Edmond Thornfield’s Atalanta of the Wild follows Atalanta, an Arkadian huntress raised in the mountain wilds, after the father who abandoned her returns seeking forgiveness. Lord Iásios invites her into the royal house of Tegea, where she meets siblings she once believed she would never know. Her bow has made her at home in the […]
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Writing Divine Presence in Bronze Age Fiction as Lived Reality Rather Than Abstraction. Mythological fiction has a problem that most writers fail to solve: the gods are either too large or too small. Made too large, they do not inhabit the story; they furnish it. Artemis stands for chastity, Aphrodite for desire, Athena for wisdom,
What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The
I. Introduction The religion of the Late Bronze Age Aegean was not Olympian religion in an earlier form. It was something older and stranger: more local, more animistic, more deeply rooted in the agricultural rhythms of the land and the intimate realities of the household. The defined personalities we know from Homer, of gods with
I confess that as a child I believed the following tales were the stories of real people who had lived long ago. Only when I got older did I understand their significance as myths, though at times I am not entirely sure. The details seem too specific, too human, too particular to be pure invention.
This is a fascinating question precisely because it touches the murky frontier between Mycenaean religion, Arcadian local cults, and the Olympian mythology that the Greeks of the Archaic and later periods projected backward into the Bronze Age. The short answer is that Athána Alēa is not an Olympian Athena at all. She appears to preserve
In the world of Atalanta of the Wild, worthy men do not simply walk into a king’s megaron. They are announced. A court herald strikes his staff upon the stone floor, and the name, lineage, and fame of the arriving hero ring out across the hall before the man himself has taken three steps into
PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn Read More »
Every novelist who works with ancient mythology eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable discovery: the sources disagree, they fall silent, or they compress into a few lines of poetry what would have taken days or weeks of human effort to accomplish. The Calydonian Boar Hunt presented me with those three problems, and the most instructive
Of all the gods of the Greek pantheon, Artemis is the one most commonly misread. Popular imagination has settled on her as a figure of cold severity, the virgin huntress, remote and punishing, more comfortable among animals than among people, quick to anger and slow to forgive. There is evidence for this reading in the
On Ovid, Myth, and Historical Imagination There is a question every novelist must answer, if only to themselves: why this story, and why now? For me the answer arrived not gradually but all at once, in the final lines of a myth I had known for years without truly seeing. Ovid tells Atalanta‘s story across
