The Agony of The Odyssey

 From Paul du Quenoy at Chronicles:

“Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school teacher Heather Levine tweeted in 2020, responding to a post from a fellow “scholar-educator” who called Homer’s epic poem “trash.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the teachers were part of an online group of left-wing activist educators who tried to get Homer’s epic and other classics of Western literature banned from classrooms because of their supposedly racist, sexist, and ableist contents.

These undoubtedly enlightened purveyors of knowledge have yet to register any reaction to this summer’s blockbuster release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s film, which he co-produced with his wife Emma Thomas and for which he wrote the script, debases The Odyssey so cheaply that Hellenophobic New England schoolmarms might well be pleased, assuming they are not too triggered to see the film.

Nolan was on tap to direct Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad executed more than two decades ago by Wolfgang Petersen, but the studio eased Nolan out of the project, giving him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Nolan has said in interviews that at the time, he felt ill-prepared to tackle The Iliad. He only conceived his Odyssey project in 2024, after the stunning success of Oppenheimer, his disjointed biopic of the troubled atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. According to interviews, Nolan kept the subject of his next film secret for nearly a year while he read several translations of Homer’s epic, along with various related media, apparently including comic book adaptations.

Perhaps naturally, Nolan contextualized The Odyssey within his larger oeuvre of feature films, many of which, including Memento, Interstellar, and his Batman trilogy, relate existential quests involving emotionally tortured men who suffer from familial loss. From that perspective, Homer’s epic—a hero’s 10-year voyage home from a distant battlefield to a faithful but beleaguered family—may have seemed a natural fit. Nolan had the time, money, and opportunity to make a stirring and searching literary adaptation of great significance, if for no other reason than that a serious film adaptation of The Odyssey hasn’t been undertaken since Italian director Mario Camerini’s flawed 1954 attempt in technicolor, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas. (Read more.)

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The Silk Road and Myths of Dragons

 From The Collector:

The Silk Road is one of the world’s most famous trade routes, connecting distant eastern civilizations with Eurasia. It stretched from China through Central Asia and Persia to the Mediterranean. But it was much more than just a trade route. While silk, spices, and jewels were transported, so were customs, myths, religions, and legends. One important myth that traveled along the Silk Road was about dragons. This is how Chinese ideas about dragons influenced European dragon lore, along the Silk Road.

The Silk Road was not a single road that led from China to Europe. It was a network of interconnected trade routes that meandered between the two continents until a standard route was established. The people who used this network did not call it the Silk Road, a term that was coined in the 19th century by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. Historians believe that the beginnings of the Silk Road can be traced back to the 2nd century BC during China’s Han dynasty, when the diplomat Zhang Qian was sent to establish alliances with western lands and bring his knowledge and observations back to China. During his journey, he saw great trading potential for China, which primarily exported silk.

The Silk Road stretched for thousands and thousands of kilometers, beginning in northern China and passing through important oasis cities such as Dunhuang and Kashgar before reaching the desert regions and mountains of Central Asia. From there, caravans would travel west to Samarkand and Bukhara, continue into Persia, and eventually reach the Mediterranean through cities such as Antioch. Along this route, one of the biggest challenges was navigating complicated terrains such as the Taklamakan Desert and the Pamir Mountains. If there were signposts at all, there were not many of them. Along the way, merchants often founded smaller trading towns and colonies that served travelers.

The Silk Road was most commonly used for transporting Chinese silk, Central Asian horses, spices from South Asia, and precious metals, glass, and ceramics. However, the Silk Road was not used only by merchants but also by pilgrims, diplomats, poets, artists, and adventurers. It was often these travelers who transported ideas, including myths about dragons. (Read more.)

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‘The Odyssey’: The Blueprint of a Civilization

 From Ekathimerini:

We tend to file “The Odyssey” under “mythology” – alongside stories of gods who never existed, sung by people trying to explain thunder. That filing is a mistake, and it obscures the single most consequential literary achievement in human history.

“The Odyssey” is not a myth. It is a founding document. It is the moment human beings first discovered that they had an inside – and it is the blueprint from which an entire civilization, and everything that civilization would eventually give the world, was built.

