Hal Johnson's Blog, page 40

William Morris

William Morris was one of the most influential figures of Victorian England, known for his poetry, his graphic design, his architecture, and his popularization of traditional English arts and crafts. He loved the Middle Ages and magic, and wrote stories set in imaginary worlds, which made him an early practitioner of fantasy fiction; he also wrote stories set in the future, which blah blah blah science fiction. Dante Gabriel Rosetti (see p. 38 of The Big Book of Monsters) fell in love with...

What to Do with Hwæt

The first word of Beowulf is hwæta common enough word in Old English, and the source of our word what, but a difficult one to translate here. It doesnt seem to be a part of the sentence, it just hovers there in front of it. Different translators have had to find their own way of rendering hwæt:

John M. Kemble (1837): Lo!
Benjamin Thorpe (1855): Ay
Thomas Arnold (1876): What!
J. Lesslie Hall (1892): Lo!
John R. Clark Hall (1901): Lo!
Ernest J. B. Kirtlan (1914): Now
William Ellery Leonard (1923):...

Rakshasas Galore

Monstrous Raksahasas are very common in Indian mythology. In the Indian epic The Ramayana by Valmiki (ca. 4th century BC), Rakshasas are the main antagonists. Ravanna, king of the island of Sri Lanka and pretty much the rest of the world, is a gigantic ten-headed Raksahasa, and he kidnaps Rama’s wife, Sita, which starts a war.

The Ramayana is one of the longest epics on earth, so it’s a war that lasts a long time—well over a thousand pages.

The Empty Casket

In 1810s, explorers in Cheops’ Great Pyramid brought word to England that the Pharaoh’s tomb was plundered, his sarcophagus empty. (In The Mummy! we learn it was just a decoy tomb.) Lord Byron, in his long satirical poem Don Juan (1819–1824)—perhaps the longest poem in English—memorializes the event this way:

What are the hopes of man? old Egypt’s King
Cheops erected the first pyramid
And largest, thinking it was just the thing
To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;
But somebody or other...

A Wonder Book

Nathaniel “Rappaccini” Hawthorne put out two collections of mythological stories for children: A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). Hawthorne retells many famous myths in these books—King Midas, the Chimera, Cadmus—and the very first story in the Wonder Book is the story of Medusa. Hawthorne doesn’t follow Ovid’s version, but his description of Medusa and her Gorgon sisters is quite good:

“Now, there were three Gorgons alive, at that period; and they were the...

The Man Who Would Not Judge Witches

Everyone knows the name Nathaniel Hawthorne, but that’s not the name he was born with. He was born Nathaniel Hathorne, a direct descendent of the notorious John Hathorne. John Hathorne was a judge at the Salem witch trials—the famous court cases in seventeenth-century colonial Massachusetts that convicted and executed nineteen witches. (They were innocent.)

Hawthorne, who lived at a time when people neither feared nor hanged witches quite so much, was so ashamed of his ancestor that he added...

Honorable Mentions VII

Ligeia from “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe (1838): Ligeia is a beautiful but mysterious woman who manages to come back from the dead by possessing the corpse of another.

Calliope

The story of Polyphemus comes from the Odyssey, one of two epic poems written in the very distant past in ancient Greece by someone later generations would call Homer. Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War, in which Odysseus fought, and its sequel the Odyssey tells of Odysseus’ long voyage home from the war.

These two poems were so influential that Greek critics (such as Aristotle) eventually decided they represented what an epic should be like. Essentially, Homer set the rules for...

Ovid in Tomis

Publius Ovidius Naso—in English everyone just calls him Ovid—was one of the greatest, and most popular, poets of the early days of imperial Rome. He wrote many poems before The Metamorphoses, but The Metamorphoses is his greatest work, and Ovid ended it with some heavy flattery of the Emperor Augustus: “Jove rules the Heavens, the Earth Augustus sways,” Ovid wrote, comparing Augustus to the god Jupiter (also known as Jove).

Yet shortly after the poem came out Augustus exiled Ovid to an...

Heliophagia: Swallowing the Sun

A heliophage is a creature or person who swallows the sun. You’d be surprised how many try!

•Skoll. In Snorri Sturluson’s book of Norse mythology, Edda (ca. 1220), Skoll is a wolf who pursues the sun across the sky every day (while another wolf, Hati, pursues the moon). At the end of the world (Ragnarok), Skoll will finally catch his prey (Hati, too!), and that will be the end of that.

•Rahu’s head. Many Indian works, including the great epic Ramayana by Valmiki (ca. 4th century), tell of...