling- Beibauer, Bettina 19, 20n3 La Fontaine, Jean de 56 Labdakides 73 Lady Chatterley’s Lover See Lawrence, D.H. Laertes 217, 226 Lamb, Charles 12, 196–200, 204, 205, 207, 209, 212 Latin 5, 9, 17, 18, 19, 21, 33, 48, 49, 50, 59, 63, 64, 67, 77, 78, 144, 153, 154, 240, 277, 300–302, 304, 306 Lavelle, Stephen 127 Lawrence, Caroline 2, 9

Index Lawrence, D.H. 170n6 Lawrence, Don 281 LeBlanc, Marc 136 Lee, Harry 124 Leodes 217, 218 Lerer, Seth 3, 4, 305n34 Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment 128–29 Lewis, C.S. 1, 11, 12, 139, 146–148, 149, 150, 152, 158, 162–63, 169–191 attitude to animals 29–30 Christianity 30 The Horse and His Boy 147, 183–187 The Last Battle 146, 187–190 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe 169–70 The Magician’s Nephew 185–187 Prince Caspian 146, 147, 171, 172–76 The Silver Chair 147, 179–183 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 176–179 Till We Have Faces 177n27 Liddell, Alice and Henry 18 Liquid Entertainment 109 Little Women See Alcott, Louisa May Łódź 81 Lord of the Rings, The, (movie) 174n18 Lost Books of the Odyssey, The 212n54 Lotus-Eaters 221 LoveChess: The Greek Era 109 Lucullus 283 ludonarrative dissonance 106 Luminaria 113 Lviv 61, 62, 63 Malczewski, Jacek 64, 65 Mark of Edain, The See Chandler, Pauline Marsyas 66 Martindale, Charles 5–6, 7, 8n30, 234n2, 297n33 Redeeming The Text 5–6, 297n33 Massilia 76 Mayo, Catherine 224, 226–227 McCallum, Robyn 11, 85, 86, 87, 95, 96, 101, 104, 196, 213, 214, 233n1, 235n9n10, 238, 241n34 McCaughrean, Geraldine Greek Myths 241n35, 242n39, 246n58, 247n59, 249, 253, 254n95 Odysseus 214–215, 214–215, 216, 223, 225, 229, 230 McDonald’s Video Game 105 McGraw, Elois Jarvis 259

341 McLaren, Clemence Waiting for Odysseus 212n54, 215–6 McMullan, Kate 207n40 Medea 71 Mediterranean 59, 63, 69, 205, 284 Medusa 11, 85, 86, 100–103, 104, 113, 121 Meier, Sid 115n19 Melantho 217 Menelaus/Menelaos 174n16, 219, 220, 223, 224, 226–227 Mentor 197, 218, 219, 224, 225 metafiction 12, 222, 230–232, 237 Metamorphoses, see Ovid Mickey Mouse Weekly 282, 287 Mickiewicz, Adam 57, 58, 60, 62, 67, 68, 79 Microsoft Game Studios 114 Midas 13, 66, 122, 124–127, 133, 134, 177, 233, 240–244 Minos 65, 72, 96–100 Minotaur China Shop 111n13 Minotaur 11, 81, 85, 86, 95–100, 101, 104, 135, 143, 204, 253 misogyny 95, 175 Molleindustria 105 Mommsen, Theodor 45, 69 monopods 177 monsters 11, 51n68, 85–104 monstrosity 92, 101, 103 Muses 66 Naevius 301–302 Napoleon 261, 288 Narcissus 233, 244–252 Narnia See Lewis, C.S. narratology 105 Nausicaa 222–223 Nemean Lion 116 “Nemesis the Warlock” 281 Nero 262, 267, 275, 283, 285 Nesbit, Edith 10, 26, 28, 30–55 The Enchanted Castle 26–28, 30, 53 The Magic City 30, 47–49 The Story of the Amulet 30, 32–47 Nessus 142–44 Nestor 219, 220, 230 Nintendo 107 Ninth Legion 273 Nodelman, Perry 86, 87n9, 95, 100, 101n49, 198n10, 237n17, 238n22, 295n20, 296, 298n39, 299n42, 306n67