Read “The Iliad” closely and something strange emerges. Achilles does not decide to rage – rage arrives and moves through him like wind fills a sail. When a god speaks, the hero does not experience it as an outside voice interrupting his thoughts; the god’s command is his thought. Heroes act. They do not deliberate. There is no interior room where a self sits and weighs its options – there is only impulse, arriving as if from outside, and action following immediately after.

The Odyssey breaks this pattern, and the break is the whole point.

Odysseus pauses. He calculates. He lies, plots, improvises, disguises himself, and – for the first time in surviving literature – he talks to himself. Clinging to a rock through a violent night, he says: “Endure, my heart. You have endured worse than this.” That is not a god speaking through him. That is one part of a man addressing another part of the same man. It is the first recorded act of a human being holding itself together through interior dialogue.

Homer did not just tell a story about a man finding his way home. He recorded – perhaps without fully realizing it – the birth of human self-awareness. (Read more.)

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Does King Priam of Troy Appear in Hittite Records?

 From The Greek Reporter:

King Priam was the famous king of Troy during the Trojan War. It was his son, Paris Alexander, who took Helen back to Troy and inadvertently caused the enormous war with the Greeks. Priam himself was allegedly a powerful monarch. He was married to a princess from the nearby kingdom of Phrygia, which itself was a very wealthy and powerful kingdom.

The father of Priam was Laomedon, the king who had fortified the city of Troy. He was the last king in a dynasty going all the way back to Dardanus, some five generations prior to him. While many of the kings in this line had Greek names, scholars generally interpret Priam’s name to be Luwian. This was an Anatolian language common in the Bronze Age.

Traditionally, scholars believe Priam first appears in Homer’s Iliad. However, some researchers claim he appears in records, such as those of the Hittites, long before this.

What are the records in question? They are Hittite documents dating to the 13th century BCE, particularly the middle and late part of that century. These documents reveal that a certain war leader named Piyama-Radu was active in Western Anatolia in that era. (Read more.)

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The Ancient Philosophy of Brutality in Euripides’ Cyclops

 From The Collector:

Euripides’ Cyclops is the only satyr play that has survived intact. We do not know anything about the performance history of this play, or why or even when exactly it was written. The plot borrows from well-known versions of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. The plot is simple and brutal, but with comic elements provided by Silenus and the satyrs. The play is perhaps easy to dismiss, but Euripides raises some interesting questions about power and brutality.

The three main characters in the play are Polyphemus, a cyclops; Odysseus, the cunning Homeric hero; and Silenus, the former companion and tutor of Dionysus. There are also a number of satyrs, described as Silenus’ sons, that act as the chorus. Odysseus’ shipwrecked crew is present, but none have speaking roles and were probably not depicted on stage.

Silenus has a few guises in Greek mythology. Sometimes he is depicted as a drunken man and other times as a satyr-like creature. In Euripides’ Cyclops, he is depicted as an old man. In the play, Silenus is toadying, coarse, sly, and greedy. He is there for comic effect, as are his sons, the satyrs. Odysseus is the same character we see in the Odyssey. He uses his cunning to outsmart the cyclops and escape. However, in Euripides’ play, we do not see all of the tricks Odysseus uses in Homer’s story.

Polyphemus is a cyclops. He lives on an island with his cyclops brothers. They are referenced but not seen. Cyclopes are solitary creatures and self-sufficient. Polyphemus lives off the sheep, which he forces the satyrs to look after. They were captured and enslaved after becoming shipwrecked on the island. Polyphemus is brutish but not unintelligent. He believes himself to be superior to the gods by virtue of his brute strength. (Read more.)

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Odysseus’ Sanctuary on Ithaca

 From ZME Science:

The rocky hills of Ithaca, home to olive groves and old Greek legends, have now yielded their most evocative secret: the possible sanctuary of Odysseus. At a site known for over two centuries as the “School of Homer,” archaeologists have unearthed compelling evidence of a hero cult that persisted for more than a thousand years — dedicated to the mythological king of Ithaca himself and protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey.

The discovery was announced by the Greek Ministry of Culture in early June, 2025, but it is the culmination of decades of archaeological labor. The project, based at the Agios Athanasios site in northern Ithaca, is led by Professor Emeritus Giannos G. Lolos and includes work by Dr. Christina Marambea of the University of Ioannina.

