A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - R Is For Russia

 I first discovered Russian fairy tales as a child, with a volume of stories about Prince Ivan, the dashing young hero who fought the likes of Koschey the Undying and the witch Baba Yaga. The magical Firebird was also a part of the stories. Ivan is usually the youngest son - in fact, he is a “Jack”, like other Jack heroes of fairy tales around the world, who are youngest sons and go on quests; “Ivan” means “John” - or Jack.

Prince Ivan - Public Domain

Koschey is immortal because he keeps his soul in an egg in a casket(or inside a bird?). I can’t help suspecting that this is what inspired Lord Voldemort, the villain of the Harry Potter novels, with his horcruxes. Like Voldemort, Koschey eventually dies when his external soul is found and destroyed.

Baba Yaga is a witch who tends to be killed off in every story in which she appears. She lives in the forest in a hut on chicken’s legs, surrounded by a fence with glowing skulls on it. She travels in a flying mortar and pestle. 

All these characters have inspired modern fiction by some top writers. 

Irish fantasy writer Peter Morwood has written the trilogy Tales Of Old Russia, consisting of the novels Prince Ivan, The Firebird and The Golden Horde. It’s a fantasy universe from the very beginning, when his sister Katya marries a prince who arrives in bird form. However, it is set in a specific historical period, because the Teutonic Knights and the historic Battle On The Ice appear, as well as Batu Khan. Ivan marries Marya Morevna, a strong and powerful woman. I loved it! 

You can get the series in Kindle.

Baba Yaga is a character in many modern stories. The prolific American writer Jane Yolen wrote a verse novel called Finding Baba Yaga - or, at least, a series of connected themed humorous poems, such as the one in which Baba Yaga sneers at the witch from Hansel And Gretel for eating the help. It’s available in ebook. I bought it in Apple Books.

Australian writer Juliet Marillier writes about Baba Yaga too. There is a story in her collection Prickle Moon, “By Bone-Light”, in which the fairy tale happens in Australia, in a modern block of flats, Woodland Gardens, where the heroine lives with her stepmother and stepsisters. Each floor is named for a tree. So, a forest, right? And the story is a retelling of the Russian fairy tale “Vasilisa The Beautiful” in which the heroine is sent by the wicked stepmother and sisters to fetch a light from Baba Yaga. In this story it’s going down to the basement to ask the concierge for light when the power goes out on their floor. The concierge is called Barbara. Barbara Jaeger. Of course. She does have a home full of bones and the light is in a tiny skull lamp - but Barbara is not evil. In fact, Baba Yaga was worshipped in her time - and modern Baba Yaga stories show her in a positive, even feminist light.

Prickle Moon is a delightful collection, published by an Australian small press, Ticonderoga Press. The good news is that it’s available in both Kindle and Apple Books, and Amazon seems to have it in print as well.

Orson Scott Card, best known for his Ender’s Game books, has also written a very entertaining fantasy novel, Enchantment. In it, the young hero finds Sleeping Beauty in a forest in Ukraine, where his family lived before moving to the US. He has returned to do his PhD thesis. She is lying on a stone ledge in the forest, guarded by the Russian Bear. When woken she urges him to propose marriage. Apparently she was left there to sleep till her marriage - and the spell was cast by our friend Baba Yaga. She takes him across the ledge to mediaeval Kiev, where she is a princess. They do return to the present and go to the US to live.

Baba Yaga follows them to make trouble - and doesn’t she love flying by plane! 

I guess it beats a mortar and pestle…

 

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - Q Is For Quests!

 Thinking about it, quite a lot of myths and folk tales feature a quest of some kind. In Greek mythology there is, for example, the quest of the Argo, in which a bunch of heroes, each of them with his own story, row to the city of Colchis to steal the Golden Fleece from a tree guarded by a dragon. They get it, with the help of the king’s daughter, Medea, but… Let’s say Jason’s story doesn’t end happily.

There are quite a few novels with the Argonauts in them. Henry Treece, a top historical novelist of the 1960s, wrote the novel Jason, in which the quest is seen from Jason’s viewpoint. I read it many years ago and remember enjoying it very much.  It’s available quite cheaply in both Kindle and Apple Books, though out of print in paperback and hardcover.

