Arthurian Legend for a Disenchanted Age

 From Express:

In a time of tech-bro billionaires, a meaning crisis among an anxious youth and questions surrounding national identity, where better to go than back to the old stories to have one’s heart reenchanted? That’s something poet, scholar and priest Malcolm Guite has become renowned for on his popular self-titled YouTube channel, which has 220,000 subscribers and counting. The real-life waistcoat-wearing hobbit, with wizard-like long silver hair and beard, has charmed millions around the world with his videos from the perspective of a visitor to his cosy, book-lined study. For each typical upload, Guite will settle into his wing armchair, light one of his many pipes, and usually read aloud from a chapter of JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis.

The 68-year-old author of several books, including five collections of poetry, realised that it’s been about a century since there was a proper re-telling of Britain’s great myth, the Arthurian legend. In what could well be his magnum opus, Guite has set about writing Merlin’s Isle: An Arthuriad, a four-volume epic ballad of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Beautifully illustrated by Stephen Crotts, the first volume, Galahad and the Grail, is set in the 5th century, after the Romans have departed, leaving Britain in a chaotic mess of savage warlords before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. King Arthur seeks to unite the realm by establishing a kingdom of peace and stability, one led by his chivalric knights who are fierce in battle against the “might is right” pagans, while being gentle and kind to the weak and vulnerable they are sworn to protect. (Read more.)

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Pygmalion’s Passion

 From The Abbey of Misrule:

Long before the digital age, artists have pondered both the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Homer’s Iliad described automaton tripods made by Hephaistos that might be confused with Elon Musk’s dream of putting an Optimus robot in every home. Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells of Pygmalion, disappointed in his marital prospects, carving his perfect woman and bringing her to life with the help of Venus. She was the first romantic chatbot, a reflection of Pygmalion’s self-love. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein warns us what can happen when scientific hubris puts the creation of life and intelligence in its crosshairs. More recently, we have Frank Herbert’s Dune, with the maxim “thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Yet we are here, crafting such a machine. Many, perhaps the majority of us, have deep reservations about AI, yet struggle to explain why. We think it could create trouble but also see the great benefits. As a result, nearly all the arguments have been around the outcomes of AI. This is the modern approach - judging something by what it can do, rather than what it is.

If artificial intelligence were a tree, then nearly every discussion we are currently seeing concerns its fruits. An AI optimist predicts a cure for cancer, where a pessimist sees the elimination of the doctor-patient relationship. Mass prosperity! Or is it mass layoffs? For every rotten apple I spot, another sees a juicy golden delicious. How can we make sense of it all?

Arguing about the fruits is problematic. First, predictions are tricky business. Remember when social media was supposed to bring people together? Second, Christianity focuses on the means, not the ends. We care more about whether eggs are getting cracked than how tasty the future omelette may be. (Read more.)

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Symbolism and Virtue in the Legend of Lancelot

 From Ancient Origins:

However, his love for Guinevere stood against all else. Lancelot gives himself entirely over into the service of the lady he loves, alas to the detriment of all his knightly ideals and goals. Also, in accordance to the popular trends of the time, Lancelot exhibits towards her the  fine amor , meaning a pure  love that was a major attribute of proper chivalric behavior. 

Nevertheless, throughout the Arthurian cycle, Lancelot is presented with numerous challenges that serve as tests to his chivalry. In one episode, he is seduced and tricked into sleeping with the daughter of the so-called Fisher King, Elaine - while she was pretending to be Guinevere. From this union is born Galahad, another great hero of the Arthurian cycle, who grows up to be an ideal and pure knight.

Throughout the development of the story of Lancelot, it becomes clear that increasingly important  Christian beliefs come to play a big role in the story. Purity, sinlessness, and penitence all come to characterize this tale. Galahad, sinless and pure, replaces his father who succumbed to his passions and love for Guinevere. As the story progresses, Lancelot’s affair with the king’s wife completely tears the royal court apart. The supporters of Lancelot and those of  King Arthur  descend into a bitter and bloody war. (Read more.)

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How Medieval Literature Built the Arthurian Legend

  

From Medievalists:

Another story to emerge in the late twelfth century centres on the tragic and adulterous romance between the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Iseult. The tale survives in several versions, including those written by Béroul and Thomas of Britain, and quickly became one of the most popular romances of the Middle Ages. Early versions contain only limited connections to King Arthur and his court, but later writers increasingly integrated Tristan into the wider Arthurian world, often portraying him as one of the Knights of the Round Table. The legend became a major parallel tradition within medieval Arthurian literature, blending themes of love, loyalty, betrayal, and fate. (Read more.)