While historians agree that Odysseus was a fictional character, these findings reveal just how real his memory was to the ancient Greeks, who worshipped him, invoked him, and etched his name into stone for generations.

This is the strongest indication yet that the legends of Homer’s Odyssey were not just preserved in verse — but etched into the lives, rituals, and civic identity of the people who lived where the story begins. (Read more.)

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5 Historical Figures Who May Have Inspired King Arthur

Notice the dragon pennant. It went back to the Romano-British legions and was like a small Chinese dragon. It whistled when the wind blew through it. It became the symbol of the Pendragons.

I would happily do nothing all day but study Arthurian legend. One thing to keep in mind is that many of the names are not proper names but titles. "Riothamus," for instance, in the ancient British language means "high king." From The Collector:

Another warlord from Dark Age Britain, who is one of the prime historical candidates for the real King Arthur, is Riothamus. He is known from two Roman sources, one from the 5th century and one from the 6th century. The more important of these two is the account by the 6th-century historian Jordanes.

He described how Riothamus, the king of the Britons, assisted the Romans in a battle against Euric of the Visigoths in the year 470. This idea of a king of the Britons travelling from Britain to Gaul to fight a battle in association with the Romans is fascinating for its similarities to the Arthurian legends. In the account of Arthur’s life by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur is said to have travelled to Gaul with a large army to fight against the Romans.

In addition to this overall similarity, Riothamus is said by Jordanes to have fled to the territory of the Burgundians. It is argued that, given the location of the battle in the territory of the Bituriges, his route while fleeing would have brought him near a town called Avallon. This is then connected to the tradition of Arthur being taken to the Isle of Avalon after being betrayed by his nephew, Mordred. (Read more.)

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Helen of Troy

Abduction of Helen by G. Hamilton

 

 

 

 

 

 

The face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium. 

 —From The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Marlowe

 From Ancient History Encyclopedia:

Helen of Troy (sometimes called Helen of Sparta) is a figure from Greek mythology whose elopement with (or abduction by) the Trojan prince Paris sparked off the Trojan War. Helen, considered the most beautiful woman in the world, was the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta, and he persuaded his brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, to form a great army to besiege the mighty city of Troy in order to recapture Helen. Following the Greek victory in the war, Helen returned home with Menelaus but she became a despised figure in the ancient world, a symbol of moral failure and the perils of placing lust above reason. Despite the poor standing of the literary Helen, she also had a divine form and was the centre of cults at several Greek sites, notably Rhodes, Sparta, and Therapne. 

In Greek mythology, Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, the queen of Sparta and the wife of Tyndareus. Zeus disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda, and Helen was the result of their amorous engagement. In another version of the myth, Helen's mother is the goddess Nemesis, the personification of retribution. Whoever is the mother, in both versions, Helen is born from an egg in Sparta. Helen's siblings included the hero twins Castor and Pollux (aka Polydeuces) and Clytemnestra, the future wife of King Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. One day, Tyndareus offered sacrifices to all the gods but forgot Aphrodite and the goddess, angered at the slight, then promised that all of the king's daughters would become infamous for their adultery. (Read more.)

 

From The New Republic:

Ruby Blondell’s insightful study of ancient Greek representations of Helen of Troy notes the close connections between her subject and the Pandora myth. Both, she argues, spring from cultural anxieties about female beauty and female sexuality, centered on the figure of the parthenos—the girl at marriageable age, a liminal figure who must cross from the world of childhood in her father’s house to the house of her husband. “She must be sufficiently reluctant to suggest that she will not stray once she is married, but she must also actively desire her new husband”—a balance that constantly threatens to tip over. Helen, the most famous adulterous wife in the Western tradition, is figured as a woman who is constantly in this liminal state, and who repeatedly crosses over from one household to another: “many-manned Helen,” as Aeschylus calls her. She was (and is) the locus for exploring the questions of whether beautiful women are always necessarily bad, and whether female sexual desire is always a force of destruction. She is also—unlike modern versions of the promiscuous or adulterous woman—always presented as at least semi-divine, the ever-young, ever-beautiful daughter of Zeus, worshiped at cult centers all over Greece, especially in her native Sparta. Modern versions of misogyny usually do not account for the possibility that “bad” women might also be goddesses.