Ken Catran’s children’s book Voyage With Jason tells the story from the viewpoint of the Argo’s cabin boy! His job is to cook and clean for the heroes. It was fun, as I recall. This one is only available second hand, alas! 

Kerry Greenwood’s novel Medea shows the story from Medea’s viewpoint. Well worth a read! Kerry Greenwood’s Medea is not the villain of the Greek plays or Greek myth. Read it to find out why.

 It’s the first of the Delphic Women books, published by Australian small press Clan Destine. You can buy it in print or ePub from the Clan Destine web site, from Apple Books or from Amazon in audiobook. 

Film Jason And The Argonauts, made in 1963, is a classic in many ways, starting with the special effects by Ray Harryhausen. The most famous scene is the one with the skeletons rising from the earth to fight Jason. It did end before Medea did all those dreadful things, including killing her children, but it was very watchable. The skeletons turned up in an episode of the Hercules TV series, as an affectionate tribute to the film.

Folk tales usually feature a quest of one kind or another, of course, whether it’s the miller’s son setting out to win the princess or the girl having to complete tasks to get her husband back. Naturally they transfer over to the fiction inspired by them. 

In the story of “Cupid And Psyche”, first written by Lucius Apuleius in his novel The Golden Ass, the heroine loses her husband by breaking the rules and is given a quest to follow by her mother-in-law Venus before she can get him back.  

Believe it or not, there is a novel based on this story by C.S Lewis, best known for his Chronicles Of Narnia. It’s called  Till We Have Faces and tells the story from the viewpoint of one of Psyche’s sisters. Mind you, it’s not quite like the original story. When the sister goes to visit Psyche, she doesn’t see what Psyche does… I’ll let you check it out. It’s easily available in both Kindle and Apple Books. Amazon does sell it in paperback as well. 

In The Epic Of Gilgamesh the titular hero, King of Uruk, goes on a quest for immortality, after seeing his dearest friend, Enkidu, die. His quest is a flop. There is a retelling in the novel Gilgamesh The King by SF author Robert Silverberg, which is available in Kindle, Apple Books, audiobook and paperback. I have read it a number of times. The novel starts with Gilgamesh as a child witnessing his father’s funeral, based on the mass grave found by archaeologist Leonard Woolley in Ur(he writes about it in his book Ur Of The Chaldees, which I got in my teens from a teacher cleaning out his bookshelves). Young Gilgamesh watches servants and courtiers march into the pit, along with one of his mother’s ladies who looks like her and a slave child in his clothes, to represent the dead king’s wife and child. He decides then that he doesn’t want to die, ever. The friend who gets killed is another reason. 

And there is the novel I mentioned in my last post, Magnus Chase And The Sword Of Summer. The quest in that book was focused on saving the world from Ragnarok. 

But quests are a regular part of fantasy, whether or not the stories came from myth or folk tale. There are so many that I have chosen just a few I have read and enjoyed. 

Film-wise, one of my favourites on this theme is Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, in which the hero’s father goes on a quest for the Holy Grail and Indy goes on a quest to find his father when he goes missing. It’s a beautiful film, my favourite of the series, which is more than just adventure. It’s about family and reconciliation between father and son. Certainly there was plenty to discuss with my Year 8 English students when we studied it as a film text.

It’s currently being streamed on Paramount Plus.

Tomorrow: R Is For Russia

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - P Is For Percy Jackson And Other Such YA Stuff

 You may or may not have read any of the Percy Jackson novels by Rick Riordan, or seen the films, but I bet you have heard about them. I like Rick Riordan for giving children an introduction to mythology in the form of entertaining fiction. I would be very surprised if there weren’t kids who looked up the Greek myths after reading this series. 

I admit I have only read the first novel in this series, Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief,  but I enjoyed it. Percy Jackson is living with his mother when he finds out that his father is the Greek god Poseidon. He is in huge danger, so goes to a place for young demigods - no, not Hogwarts, Camp Halfblood! There he meets his new group of friends and they end up going on a road trip in search of Zeus’s lightning bolt, which has been stolen and Percy blamed. One of his friends is a satyr called Grover, the other a girl called Annabeth Chase, a daughter of Athena. The whole adventure is centred around characters from Greek mythology. There are five novels in the series plus a couple of non fiction linked books about Greek mythology.

