Echoes of Myth in Storytelling

Growing up on fairy tales, legends and myth first taught me what sorts of story elements make a deep connection to the unconscious mind. Though I loved Andrew Lang’s fairy tales, I also read many of the versions from Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, and was able to contrast their darker tone with Lang’s bowdlerized cousins. Even as a young child, I was able to see that Lang, though having a wider range of stories, did not present them as effectively, and in some cases removed the point entirely with whatever material he deemed was unsuitable for his audience. But then, Lang was convinced that all such stories were for children, while the Grimm Brothers were collecting folk tales, and Andersen was writing new stories from old traditions. As it happened, folk tales made more sense to me than stories re-written for children, or even stories written to echo those same folk tales.

I remember working my way through books of Norse mythology, fascinated by the tales of the Midgard Serpent, Fafnir, the Norns, Loki. Such stories resonated deeply in me, pulling at something that I only half-understood, but which made sense to something below the surface of my experiences. As my seven-year-old self encountered the tale of the contest between Thor, Loki and the giants of Jotunheim, the allegories sparked connections in my head. (I understand now that this story was a re-writing out of older elements, but it made sense to me on that deep level anyway.) Greek and Roman myth were also fascinating – but they were more ordered, more cerebral, which meant that I had fewer connections to the back of my mind, and more to the critical front part.

I dipped into other mythologies as I could: various African and Native American tales that were parts of books that painted the stories as essentially coming from single sources, even though I now know that they were either drawing from single cultures, or conflating myths from multiple sources in a broad location. Either way, they were powerful stories, though I would love to know a great deal more about their contexts.

I first encountered the mythic in fiction at about the same time. Reading the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander, I found story elements that tugged at my unconscious in the same way as did mythology and the best folk tales. I did not consciously recognize the witches of Morva as a sort of combination of the Norns and the Fates, but I did recognize their complex morality and ambiguous goodwill. Spiral Castle, and especially the deep passageways beneath, were like my own dreams; the Fair Folk and their realm were perilous even to those who possessed their goodwill. I did not know at the time that Alexander had borrowed multiple elements from The Mabinogi, the book which compiled ancient Welsh legends and myths between the 12th and 13th centuries. That was where I first encountered British and Celtic mythologies, and for whatever reason, they struck deeper than any other. Perhaps it was because of their powerful imagery and sense that the unknown was just out of sight around the next corner.

Over the years, I found other authors who wrote the sort of fiction that trickled myth into story: Alan Garner; Susan Cooper; Ursula LeGuin; Tolkien; Joy Chant; Evangeline Walton; Peter Beagle; Patricia McKillip; Nancy Springer; and several others. (I didn’t run into such authors as Diana Wynne Jones or Charles de Lint until college.) When I would find one of these authors, I would not consciously understand what compelled me about the stories, but I would recognize it. That resonance, that echo in the dark space at the base of my brain would notice and connect, telling me these stories meant more than their plot supported. These were often not comfortable stories for me to read, but they were important and significant.

Also, starting with The Sword in the Stone, I became fascinated with King Arthur; the sheer volume of interpretations of his story were so widespread and so different that I began to understand where myth, legend, and storytelling intersected. I read everything Arthurian I could find, from Mary Stewart to Leonard Wibberly’s odd modern tale, The Quest of Excalibur. And I started looking up sources. That was when I hit the jackpot; I could see how the oldest tales spread, how they crossed the English Channel to be re and re-written, and how the modern iterations either kept the basic plot of the French romancers, tried to re-create an earlier version, or took off into completely new territory. Taking a lot of folklore and Celtic language courses in college, I discovered the relationship between the myths and the legends had been deliberately obscured (long story I’m not writing about here), and the fact that the oldest reference to Arthur dates back to an epic poem called “The Gododdin” (pronounced “Godothin”) whose sources may date back to the sixth century. I also discovered the character of Taliesin, who wanders both through The Mabinogi and the Arthurian myths, and got to be as fascinated with him as I was with Arthur himself.

(Oh, my – I set off to write a little bit about that passion and find I can’t stop writing about it. Bad girl!)

In college, I started searching for sources even harder, and was introduced to The Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest extant fiction in the world, with various versions dating back at least four thousand years), as well as Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. I also deepened my search for original sources, haunting both the public and university libraries, reading through poetry as well as prose, taking courses and researching mythology. I wrote papers on Arthur, Gwydion, and Shakespeare’s link to folk tales. And those connections finally became clear to me. I was reading books that linked to deep archetypal stories, following the Alchemical and Hero’s Journeys.

Those things that made sense resonated because they were embedded deep into the human unconscious. Many of those writers, even of children’s fiction, seemed significant to me because they were significant to humans as a whole. The iterations were different, depending on the intentions of the author – whether they were deliberately using specific mythology in their work, or whether they were unintentionally evoking archetypal imagery and characters, they touched me because I was open to that place in my unconscious when I started reading them.

Of course, plenty of fine authors who don’t go nearly as deep. I don’t mind reading them, but they don’t hit me with the same force that those who write mythic fiction. Myths, legends, and folk tales have lasted because they are uniquely human, and about what that truly means. Whether it is about parents abandoning their children in the woods, a quest for something eternal and unattainable, or a tale of murder and betrayal, the story that feeds my spirit most is the one that deftly spins story into a cocoon of myth and reverberations of the human spirit.