The best-seller about Helen of Troy by the television presenter Bettany Hughes, from 2007, bizarrely claimed to tell, and to celebrate, “Helen as a real character from history,” while acknowledging that her existence is only “a possibility”—as if the biography of a mythical character from three thousand years ago could possibly be reconstructed. Blondell has almost none of this naïveté: she notes explicitly that her subject is a set of cultural tropes, not a historical person. Helen was a construction of the Greek male imagination, and the myths and literary treatments of Helen can teach us nothing about the lives even of women in classical Greece, let alone women in Sparta in the Bronze Age: she is “a concept, not a person.” But these myths can teach us a great deal about the complex attitudes of ancient Greek men, mostly ancient Athenian men, toward women, female beauty, and male desire.

The story goes that Zeus wanted to reduce the human population, so he arranged for the birth of the two characters who would make the Trojan War inevitable: Achilles and Helen, representing “seductive female beauty and destructive male strength.” They have in common an extraordinary self-awareness and concern for their future reputations in myth and legend. Both were half-human, half-divine, Achilles being the son of the mortal Peleus by the sea-goddess Thetis, and Helen the daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan and of the Spartan queen Leda. Owing to this parentage, she hatched from an egg—the first mark of her unusual, not-quite-human status. Helen is the only female child of Zeus by a mortal woman, an exceptional woman in this as in every other respect. Other versions of the myth suggest that she was the daughter of Nemesis, or “Destruction.”

Helen’s beauty is not subjective. A key premise of the myth is that she is beautiful in some absolute and total way that defies description, and hence can be represented only by entirely conventional means. Helen, like any other beautiful woman in the Greek literary tradition, has lovely cheeks, neat ankles, and pretty accessories. She is equally irresistible to any and every man. As Blondell neatly puts it, “a beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.” 

From a young age, Helen was prone to getting abducted. When she was still a young girl the Athenian hero Theseus swiped her, but she was retrieved by her magical brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux. A little later, suitors from all over Greece began to court her, and took an oath that they would all fight together for her eventual husband. Menelaus of Mycenae, whose main claim to fame was his wealth, won Helen as his wife. But some time afterward, a Trojan prince named Paris was appointed to judge between three goddesses, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. He chose Aphrodite, goddess of love, because she promised him Helen as a reward—the only problem being that Helen was married already. The abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War. (Read more.)

The Hatching of Helen

More HERE.

Helen with King Priam watching Menelaus fight Paris

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My Lagan Love

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I own nor liberty 
For love is lord of all.  

Her father sails a running-barge 
'Twixt Leamh-beag and The Druim; 
And on the lonely river-marge 
She clears his hearth for him. 
When she was only fairy-high 
Her gentle mother died; 
But dew-Love keeps her memory 
Green on the Lagan side.  

And often when the beetle's horn 
Hath lulled the eve to sleep 
I steal unto her shieling lorn 
And thru the dooring peep. 
There on the cricket's singing stone, 
She spares the bogwood fire, 
And hums in sad sweet undertone 
The songs of heart's desire  

Her welcome, like her love for me, 
Is from her heart within: 
Her warm kiss is felicity 
That knows no taint of sin.
And, when I stir my foot to go, 
'Tis leaving Love and light
To feel the wind of longing blow 
From out the dark of night.  

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I owe nor liberty 
For love is lord of all. 

(from an old Irish song)
A beautiful rendition, HERE, HERE and HERE.

To quote from Mary O'Hara's notes on this song, from her book A Song For Ireland:

The leánan sídhe (fairy mistress) mentioned in the song is a malicious figure who frequently crops up in Gaelic love stories. One could call her the femme fatale of Gaelic folklore. She sought the love of men; if they refused, she became their slave, but if they consented, they became her slaves and could only escape by finding another to take their place. She fed off them so her lovers gradually wasted away - a common enough theme in Gaelic medieval poetry, which often saw love as a kind of sickness. Most Gaelic poets in the past had their leanán sídhe to give them inspiration. This malignant fairy was for them a sort of Gaelic muse. On the other hand, the crickets mentioned in the song are a sign of good luck and their sound on the hearth a good omen. It was the custom of newly-married couples about to set up home to bring crickets from the hearths of their parents' house....

