Jesse > Recent Status Updates

Finished: Monsters and Monster Slayers

Lots of fascinating monster myths. One story - “Little-Man-With-Hair-All-Over” - is an echo of one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, also told in an Irish flavor, where the hero is betrayed by his two male compatriots and left to die in a hole after the treasures and women are rescued. Another has a horrible father who feeds kids their mother.

Next: War and the Warrior Code

Finished: Tales of the Sun, Moon, and Stars

This chapter is way more sexually charged than previous ones, sometimes with a bawdy sensibility, but also includes darker tales involving rape, incest, self-mutilation resulting from said assault, and sex with the living dead. The psychedelic story of “Sun Creation” is highly evocative.

Next: Monsters and Monster Slayers

Finished: Tales of World Creation

The stories of sisters working together to shape the world - even with an absent father - come as a breath of fresh air. Some, like the Caddo myth, have clear influences from the Abrahamic flood. They’ve also had to now account for the creation of the Europeans, specifically mentioning the Spanish (lol) and hairy ape people who disappeared.

Next: Tales of the Sun, Moon, and Stars

Finished: Tales of Human Creation

Some funny stuff in here as well as fascinating tales of things like how horses came to be domesticated by native Americans - the mythological explanation, I mean, as the current generation of horses in America was brought over by the Spanish.

Finished: Penelope.

Alternate traditions discussed involving Penelope being a less than chaste woman over what could only have been an agonizing 20 years. It also focuses on how closed-off she is as a character within her own story, and Haynes’s characterization - reading into the reality of her relationship with Odysseus - is that she must have been as clever to catch his intellectual interest.

Finished: Medea

Based on Haynes’s retelling, Gods and Heroes used the Euripides version for its welded canon. It’s interesting to see the earlier, alternate traditions where Medea did not kill her own children.

Finished: Phaedra.

Haynes unpacks the rape culture of Ancient Greece, how our secondary sources / retelling gloss over it, and also expounds on Persephone in an attempt to give as much surrounding information as possible (as much as Eurydice also dwelled on Alcestis, who died for her husband and was brought back for her demonstration of love by Heracles).

Finished: Eurydice

I hadn’t read a synopsis of Eurydice’s death so that was illuminating. I loved the run-down of how multiple cultures have reproduced and retreaded the Orpheus story - including a variant where Eurydice looks at him as a preening, self-absorbed scholar who she actively tries to sabotage so that she can be separated from him back to the kingdom of the dead.

Finished: Clytemnestra

The differing traditions on Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon and how authors have treated her motivations are illuminating. The Gods and Heroes compilation appears to dig deep into all of her potential motivations - from her first and second children to be murdered by Agamemnon, the death of her first husband, those having more weight it feels then Cassandra, his “war-bride”

Finished: The Amazons.

The back portion of this essay draws from Wonder Woman as portrayed by Gal Godot as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a way to talk about how we use Amazonian archetypes in the “modern” age. It also sensibly illustrates how gross we are also capable of treating the subject by quoting a horrific poem from a poet from the ‘50s.

Finished: Medusa.

Very nice survey of mythology. Medusa doesn’t feature as a character in plays so Haynes has to dig into a much deeper reading of her origin and role in Greek society, contrasting against how she is portrayed in the modern day, between Clash of the Titans and Rick Riordan’s work.

Finished: Helen.

I am fascinated by the account given here of an alternative but now obscure tradition of Helen, who did not actually elope with Paris but instead lived in obscurity in Egypt for 20 years while Paris cavorted with an eidolon - a phantom creation for his own satisfaction.

Finished: Pandora and Jocasta. I love how Haynes unpacks sexism from different traditions and finds available, alternative traditions. Reading about Euripides’s complex female characters - probably not well-represented in the Greek compilation I read over the past year - has me wanting to check it out. Reading about Jocasta NOT killing herself and trying to negotiate peace between her warring sons is awesome.

Finished: Kings, Queens, Princesses, Earls, and Robbers

This section is descended from the same tradition as the fairy tales found in Grimm’s collection but each one has a distinctly Irish flavoring that makes them a treat to re-read. I feel like the Irish storytelling knew that each of these fairy tales are set up like jokes with the various twists as their punchlines.

Finished: Legends of the Western Islands

This section addresses something that prior stories only hinted at - that “good” fairies direct beautiful souls to their revels in a sort of purgatory and also punish the bad souls. One is a pretty effective parable on grief, regret, and dwelling on the past. “Shaun Mor” is a condensed “Daniel O’Rourke”.

Next: Kings, Queens, Princesses, Earls, and Robbers

Finished: Treasure Legends

Nothing special, but one of these - “Rent Day” - is a copy of “Rent-Day” from the Tyr-Na-N-Oge section. Another sad oversight resulting in wasted space for prose.

Next: Legends of the Western Islands

Finished: Rocks and Stones

These stories are associated with actual geological features of Ireland that you can actually visit. They otherwise run the gamut from giant stories to ghosts and even religious, time-traveling miracles.

Next: Treasure Legends

Finished: Giants

A lot of these stories have overwhelming similarities to Grimm’s fairy tales but they are better put-together on the whole. The parallels feel even stronger here in the format of most of these Giant stories. Except the Henpecked Giant - that one is more like the bawdy Irish stories, emphasis on punchlines.

Next: Rocks and Stones

…okay

Finished: The Devil

The “three wishes” story about a neerdowell who fleeces the devil three times is pretty funny and is an origin story for Will o the Wisps.

Next: Giants

Finished: Priests and Saints
Some of the St. Patrick stories are interesting. He was apparently capable of saving Pagan souls by resurrecting the dead just long enough to baptize them… which would be a huge concern for a people, like the Irish, who were converting to Christianity.
Next: The Devil.

Finished: T’yeer-Na-N-Oge
Most of these stories are basically the same as the fairy stories found in the book’s first section, but the locale - a fairy rath found at the bottom of a lake - is a bit different. The legend of an Arthur-like figure, O’donaghue, is one of the biggest breaks.
Next: Priests and Saints
(Looking forward to the sections on St. Patrick!!!)

Just finished: Witches and Fairy Doctors. The last tale is a near carbon copy of one found earlier in the section, which feels like quite an oversight for this collection.
Next: T’Yeer-na-n-oge (Tir-na-n-og)