Annabeth makes a guest appearance in Magnus Chase And The Sword Of Summer, the first of a trilogy. She is the cousin of Magnus, the hero of this series. He, too, is a demigod, but not one of the Greek pantheon; his father is the Norse god Frey, one of the Vanir who went to Asgard in a trade off after a war between Asgard and Vanaheim. Frey is the god of fertility and abundance. He lost his amazing sword when he traded it to his servant in return for helping him win the beautiful giantess Gerd. As a result, it will be used to kill him at Ragnarok. This is the “Sword of Summer” of the title. It’s all there in the Norse myths.

Magnus has been living on the streets since his mother died protecting him from two supernatural wolves, the “children of Fenris” two years ago, hanging out with his friends Blitz and Hearth, homeless guys who are more than they seem. He retrieves the sword from under the river running through Boston - in this novel Boston is the centre of Yggdrasil the World Tree. Fighting the evil firelord Surt, protecting innocent bystanders, Magnus is killed and finds himself transported to Valhalla by part-time Valkyrie Samira Al-Abbas(she goes to school the rest of the time and tells her grandparents she is tutoring when she goes off to collect souls for Valhalla). Samira - Sam - is a daughter of Loki, so isn’t trusted by the other Valkyries. 

In fact, many of the people in Valhalla are demigods, though it isn’t Camp Halfblood and strictly speaking you don’t have to be a demigod to get a place there. 

Thinking about it, the Greek gods, at least, were always fathering children by mortals, so it makes sense that they are still doing it - no wonder there are so many young demigods in the works of Rick Riordan! 

Hilariously, Valhalla is now shown as a five star hotel with plenty of high technology(but no GPS). As we read in the Norse myths, the inhabitants, awaiting Ragnarok, happily fight every day, get killed and revived by dinner time. Well, not Thursdays - Thursday involves dragons…

Magnus learns there is a deadline; if he doesn’t recover the sword and find the island where Fenris is tied up in the next few days, the wolf will escape and Ragnarok will happen next week. 

Luckily he is sprung from Valhalla by his good friends Blitz and Hearth. After this, a number of Norse myths are re-enacted, such as Thor’s fishing trip with a giant ox head for bait(with Magnus doing the fishing) and a dwarfish craft competition with the loser to be decapitated, with a shapeshifting horsefly interrupting one of the competitors(inspired by the story of Loki, Sif’s hair and the Dwarves). There is a reference to a “tug of war” between Loki and a goat, without the details, probably not a good idea in a children’s or even a YA book, though teens might find it amusing.

Really, the “hero/heroine is a child of some Important Person” is a trope very common in YA fantasy. 

Mostly it’s girls. In this fiction, the heroine, a normal American(usually American) girl, finds out that her father is a king of some supernatural realm - she is half a Faerie, a vampire princess, a half mermaid, a part angel, even a demon princess in one novel I read - a girl who sprouts horns and a tail when she gets angry at, say, a date who tried to grope her. I wish I could remember the title of that one!

She is usually told that there has been a marriage arranged between her and a fellow demon, Faerie, vampire or whatever, always a hot new boy at her school. If she doesn’t date him, there will be a war or the world will come to an end or both. And her father is always royalty, never a Faerie plumber or a demon factory hand… 

Still, I guess that’s what kids want to read! Girls do, anyway, in my experience.

I can’t help thinking of a fan story I read, “Fellowship Of The Thousands” which pokes fun at “Mary Sue” stories; on his way to Rivendell for the Council of Elrond, Boromir sees hundreds of young women falling from the sky. When he gets there, he encounters more, including daughters of Elrond that elf never knew he had - they’re Mary Sues, of course. An entire army of them leaves Rivendell with the  Fellowship. I read it on fanfiction.net, but it’s now available on Archive Of Our Own if you are curious.

And then there is the comic written by J.Michael Straczynski, (author of Babylon 5) in which Loki asks Spiderman/ Peter Parker to help him. His daughter Tess Black has had her body hijacked by an evil sorceress. “You have a daughter?” Peter says, amazed.