Waterhouse's "Hylas and the Nymphs"

 

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Rohmer at Camelot

 From Charlotte Allen at Quillette:

Rohmer was crazy about Chrétien de Troyes and especially about Perceval, which he made his adolescent students read during the decade he spent in his twenties teaching literature at a lycée before he could support himself in the film world. In 1964, he had made a 23-minute short film for French educational television titled Perceval ou le Conte du Graal (Perceval, or the Story of the Grail). For this project, he used illustrations from a 13th-century manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. In an interview for L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, Rohmer described the text of Perceval as “one of the most beautiful in French literature.”

He was right. Chrétien de Troyes was not only a literary master in his own right but the inventor of “Arthurian” literature as a literary genre: stories about King Arthur and his court that have kept poets, novelists, playwrights, moviemakers, illustrators, and comic-book writers busy for more than 800 years. He didn’t invent King Arthur himself. Chroniclers in England and Wales had already taken note of Arthur—who might have been a real 5th- or 6th-century warlord, or might have simply been an invented folk-hero—as a majestic Celtic-British ruler who defended his country against the invading Angles and Saxons after the Romans deserted Britain. By the mid-12th century, thanks to the imaginative energy of chroniclers and bards, the canonical saga of Arthur’s life was well-established: the sword Excalibur, Merlin the magician, Queen Guinevere, the isle of Avalon.

But it was Chrétien who shifted the focus of the Arthurian stories away from King Arthur himself to his court and its individual knights. He likely invented Sir Lancelot as Guinevere’s secret lover in one of his narrative poems (five of them survive, and there may have been more), as well as Camelot as the site of one of Arthur’s castles. Perceval was another of his inventions, and he probably invented the Grail as well. His stories are so full-blown that generations of academic researchers and amateur scholars have searched for their possible sources in Welsh and Irish myths and legends, as well as in the oral lore of medieval Brittany, to which many Celtic Britons had fled after the Anglo-Saxon invasions. (Read more.)

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The Ancient Greek Myth That Inspired Tolkien

 From The Greek Reporter:

In Tolkien’s writings, Númenor is described as an ancient kingdom located on a large island to the west of Middle Earth. It is inhabited by the greatest human civilization to have existed and is essentially an idyllic utopia ruled by wise kings. The island itself was a gift presented by the Valar – angelic godlike figures – to the ancestors of the Númenóreans as a reward for facing the Dark Lord Morgoth in battle.

However, over time, the Númenórean civilization is corrupted. The trouble started when the last king of Númenor, Ar-Pharazôn, defeated Sauron, the lieutenant of Morgoth, and brought him back as a prisoner to the island kingdom. Sauron, who was remarkably deceitful, managed to convince the Númenórean king that he could live eternally if only he worshiped Morgoth as a god.

Consequently, the Númenóreans ceased their worship of Eru Ilúvatar, the One God in Tolkien’s mythos, and disaster ensues. For their hubris and corruption, they were punished with the sinking of their island. Only a few of the virtuous Númenóreans escaped to Middle Earth, where they founded the kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. (Read more.)

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Atlantis: How Plato’s Story Corresponds to Real History

 From Greek Reporter:

Although most people around the world agree that the original Santorini hypothesis so far made the most compelling case where Plato’s Atlantis once was, unfortunately, there are two critical flaws with that theory, which have allowed critics over the years to maintain the story was just a myth.

The first problem is that the hypothesis entirely discards Plato’s given chronology of 9,600 BC. A more significant problem with the original theory is that the primary island of Atlantis, an island the size of Crete, one Plato said was supposed to be nine kilometers away from the circular island within an island setting, is not around the Santorini backdrop of 1,600 BC.

As is common knowledge, a genuine discovery requires that all elements of a physical description are present, and all are in the given order. In this case, if any of the clues given to us by Plato are missing, the elements are not arranged in the correct order, or the chronology does not coincide with Plato’s given chronology, then all is speculation.

The book ATLANTIS The Find of a Lifetime embarks on a 10,000-year journey that effectively reveals Atlantis’s submerged island and demonstrates how Plato’s 2400-year-old story corresponds to real history. (Read more.)

