Volume 52, Number 14 · September 22, 2005
After Strange Gods
By Michael Chabon
I was in the third grade when I first read D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths and already suffering the changes, the horns, wings, and tusks that grow on your imagination when you thrive on a steady diet of myths and fairy tales.[*] I had read the predecessor, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths (1961), and I knew my Old Testament pretty well, from the Creation more or less down to Ruth. There were rape and murder in those other books, revenge, cannibalism, folly, madness, incest, and deceit. And I thought all that was great stuff. Joseph's brothers, enslaving him to some Ishmaelites and then soaking his florid coat in animal blood to horrify their father. Orpheus' head, torn off by a raving pack of women, continuing to sing as it floats down the Hebrus River to the sea: that was great stuff, too. (Maybe that says something about me, or about eight-year-old boys generally. I don't really care either way.) Every splendor in those tales had its shadow; every blessing its curse. In those shadows and curses I first encountered the primal darkness of the world, in some of our earliest attempts to explain and understand it.
Feature, 1886 words
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