“Hundreds across the centuries,” the trickster god replies. “I’m a Norse god. It’s what we do.”

Well, more Greek gods than Norse do this, really, but it’s a nice line to describe what happens in YA fiction! 

And here is an article on this very subject! 

https://www.themarysue.com/books-like-percy-jackson/

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - O Is For Ordinary People

 If you have read your share of fairy tales, you’ll know that there are many working class heroes/heroines who have adventures. Usually, it’s the youngest son of a miller or farmer who inherits the least amount, with his older brothers getting all the useful stuff, and has to go off to seek his fortune. By the end of the story he has won the hand of the king’s daughter and half the kingdom. Or the youngest daughter finds herself having to achieve a task or a set of tasks before being allowed to live happily with her new husband, the King.

Mind you, in “Puss In Boots”, the youngest son has to leave all the work to the cat left to him, not being too bright himself. Aladdin is not a nice person - a lazy good-for-nothing boy - but he has a genie to help him. 

But there are others who do seem to have a brain, and use it. There is the fisherman who talks the angry genie back into the bottle. Sinbad, a merchant, survives seven voyages in which he is the lone survivor of the ship, yet somehow ends up returning home richer than before. 

The original Star Wars trilogy, which quite deliberately uses “The Hero’s Journey” trope, is also a fairy tale. Luke Skywalker is the farm boy who very quickly becomes a Jedi Knight and moves in exalted company. He doesn’t marry the princess, of course, because she is his sister, but she does marry a smuggler with a lower class background, so somebody who would count as the miller’s youngest son gets to marry the princess. 

And Luke and Leia have a father whose background is as lower class as you can get. Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader is the son of a slave woman(who swears she has no idea how she got pregnant and you believe her!). Their mother, Padme Amidala, when we first meet her, is a Queen, though an elected one, then a Senator. So, Anakin won the princess, right? And Leia is raised as a princess, Luke with his grandmother’s humble farm family. 

I found it intriguing, when I watched the TV series Obi Wan, that the hermit and former Jedi Knight Obi Wan Kenobi has a day job working in a factory, something the films never suggested, but hey, even he has to pay the bills, doesn’t he? That desert doesn’t offer much in the way of food and other supplies. 

Rey, an orphaned girl who has brought herself up on a desert planet not unlike Luke’s Tatooine, scavenging salvageable stuff for a living, turns out to be the evil Emperor’s granddaughter, which is another trope, ie the long lost heir to the throne or at least a member of the nobility is living as an ordinary person, used in old films and novels. 

In the Discworld novels we have Captain Carrot, who would be the King of Ankh-Morpork if they still had one, and he is exactly the kind of person who would be perfect for the job. Everyone likes him, he cares about people, he is able to handle any problem. But he is a policeman. It’s all he wants to do. He clearly knows, but never so much as mentions that he is the long-lost heir, though plenty of others do.

In Discworld books set in the tiny kingdom of Lancre, the King is a former jester. He marries a witch, Magrat Garlick, the youngest of a trio who first appear together in Wyrd Sisters, which sends up a certain Shakespeare play. Pretty much everyone in Lancre is an ordinary person, though it’s full of magic. Witches are village wise-women whose job is to look after the sick, deliver babies and such.

Unlike them, wizards working at the Unseen University are encouraged not to practise their art, because a very long time ago wizards who did started a horrific war. Instead they spend their days avoiding the students and eating huge meals. The thing is, you don’t have to be an aristocrat to get into Unseen University. And most aren’t. 

In Lord Of The Rings, the leading characters are mostly aristocratic or at least, in Bilbo and Frodo’s cases, the village squire. But Sam Gamgee, Frodo’s faithful servant, as ordinary as you can ask, ends up inheriting the manor, Bag End. He becomes Mayor of the Shire seven times. One daughter becomes a lady in waiting to Queen Arwen, then wife of a man with a title. Another marries the son of Peregrine Took(Pippin), Thain of the Shire. Sam is a gardener and fixes the land’s destruction after the Scouring of the Shire, planting and using soil from the home of the elves, the forest of Lothlorien. And because he was, if briefly, a Ringbearer, he is allowed to go to the Undying Lands where all the gods and Elves have gone. 