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C.S. Lewis and the Greatest Arthurian Epic

 From The Library of Lewis and Tolkien:

Violent, lewd, celebrating deception and sexual immorality on the one hand; gracious, sensitive, revering mercy and humility and rejecting all that is crude, ugly, and obscene on the other — it would be natural to conclude that Ascham and Lewis were talking about two different books, two different portrayals of the Arthurian legend. Lewis must be demonstrating the way such stories could appear in a noble and Christian light, contrary to the book lambasted by Ascham.

The only problem is that Ascham and Lewis were not discussing two different books. They were both describing — or claiming to describe — the same book: Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Arthurian epic, Le Morte d’Arthur.

Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is a massive, sprawling narrative that chronicles the rise, decline, and eventual downfall of Camelot — the adventures, and later the breaking, of the fellowship of the Round Table. All of what we regard today as the classic, quintessential features of the Arthurian story are there (and then some): Arthur’s sword Excalibur; the wizard Merlin; the Lady — really Ladies — of the Lake; the quest of the Holy Grail, the healing of the Maimed King and restoration of the Waste Land; Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair; the rebellion of Arthur’s ill-begotten son, Mordred; Arthur’s final departure over the waves into the distant isle of Avalon. More than any other single work, Le Morte d’Arthur is the one that later storytellers have most drawn upon, whether Tennyson’s cycle of blank-verse poems Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, or John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur. (Read more.)

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Sir Galahad: The Greatest of the Round Table

  

From The Medieval Scholar:

Galahad’s role in the Arthurian legend, particularly his quest for the Holy Grail, is a later addition to the mythos. His character first emerges in the 13th century within the “Lancelot-Grail” (Vulgate) Cycle, a series of Arthurian romances that expanded the legend and positioned Galahad as central to the Grail quest. The name Galahad is thought to derive from the Welsh Gwalchaved, meaning “Falcon of Summer,” linking him to Celtic origins and mythological traditions.

The original portrayal of Galahad may have been influenced by the mystical ideals of the Cistercian Order and figures like St. Bernard of Clairvaux, whose vision of ascetic, spiritualized knighthood echoed through Galahad’s character. This is reflected in Galahad’s celibate and otherworldly nature, his white shield bearing a vermilion cross, and his embodiment of Catholic warrior asceticism, mirroring the ideals outlined in St. Bernard’s Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae for the Knights Templar. (Read more.)

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When the Gods War for the Soul

 

Review of the series Rise of the Merlin. From Bree A. Dail:

I appreciate ambitious book-to-screen adaptations—The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, The Witcher, Game of Thrones—even while criticizing their excesses and missteps. When they work, they remind us that epic storytelling can still be done with seriousness, scale, and intention.

Setting aside the issue of gratuitous sex—which always unnecessarily lowers the artistic value of these epics—most original series today (along with many book-to-film or television adaptations) operate at an astonishingly low bar. They suffer from a lack of creative writing talent, a disregard for beauty and mystery, and an indifference to language itself.

From The Rings of Power, to Bridgerton, to the seemingly endless Star Wars spinoffs, and the glut of witch and vampire series, the pattern is the same: dreadful dialogue, thin character development, hollow spectacle, and stories that mistake volume for meaning. Enormous budgets cannot compensate for the absence of imagination, reverence, or craft.

Which is why it is worth noting—explicitly—the astonishing impact Spencer Klavan had in developing, and then teaching, the Atlantean language for this series. That kind of philological seriousness is vanishingly rare in modern television. J. R. R. Tolkien would have been impressed. It is also worth noting Jeremy Boreing not only produced, but directed and wrote these episodes. This has been a major undertaking, which must be lauded. (Read more.)

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Lost Lands of Arda

 From The Saxon Cross:

My first entry in this series detailed how Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, when correctly scaled, perfectly matches the landscape of Ice-Age Europe. Tolkien’s placement of mythic locations such as Mirkwood also matches their attested locations in ancient Europe.

My theory is that J.R.R. Tolkien meant for his Middle-Earth legendarium to be a literal mythology of ancient Europe. While the professor made vague allusions to his mythology being a telling of our ancient past, I believe he took this more seriously than he ever publicly admitted. I do not believe he meant it only as a frame story.

[...]

Keep in mind that when I talk about my map projection of Middle-Earth onto Europe, I am consistently referring to the map projection from the first article, not picking and choosing different scales to make things work.

