Hogwarts Professor

I think about classical mythology frequently.  Like Sayf Bowlin (thanks again for the super guest post!),  I was fascinated with the stories when I was a child, and I find that the literature I enjoy for myself and assign for my students has a definite theme of Greco-Roman deities.  Recently, as I was teaching William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” a powerful but distinctly unpleasant little gem, I was thinking about how Yeats used the story of Leda, usually captured by artists as a nice opportunity to pose a pretty girl with a pretty bird, as a vivid reminder of the way those in power use and discard others with no regard for either long- or short-term consequences.

Myths, despite their seemingly fixed narratives and characters, have always been in flux, changing, developing, rather than remaining as static artifacts.  Sometimes it is easy, particularly for those of us who are familiar with the classics, to stomp out of a movie or throw down a book and exclaim, “Well, that isn’t how that myth goes,” and certainly, there has been some mythological tinkering that is  just appalling in its disregard for any of the accepted elements of the stories as we know them. But rather than wringing our hands over kids these days who don’t know Tartarus from Tartar sauce, it might be more interesting to examine why writers, artists, and movie makers alter mythology. Sometimes, as we’ll see, there is not much depth or thought put behind the decision to change a traditionally accepted version of a classical myth, but often, those changes are done for very complex and thought-provoking reasons. In order to make this easier going, I’ll post this part, and later one(s) to follow.

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