Definitely a case of upward mobility! 

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tale In Fiction - N Is For Norse Influence

 Norse/Scandinavian folklore, myth and legend has been plundered for stories for quite some time. And I’m going to cheat a little because of a story I want to mention. 

J.R.R. Tolkien certainly loved his northern stuff. He built his own world, certainly, but it didn’t come from nowhere. His inspirations came from up north. For example, his twelve Dwarves in The Hobbit have names taken from Dwarves in Norse mythology, listed in the Old Norse Voluspa. For that matter, Gandalf’s name was also from that list.The Dwarves themselves are taken from German and Norse myth and legend. They are amazing craftsmen both in myth and Tolkien’s fiction. You might remember  the ones in that story about Loki and Sif’s hair, where they created such goodies as Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. 

Ursula K Le Guin’s story, “The Necklace”, published in the book Rocannon’s World, certainly has hints of the story of Freya’s necklace, the Brisingamen. In it, the heroine goes in search of a necklace that belonged to an ancestress, as she wants it for a dowry she couldn’t afford. She finds her way to the Claymen, the equivalent of Norse Dwarfs. They are craftsmen who had made the necklace, and help her to find her way to where it’s being kept - in a museum on another planet… another folk tale element is in it, but I’ll avoid spoilers here. You can buy it in ebook.

Joanne Harris wrote a series of novels inspired by Norse myth. Two of them, The Gospel Of Loki and The Testament of Loki, are seen from the viewpoint of the trickster god. The first-mentioned is the Norse myths as seen by Loki. In the second, Loki escapes from the Underworld via a computer game and helps a teenage girl whose body he is sharing to gain confidence, a makeover and a girlfriend. 

In this series, Ragnarok is not really the end of the world, at least not for humans. Five hundred years later - in YA novel Runemarks - civilisation is back up and running. The gods are in the underworld, mostly, but not truly dead. Odin is wandering Earth and acting as a mentor to teenage girl Maddy Smith, who was born with a runemark on her hand, which makes her an object of suspicion in her village but gives her powers. Along the way, she meets a red-haired young man who is known as the Captain; he’s Loki, who got hold of a body and is back. She has a quest… 

I bought all these in Apple Books, but you can get them in print on Amazon.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy has Norse references in its sixth title, And Another Thing… written by Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl series(which has fairies in it), based on notes written by Douglas Adams before his death, but never finished. The god Thor plays a fairly substantial role in it. He has a spaceship, by the way. Available at your good book websites, or get your bookshop to order a copy.

In Parke Godwin’s novel The Tower Of Beowulf (which you may have to get second-hand - see Amazon) based on the Old English poem, Grendel’s mother is a daughter of Loki. Her father, feeling sorry for her, has her brought up in a house where the mirrors show her as beautiful. In fact, she can cast an illusion, and uses it to seduce a king, who is Grendel’s father. (When you think about it, that makes Grendel the rightful king of that place).

When Loki is tied up with that snake dripping poison on him, it isn’t his wife Sigyn who comes to help him, it’s his daughter. 

It’s a lovely novel, like all Parke Godwin’s other works and worth chasing up. You can get a print copy - mostly second hand - on Amazon. It doesn’t seem to be available in ebook.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods has a huge mix of gods from all over, but Odin is one of the main characters, along with the hero Shadow Moon’s jail cell mate, known to him as Low Key Liesmith. There is also a story among the “Coming To America” chapters in which a Norse ship arrives in America well before the eleventh century historical dates. They pray to their gods for a fair wind to get them home. A Native American wanders into their camp and they get him drunk and sacrifice him to Odin in the traditional manner, by hanging. Centuries later, when the historical Vikings arrive, three of their gods are waiting for them.

There are so many books with Norse myth in them, but I’m going to finish here with a novel that has Norsemen in it, but not myth. It is inspired by the Vinland Saga. We know that the Norse probably got to North America in the eleventh century, but not where they settled. They didn’t stay there, but it makes a great story.

