Atticus the Storyteller's 100 Greek Myths

Review also includes:

Viking! Myths of Gods and Monsters, Kevin Crossley-Holland, 160pp, 978-1842552261

These books contain comprehensive and very striking retellings of well-known mythologies.

The Coats and Lewis collection uses the device of a travelling storyteller who recites the old stories to various listeners as he travels from Crete along the routes of the Argonauts, the Odyssey and the Iliad. Atticus’s recitations are as light-hearted as is compatible with these dreadful but intriguing tales of lust and slaughter. None of the major episodes are missed, but several details (such as the exact nature of the ‘great wound’ that Cronus inflicted on Uranus shortly after the creation) are politely passed over. The copious illustrations, which include a useful map of Atticus’s wanderings, are in a similar style: vivid and appealing but understandably evasive.

Crossley-Holland characteristically follows a more full-blooded approach. This selection from his adult Norse Myths translation preserves the savagery of the struggles between fire and ice, gods and giants, men and monsters; a ceaseless strife between strata of existence which has influenced writers down to Tolkien and Pullman. The prose-poetry echoes the narrative discord, as in the opening paragraph to the final chapter depicting Ragnarok: ‘An axe age, a sword age, shields will be gashed: there will be a wind-age and a wolf-age before the world is wrecked.’ The book is prefaced by a visual outline of Norse cosmology and the main protagonists in the several worlds.

Both books, in very different ways, provide excellent routes into strange home ground.