342 Nogala, Dorota 39, 41 Normans 266, 287, 295 Obelix 295, 298, 302, 303, 304, 305 Odysseus 12, 17, 18, 74, 75, 92, 93, 94, 109, 111–114, 117, 180, 181n39, 195–212, 213–232 See also Ulysses Odyssey, The 12, 75, 94, 177, 180, 195–212, 213, 217, 218, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230 “Oh, Wicked Wanda!” 284 Old Narnians 172 Olympians 53, 63, 115, 208, 210 Olympus 66, 71, 210 One of the 28th: a Tale of Waterloo 261 Oreithyia 69 Orion 117 Orpheus 17, 107, 122–127, 130, 133, 134, 180n36 orthogonal unit differentiation 119 Ovid 12, 13, 66, 71, 77, 97, 140n6, 141n9, 141n12, 142n15, 144, 174, 175, 178n30, 186n59, 187, 203n29, 222, 233–256, 272 Pactolus 125, 126 pagan moon worship 27 Palamedes 226, 231 Palladium Interactive 113 Pan 10, 20, 23–24, 25, 28, 221, 223 Pandion 69 Pandora 187, 185, 186n60 Parandowski, Jan 61–67, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77n71, 78, 79, 80, 81 Parmeniscus of Metapontum 65 patrifocal narrative 86 “Peanuts” 280 Pedercini, Paolo 105 Pegasus 111, 113, 186 Penelope 78, 196, 212, 215, 216–217, 218, 219, 224, 227, 231–232 Penelopiad See Atwood, Margaret “penny dreadfuls” 282 Penthouse 284 People’s Republic of Poland 11, 61, 75, 80 Percy Jackson & The Olympians: Lightning Thief (movie) 107 Percy Jackson & The Olympians (books) See Riordan, Rick Pereira, Joe 110n11 Perrott, Reg 282

Index Persephone/Proserpina 17, 19, 20, 22n5, 23, 180, 181, 186n60, 242n43 Perseus and Andromeda 112–3 Perseus 73, 103, 117, 141 Petersburg 67, 68, 70 Phaeacia 195, 221, 223, 230 Photopia 127 Piankówna, Gabriela 70 Picard, Barbara Leonie 214 Pilote 299–300, 302 Piotrowska, Eliza 80 Pisistratos 219 Plan B Entertainment 107 Plato 40, 59, 69, 81, 126n34, 176n24, 182, 188n65, 189, 190, 291 Plutarch 208, 209 Ps.-Plutarch 291 Poland 11, 56–82 Pollack, Alan 283 Polyphemus See cyclops Poseidon 40, 115, 116, 117, 119, 223n12, 228 Potter, Beatrix 205 Pigling Bland 205 Princess Peach 122 Prins, Yopie 19 Prometheus 75, 128, 141 Proserpina See Persephone puer aeternus 20, 23 Quinn, Zoe 111n13 Re:Action Entertainment 117 Redeeming The Text, see Martindale, Charles Rekowska, Monika 80 Richard the Lionheart 287 Rider Haggard, H. 34, 180n36 Riordan, Rick 139, 152–155, 164, 205, 207n40 Rise of the Argonauts 109, 120, 127 “Road to Rome” 282 Robin Hood 241n34, 272, 287 Rocksteady 135 “Rogue Trooper” 281 Roman Britain 268, 284, 287, 288 Roman Invasion 13, 259–279, 284, 287n43 Roman Mysteries, See Lawrence, Caroline Romanization 295 Romans/Rome 3, 28, 42, 45, 47, 172, 259–279, 282, 284–288, 290, 293, 295, 298, 302, 304–305

343

Index Romulus 66 Rose, Jacqueline 198n10, 238n22, 296 Rousseau, Jean- Jacques 56, 62, 82, 197 Rowling, J.K. 1, 11, 139, 148–152, 163–164, 300n48 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 148, 150 hierarchical society 163 Rusinek, Joanna 81 Russia/Russians 62, 67, 68, 70, 73

Stroh, Wilfried 61 “Strongbow the Mighty” 287 “Strontium Dog” 281 Studencki, Władysław 62n15n16n19, 63n20n22, 67n36, 75n66 Super 3D Noah’s Ark 132n44 Super Mario Bros 122 Sutcliff, Rosemary 2, 196, 214, 259n1, 268, 286n39, 287 The Eagle of the Ninth 2, 268, 287