The Technicolor Time Machine is by Harry Harrison. It’s a very funny time travel story in which a film studio about to go out of business as soon as they get audited on Monday get access to a time machine and take their actors and crew into the past to make a film about the Vikings settling in America. It gives them free or cheap extras and they can go into the past and film the whole thing in a week present day time. When they can’t find any Norse settlements to film in, they do it themselves with the help of a local Norse leader. You can probably guess how it works out.

Available in ebook, both in Apple Books and Kindle. Also, if you visit YouTube, there is a BBC radio play of it written by Chris Boucher, who wrote a lot of scripts for the SF series Blake’s 7 and later Star Cops.

Do you have any favourite Norse-themed fiction?

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tale In Fiction - M Is For Minoans

 Have you ever noticed how much Crete is involved in fantasy fiction with a Greek mythology theme? 

And who could blame the authors? There is so much in that civilisation to write about. There are so many beautiful wall paintings and cheery pots with octopus images! 

Refreshing your memory, Minos, King of Crete, prayed to the god Poseidon for a perfect bull to sacrifice to him. A bit weird to be asking a god to supply his own sacrifice, but there you are. Poseidon obliged with the most amazing, beautiful white animal you could ever imagine. In the end, not a good idea. Minos kept the bill to improve his own herds and sacrificed a lesser bull. This being Greek mythology, where crazy things can and do happen, Poseidon was annoyed enough to arrange for Minos’s Queen, Pasiphae, to be filled with lust for the bull. She got the genius craftsman Daedalus to build her a cow she could get into and… yuk! As a result, she bore the Minotaur, a scary being with a human body and bull’s head. Daedalus was also commissioned to build the Labyrinth to hide away and contain the embarrassing child, who was carnivorous and fed with young men and women sent as tribute. Athens had to do it as punishment because a son of Minos had been killed while there. 

Now, I am going to start with a novel series you will know well enough, but maybe never noticed had any Greek myth in it: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It may seem to be just another series set in a dystopian future, but think about it: young tributes, boys and girls alike, are sent from various districts to fight in an arena game they are highly unlikely to survive. They are chosen by lot. There was a mention of a punishment that started it. This is eventually overthrown, as in the myth. When I read the books for the first time, the Greek myth elements jumped up and bit me. 

There is a scene in Circe when the heroine is visiting her sister Pasiphae while she is in labour. Pasiphae says “I fucked the sacred bull, all right?” There is quite a lot about the Minotaur in this novel, with grisly details about its delivery.

Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea are about Theseus, the destroyer of the Minotaur. However, it’s written as basically historical fiction, with just a bit of fantasy in that Theseus can tell when an earthquake is on its way. In this version, Minotaur is the title of the heir to the throne, like Prince of Wales. Pasiphae slept with a bull dancer, not a bull. As it’s a matriarchal society and Pasiphae is the Goddess on Earth, there isn’t much Minos can do about it. The tributes are chosen from among the small, light and agile teens - and yes, Theseus fits into this category. He is much shorter than a hero is expected to be, much to his disappointment. The bull dancers are acrobats. The creation of Daedalus is a wooden bull that the young acrobats use for practice. The Labyrinth is the name of the royal palace.

Wendy Orr, a children’s writer who lives in Australia but has a Canadian background, has written three books set before and after the time of the Thera explosion. 

The first in the trilogy, Dragonfly Song, involves tributes sent to Crete to become bull dancers.  The heroine volunteers to go when another girl has an accident that kills her. The tributes get respect, something she has been lacking. This novel has fantasy elements in it. There isn’t any Minotaur, but the bull dancing is a sacred activity, not just a show. For this reason, you don’t know which bull you will get for any show, unlike in The King Must Die, in which every team had its own bull and trains with him.

Wendy Orr knows about bulls; apart from research she and her husband bred cattle for many years. 

In the third novel, Cuckoo’s Flight, the Trojan War is mentioned; the heroine’s father is Trojan and came to a Cretan island to escape.

Poul Anderson’s time travel novel The Dancer From Atlantis is also a story about bull dancing. The title character is very young, because it’s better to get younger children to perform, as they are more flexible and athletic. It’s true, by the way - our ESL students, mostly refugees from Sudan, did a circus course; it’s amazing what they could do without any previous training. Their performance was breathtakingly beautiful. 