Today, I want to expand by going into deeper detail on more locations within Tolkien’s mythology and their real-world counterparts.

I also want to examine some of the issues with the map from my first post. I will examine the issue of the Black Sea, and also explain why I believe the south of Middle-Earth looks so unlike the real Mediterranean. (Read more.)

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A Road Trip to Avalon

 

 

Some young knights on a quest. From The Saxon Cross:

Glastonbury is a weird town. For two thousand years it has been the spiritual center of England. For a long time this was because Glastonbury Abbey was the largest and most powerful monastery on the island. But while the monastery has long lain in ruin, the town is still very much a spiritual center. The town is chockfull of New Age shops, druids, neo-pagans, witches and occultists. Something very real draws this sort of person to the town, and I think some of them are genuine seekers. Of course, they’re looking in all the wrong places, but the power they feel is real. Glastonbury is a Christian holy place and that power still pervades the ground.

First we walked the ruins of the great abbey. This island is littered with the ruin of the work of the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII. During King Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries the abbey fell into disrepair, and its last abbot was draw, quartered, and hanged on Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Glastonbury then ceased to be the center of Christianity in the isle, and the blood soaked into the ground has been crying out ever since. The ruins of the monastery are hauntingly beautiful. It is also the purported site of Arthur and Guinevere’s graves, although this is one legend that I think may have been fabricated in the Middle Ages. On the abbey grounds still live the last of the Holy Thorns, the sacred trees that bloom on Christmas Day, that are said to have been brought to the isle of Avalon by St. Joseph of Arimathea.

 On our way up to the Tor we stopped to drink from the Chalice Well, also known as the Red Spring. There are two versions of the legend of this holy well. One claims that St. Joseph buried the Holy Grail inside the Tor, and from it sprang the well. The other claims that he buried two vials, one filled with Christ’s blood and the other with His tears, and from these sprang the Red and White Springs respectively, the White Spring being another holy well just across the street from the Chalice Well garden. Whatever the truth is, the water is full of iron and indeed tastes like blood. Inside the chalice well garden at the foot of the Tor we were met by another one of our companions, Jake, which seemed like a fitting and symbolic place to meet on a spiritual quest. Together we prayed and drank from the well, and then ascended the Tor together. As we began our ascent a rainbow broke out across the sky, crowning St. Michael’s Tower. (Read more.)

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The Legend of Uther Pendragon, King Arthur’s Father

 From The Collector:

In the legends of King Arthur, many of the members of Arthur’s family have names which make sense in an early Post-Roman, Romano-British context. Arthur’s own name likely comes from “Artorius,” while Arthur has uncles named Aurelius Ambrosius and Constans. Within this context, the name “Uther Pendragon” stands out as decidedly unusual. What is the reason for this?

The legends themselves make it clear that “Pendragon” was simply an epithet applied to this king. In fact, medieval Welsh apply this to other figures as well. Its meaning is quite obvious. The word “pen” is Welsh for “head,” often in the sense of “chief.” The word “dragon,” meanwhile, is frequently used in poetry to denote a warrior. Therefore, this is a title meaning “Chief Warrior.”

As for “Uther,” this could be explained as a corruption of the Latin name “Victor.” Normally, in Welsh, that would be “Gwythyr,” but the corruption of this into “Uthyr” is attested in Welsh texts. Alternatively, and perhaps more probably, it comes from the Welsh word “uthr,” meaning “fearsome,” and is actually part of the “Pendragon” title. (Read more.)

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The Ancient Roots of Christmas Ghost Stories

From The Spectator:

Christmas in its traditional sense is the Christmas season – not the period from mid-August to Christmas Eve when shops are selling tinsel and mince pies, but the Twelve Days of Christmas that begin at sundown on Christmas Eve and culminate in ‘Twelfth Night’ on the evening of 5 January. The medieval 12 nights were the ultimate stand of light and warmth against cold and darkness in the depths of Europe’s Little Ice Age. Small wonder, then, that this strange time of the year gave rise to cathartic tales of the dark, death and the macabre. The nineteenth century writer Montague Rhodes James – who used to read a chilling ghost story yearly at to a select gathering of students and fellows at King’s College – described it as the desire to be made ‘pleasantly uncomfortable’. Tales of supernatural horror, when you yourself are in perfect safety, are perhaps as old as human storytelling itself. 