Sabashnikov, Mikhail 70 Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 78 satyr 64–65, 146, 170, 219, 224 Seah, Jarrel 124 Seaton, Tony 57n4 Second World War 2, 267, 273, 282, 288–290 Secret Garden, The See Burnett, Frances Hodgson sexuality 101–103, 108n4, 201, 245, 248, 255 Shadow of the Colossus 127–128 Shaw, George Bernard 33n12, 44–45, 50 Shelley, Bruce 130 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 107 Shipton, Paul Gryllus 205–12 Shuttle, Penelope 231 Sierra On line 109, 135 Silenus 169, 170, 171, 173, 176, 224, 241 “The Singing Sword” 283 Sirens 11, 85, 86, 88–95, 101, 104, 111–112, 114, 179, 198, 215, 228 Sisyphus 128, 208, 209 Slitherine Software 107 Smith, Harvey 119 Soviet Union 70 Spanish Armada 288 Speare, Elizabeth 2 Spenser, Faerie Queen 181 Stanbury, Peter 281n5, 282, 283n19 Stanford, W.B. 213–214, 231n19 Stephens, John 11, 85, 86, 87, 95, 96, 101, 104, 196, 213, 214, 233n1, 235n9n10, 238, 241n34 Stoppard, Tom 222 Strabo 303, 304, 305 strategy, dominant 115 Stray, Christopher 6n23, 7n27, 10n35, 19, 244n49, 286n39, 297n30n33

Tacitus 172n11, 263, 271, 285 talking animals See anthropomorphism Tantalus 128 Tennyson, Alfred 221 theosophy 35n17, 52n68 Theseus 72, 74, 81, 96–99, 104, 141, 181, 202, 253 Thyestes 224, 226 Tolkien, J.R.R. 169–170 Tom Brown’s Schooldays, See Hughes, Thomas Tomb Raider 122n29 Torn from Troy 212n54 Trease, Geoffrey 1, 2, 269, 272–275, 276, 278 Cue for Treason 274 Laughter at the Door 272 Word to Caesar 269, 272–274 Treece, Henry 2, 268, 275 Legions of the Eagle 268–9, 278 “Trigan Empire” 281, 283n16 and n18, 288 Troy 73, 217–218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 230, 231 Trojan Horse 80–81, 221 Trojan War 64, 73, 75, 221, 231 Tully, Tom 288 TV 21 284 Uderzo, Albert 13, 290, 292, 293, 300, 301, 304, 305 Ulysses and the Golden Fleece 109–12, 126, 135, 136 Ulysses 12, 92, 179, 183, 198–200, 202, 204, 220–221, 222 See also Odysseus utopia 37–43, 47n52, 52 ValuSoft 107, 117 Vellocatus 285n28, 286 Venutius 285, 288 Vercingetorix 283n14, 304

344 Virgil 143–144, 214, 222, 234 Vertumnus 169n1 Victorian attitude to Classical past 9–10 video game genre See game video games 11, 105–137 Viroconium 269, 272 visual grammar 88, 98, 100 Wallis, James 131 Wanderlands 124 Warsaw 57, 58, 62, 68, 69, 80 Watteau, Jean- Antoine 57 Wells, H.G. 39, 44, 47n52, 50n62, 52n71 The Time Machine 39n26, 50n62, 52n71 War of the Worlds 289 Went the Day Well? 289 White, E.B. 207 Wieleżyńska, Julia 70 Wilde, Oscar 65n29 and n30 William of Orange 288 Williams, Ken 109 Winter, Milo 205, 206

Index Wisdom Tree 132n44 Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey 113 With Clive in India 261 With Kitchener in the Soudan 261 Wizard of Oz, The 228 “The Wolf of Kabul” 288 Wong, Sam TC 124 word-image combination 85–87 “Wrath of the Gods” (comic strip) 290 Wrath of the Gods (video game) 113 Wulf the Briton 13, 280–290 Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids 289 Yolen, Jane 214, 224–6 Zeno 128 Zeus 68, 115, 119, 210, 216, 245 Zieliński, Tadeusz 61, 67–75, 76, 78, 80, 81 Zipes, Jack 4, 5 Zipper, Albert 63 Zubek, Robert 136