The novel is about the Thera explosion, but Theseus is in it as a villain. The premise is that the tributes are not sent to be killed at all, they go to Crete as hostages, live at court and have become very much Cretans  by the time they go home. And that is the intention. Theseus is a baddie to begin with, but is shocked into eventually becoming a good king.

Available in ebook.

Do you have any favourites in this area? 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Folk Tale And Myth In Fiction - L Is For Charles De Lint And Margo Lanagan

 Charles De Lint is a prolific Canadian fantasy writer, who focuses on myth and legend and - well, fairies - in his work. 

The novel closest to the theme of this A to Z is Jack, The Giant Killer, published in 1987 and still available on Amazon and Apple books. It is an urban fantasy version of the fairy tale, in which the Jack of the title is a girl called Jacky. The Wild Hunt ride on motorbikes and there are the Seelie and Unseelie courts, all in Ottawa. And, of course, there are giants. 

But there is a lot more to his work. He has done far more books than I can list here - and I’m still reading them. So let’s just talk about a few. 

His fiction mixes Celtic with Native American myth. In one of his novels, Moonheart, the Celtic spirits have come to North America and taken over from the indigenous spirits, who have withdrawn into the Otherworld. The heroine, who runs a bookshop, meets Welsh bard Taliesin, a hero of Celtic mythology, who made his way to North America centuries ago and is still around. She is a heavy smoker, so when she meets a Native American being and offers her a cigarette, it is considered sharing sacred smoke! 

I loved this book, which, among other things, introduced me to some wonderful folk bands such as Silly Wizard. 

He is best known for his Newford series, books and short stories,  set in a small town somewhere in North America. It is filled with magic of more than one kind. The local park is a forest of Faerie. Native American spirits wander in and out. Best of all, the town is full of writers, artists and musicians and you can take your pick of concerts by Celtic bands any time of the week. I have to say, if Newford was a real place I’d move there tomorrow. 

Charles De Lint is a musician himself. He met his wife when she came to him for mandolin lessons. I once attended a convention at which he was the guest of honour and he and his wife performed for us. They did a more informal jam session in the hotel foyer with one of our local musicians, a harper who carries her instrument everywhere. I believe he has been in a Celtic band in his time. So it’s easy to see why he would slot music and the arts into his fiction. 

By the way, I had the pleasure of doing a panel on YA and children’s fiction with him at that con.

Margo Lanagan is an Australian writer who has done some fiction with fairy tale backgrounds.

The one which is best known is Tender Morsels, a YA novel based on Snow-White And Rose-Red. In the fairy tale, two girls live in the forest with their mother. They are kind to a (talking)bear who is a prince under an enchantment. They are also helpful to a dwarf who, however, is ungrateful each time they help him. Eventually the dwarf gets his comeuppance and the bear is turned back into a prince. 

Tender Morsels expands on the story, with a back story for the mother, the bear and the dwarf. It got into trouble in the U.S when it first came out because of those dark back stories. It is a wonderful book anyway. Available at all good book web sites.

My favourite of her works is called Sea Hearts in Australia and The Brides Of Rollrock Island outside Australia. It won a Children’s Book Council of Australia Award for Older Readers the year it came out.

It’s not based on a specific folk tale, but you are probably familiar with the stories about selkie women who can’t return to the ocean because their human husbands have stolen and hidden their seal skins. Then a child finds the hidden seal skin and the wife leaves her human family and returns to the sea.

This novel, set on a Scottish island in the 19th century, begins by asking what might happen to descendants of these seal women centuries later. In this case, a girl who is a descendant has the power to bring women out of the seals which live around the island and makes a nice living out of it. 

These women are basically Stepford Wives if you can imagine those as having feelings. They are beautiful and obedient and all the men want one. Eventually the human women leave the island and the only women are selkies. There is no other choice for boys because any girls born to the selkie women have to return to the sea as seals, unable to live on land. In the end, it’s the decision of the teenage boys to help their mothers, not an accident.

It’s a beautiful and touching novel, well worth a read. Fortunately it’s still available, in ebook, print and audiobook. Buy it!