In a famous story recorded by Bede, the seventh-century missionary St Paulinus converted King Edwin of Northumbria by asking Edwin to imagine human life like a sparrow that flies into the king’s hall in midwinter, and for a brief moment enjoys the light and warmth of the festivities before flying again into the freezing dark:  ‘So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed’, the king declared.  

And the Anglo-Saxon fear of winter is memorably evoked in Beowulf, a poem about the horrors that stalk the midwinter night:  

Long was the season:
Twelve-winters’ time torture suffered
The friend of the Scyldings, every affliction…  long against Hrothgar
Grendel struggled – his grudges he cherished,
Murderous malice, many a winter, 
Strife unremitting…

Grendel is not, of course, a ghost – exactly what he is remains somewhat unclear – but he is an ill-favoured otherworldly visitant. The feeling that Christmas represents a struggle of light against darkness resonates, of course, with the Gospel reading for Christmas night, John 1: ‘The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’. Some have linked the appearance of ghosts on Christmas Eve to the holiness of the day to follow, as if it is a last chance for dark forces to come out and play before being driven away by the light.  

Christmas has long been associated with strange upheavals in nature; animals are supposed to gain the power of speech at midnight on Christmas Eve, as the entirety of nature is transformed in wonderment at the birth of Christ. As the Gaudete carol has it, Deus homo factus est, natura mirante – ‘God is made man, with all nature marvelling at it’. 

But this does not seem to be enough to explain why the dead should return at Christmas time. On a basic level, we all know that grief for our loved ones is heightened at Christmas, simply because it is that time of the year when families are reunited. In the Middle Ages many people believed that there was a chance for the souls of the dead to return from Purgatory at the turning of the year in order to ask for prayers in the coming year.  

Besides Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the most famous seasonal ghost story is surely the ‘sad tale… of sprites and goblins’ started but left unfinished by the boy Mamillius in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. ‘There was a man dwelt by a churchyard…’ In those eight words we have the essence of the medieval and early modern midwinter ghost story: the setting is the churchyard, not because churchyards are spooky (a modern idea), but because the churchyard is the resting place of the dead.

Mamillius’s story is not, first and foremost, a frightening tale but a sad one – for the souls of the dead have returned to demand the mercy of the living through the offering of prayers and masses, not to scare them.  The Christmas ghost story cathartically exorcises our fear of the spirits of the outer darkness, like Grendel – but it is also a mechanism for managing our collective grief at the loss of the departed, and a reminder to offer them their due. In this context, the morally insistent ghosts of A Christmas Carol are perhaps not as untraditional as they might at first seem. 

The Christmas ghost story is far more than just a spooky bolt-on to the festive season, an antidote to tinsel and relentless good cheer. It is more than a comfortable scare. The Christmas ghost story arises from the deepest roots of the midwinter season as a time of turning, transformation and new beginnings.  Midwinter is a time of encounter with the dead; when we are reminded of their presence alongside us in our revels. The Christmas ghost stories of literature – and now TV – continue, in culturally sanitised form, an age-old and complex negotiation between light and dark, death and life, that becomes acute as the dark encroaches and daylight dwindles. (Read more.)

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How One Myth Changed Empires

 From The Greek Reporter:

The myth of Persephone, or Proserpina, a daughter who disappears underground and rises again, has long helped people make sense of time. In Greece, the story of Persephone explained why the world shifts from growth to barrenness and then returns to life. In Rome, the same story—told as Proserpina—was woven into the city’s calendar and used to structure public life. What began as a tale about the seasons became, in Roman hands, a way to organize fields, markets, courts, and elections.

In the Greek version, Hades seizes Persephone, and her mother Demeter grieves so deeply that the earth withers. A compromise brings Persephone back for part of each year, but the pomegranate seeds she has eaten bind her to return below when the cycle turns. The meaning is straightforward: winter reflects her absence, and spring announces her return.

Greek communities lived this rhythm through ritual. At the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiates experienced a drama of loss and hope. In Athens, the women’s festival of the Thesmophoria paused everyday life to reflect on fertility, reciprocity, and restraint. Even farming followed signs that made nature the ultimate master clock. (Read more.)

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