For a long time now, the re-telling of myths and legends has been considered the provenance of children's books. Do you remember Barbara Leonie Picard and Roger Lancelyn Greene, with their Greek and Roman and Norse myths? And there was Rosemary Sutcliff with her Beowulf, Arthurian trilogy and Irish myths. OUP put out a wonderfully comprehensive myths and legends series and there have been recent excellent re-tellings, like Kevin Crossley-Holland's Norse Myths and Penelope Lively's Black Ships Before Troy and Aeneid as well as Adele Geras's two novels based on Homer.
Of course adult writers have always been attracted to classical and Biblical material. If Joyce's connection with Homer was a bit notional in Ulysses, there was Michael Ayrton's The Maze-Maker (Daedalus) and Robert Graves's King Jesus.
But it was on the bookshelves of children's libraries, classrooms and bedrooms that you could be sure of finding Jason, Romulus and Remus, Finn McCool and Odin. They were joined in the 70s by Anansi and Rama and Sita, and the many other myths and legends that reflected Britain's more culturally diverse population.
Not so any more. It has been difficult for years to sell co-editions of straight re-tellings to the American market, particularly of specifically British material like King Arthur, though Kevin Crossley-Holland has bucked the trend with his mediaeval trilogy.
It has been left to the modern mythmakers, taking off from Tolkien and CS Lewis to recycle the material by absorbing it into their own imaginative processes; writers like Ursula le Guin and Alan Garner, who have been followed by J.K. Rowling, Garth Nix and Philip Pullman. This led to the dreaded concept of –crossover,” when adults started to plunder children's reading, finding it often more satisfactory than what was intended for their eyes. It made good business sense, as the film franchises on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Narnia have shown.
And now we have Canongate's new series of re-tellings of myths, reviewed by Neil Philip in this issue. So far the choices have been conservative ® both Greek in origin and well known tales, though given a new twist by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson. But it's a good idea to bring the myths back to the people who made them ® adults. While I'm all in favour of children knowing as many traditional stories as possible from as many cultures as possible, we must never ghetto-ise myth as a children's activity. Because sadly, in our culture, that is to diminish it.
Myths are an attempt to answer the big questions about the world we live in and adults tend to forget to keep asking them. So let's hear it for Jamie Byng!