 

The changing myth of King Arthur. Also from Medievalists:

After appearing and disappearing for centuries, Arthur’s story is set down in its longest and most widely-read early form in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain. In it, he stands for everything that was ideal in the author’s twelfth-century world: unity in a time of near-constant political instability, kingship with wisdom and fortitude, strength of arms with the courage to use it, and Christianity above all. As a historian, although widely discredited even in his own time, Geoffrey of Monmouth emphasized Arthur as worthy of legend because of his political acts: unifying warring kingdoms under one banner and ruling justly over all.

 At nearly the same time, courtly love was all the rage in the literary world. This ideal love was adulterous, courageous, and so passionate moderns might find it marginally embarrassing. It was at this moment that Lancelot rode into the Arthurian mythology, fainting with love over Guinevere, and pushing Arthur to the side as a stodgy, less hip cuckold. Arthur endured this romantic shift as a great but increasingly less-adventurous figure, who stayed behind boringly but brilliantly governing his realm while his knights risked life and limb on their glorious quests. Although this was also the moment in which the quest for the Holy Grail emerged, Arthur, ever-involved in worldly affairs and now tangled up in a love triangle, is not the one to find it. (Read more.)

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Death of the Great God Pan

 From The Greek Reporter:

One of the strangest stories to survive from the ancient world of the Greeks tells of a mysterious voice heard across the sea announcing something almost unthinkable. According to the voice, the Greek god Pan was dead.

The story was recorded by the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch in his work On the Obsolescence of Oracles, written during the Roman period. Rather than recounting a familiar myth about a god battling monsters or interfering in human affairs, Plutarch presented the episode almost like a contemporary report. He included named witnesses, specific geographical locations, and even an investigation allegedly ordered by the Roman emperor.

The story raises an enduring mystery about what Plutarch believed had happened and why the death of Pan would have been considered such a remarkable event. It also offers a glimpse into how ancient Greeks understood their gods, oracles, and the changing religious world around them. (Read more.)

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Did the Hittites Record the Fall of Homeric Troy in Cuneiform?

 From The Collector:

Homer’s account of the Trojan War in the Iliad, written in the 7th century BC, is one of the world’s most enduring stories. But was it purely fantasy, or based on real historical events? In the search for confirming evidence, scholars have examined clay tablets containing the historical archives of the Hittite kings at Hattusa. They preserve details of Anatolian politics in the 13th century BC, the time when the Trojan War was supposed to have been fought. While these administrative texts do not speak of golden armor or meddling gods, they do record a century of real conflict over the legendary city the Hittites called Wilusa, which many scholars believe was ancient Troy.

The Hittite Empire ruled over much of Anatolia throughout the Late Bronze Age, the era between approximately 1550 and 1150 BC. Numerous Hittite documents have been uncovered and translated. In particular, thousands of clay tablets were unearthed at Bogazköy in modern Turkey in the early 20th century, containing administrative records kept by Hittite royal scribes of the Hittite capital of Hattusa. This collection contains diplomatic letters between rulers, quite a few of which refer to attacks on western Anatolia by a nation called the Ahhiyawa. While not universally accepted, the majority of scholars agree that the Ahhiyawa were the Mycenaean Greeks. The ethnonym “Ahhiyawa” is held to be a Hittite version of “Akhaioi,” the Greek form of “Achaeans.”

As soon as these documents were uncovered and translated, historians began to realize their potential significance regarding the Iliad. According to Homer’s epic poem, a thousand Greek ships were launched against Troy in western Anatolia in the 13th century BC. This was not a war against just one city but against Troy’s many allies all over western Anatolia as well. Hittite documents dating to the same period appear to confirm that the Ahhiyawa were engaged in large-scale warfare in western Anatolia at this time. (Read more.)

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Spells, Magic and Ancient Paganism

 Pagans lived lives of superstition. From The Collector:

In ancient Mesopotamia, magic was considered commonplace and was inseparable from religion, politics, and daily customs. Unlike today, magic was not seen as “other,” but essential for the functioning of society. This was true for all the various city-states and empires that flourished in Mesopotamia across its 3,000 years of history. This article explores the types of spells and rituals that characterized magic in ancient Mesopotamia.

In ancient Mesopotamia, magic and spells were considered a normal part of religion and were integrated into daily customs. Polytheists, people could call on a variety of gods through spells and rituals, though the patron deity of an individual city was chiefly honored.

Unlike ancient Egyptian religion, which was built around the predictability of the life-giving Nile flood, Mesopotamian cosmology was shaped by the instability of life in the ancient Near East. Whether conditions were harsh, harvests irregular, wild animals threatening, and there was often armed conflict between people. There, it is not surprising that their pantheon was occupied by both gods and demons, connected with nature and the other unpredictable elements of life in the region. While the gods were often anthropomorphic, they could also appear as mythical beasts that embodied aspects of the animals in the region, including lions, snakes, and birds of prey. (Read more.)

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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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