A Message Through Time by Anna Ciddor. Melbourne: Allen And Unwin, 2023

 

Australian boy Felix and his older stepsister Zoe have been on holiday in France, in the city of Arles. In the last hour or so before departure, Felix finds a Roman stylus, with a message in a bottle giving instructions for time travel, writing the Latin word “Ave” to travel into the past and “Vale” to return. Of course, he can’t resist and they find themselves in Roman Arles, or Arelate, in the time of Emperor Constantine. There they accidentally pick up a Roman girl, Petronia, whom they show around briefly before taking her back to her own time, where they may be stuck…

If you have read the novel The Boy Who Stepped Through Time by the same author this will be familiar, but you don’t need to have read it to enjoy this, though there is a guest appearance by a character from that novel. 

The novel is a lot of fun, with culture clash mixed into the adventure. Petronia’s attitude to modern times is hilarious(though she is impressed by public playgrounds). When the three young people return to Roman times the culture clash is even more over-the-top, with food, medicine and customs bizarre to the two modern children, but quite normal to their hostess. Like the previous novel, it is well researched with the help of the author’s sister, an expert in this era. The author has also done the very good internal artwork. 

They take a trip on a barge along the river Rhone to reach Petronia’s family, and from here things start going wrong for  Felix, but he can’t tell Zoe.

The adventure does bring them closer, though.

I enjoy time-slip stories and this one is an excellent example of its type. 

Perry, hero of The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, has to live in this era by himself and work out how to get home while Felix and Zoe have each other and know what to do - the problem is a very different one. 

But anyone who enjoyed the first novel in this universe will certainly enjoy this one. 

I recommend it for ages 9-12, late primary school to early secondary. 

Available in both ebook and print, along with the rest of her fiction, at all good web sites in Australia, or order from your local bookshop. If you live outside Australia you might have to find out when it’s available in your country. Right now, it’s only available here, sorry!  But you can get her other books, including The Boy Who Stepped Through Time, on overseas sites, including Amazon, both print and Kindle.

Thank you, Allen and Unwin, for sending me a copy of this novel! 

The Key To Rome by Sophie Masson. Armidale, NSW: Eagle Books, 2023

 

The year is 84 CE, the place is the Roman province of Britannia. The rebellion of Boudicca is within living memory for many adults. 

Twelve year old Livia, daughter of an eye doctor, is now an orphan. She has promised her dying father to take a mysterious key to her uncle Marcus, who was estranged from her father, but will know what to do with it. Livia has nothing now but her old horse Pegasus, her father’s doctoring kit, which she knows how to use - and the key. When her uncle is not at home, she travels further, to the home of someone who might know where Marcus is.  Her uncle is not there either, and she is advised to go back to his home,  but a British slave boy, Mato, offers to help her if she will take him with her. There is more to this story than Livia had believed. She and her new friend will have to solve the mystery before disaster strikes.

Here is another one of the talented Sophie Masson’s exciting historical adventures. Many of them have fantasy elements but this is a straight historical mystery, well researched and with a useful historical background and glossary at the back. 

The cover art and internals, including a map, are drawn by Lorena Carrington, a gifted Aussie artist who has worked with Sophie Masson before. 

Livia is a strong leading character who refuses to give up, even when the quest for her uncle looks as if it might be useless. She weaves together the clues to lead her in the right direction. 

This novel, aimed at ages about nine to twelve, reads like a Rosemary Sutcliff adventure, perfect for young readers who enjoy history and are inspired by strong characters their own age. It’s also not a bad place to start children on historical fiction.

Christmas Press, of which Eagle Books is an imprint, is an Australian small press which has been doing very well. For now, though, The Key To Rome will only be available in Australia. Dymock’s Bookshop already has copies, as does Amazon Australia, but it’s just as simple to ask your bookshop to get it in.

If you haven’t yet discovered Sophie Masson’s wonderful work, you can get it outside Australia in the usual good websites. 

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - Some After Thoughts

This year’s Challenge badge!

So, another A to Z has come and gone. Every year I think I won’t come up with a theme, and then I do, and get passionately involved. The same has happened this year. 

I really enjoyed talking about some of my favourite books and others I have only discovered recently. I haven’t done much this year about the actual registration stuff apart from join the official page. It gets exhausting to do much more than that; in previous years I have gone to the Challenge website every day and slotted in a new piece of information, found interesting blog sites to visit and put a link to whatever was my daily post so people I visited and their visitors might wander over. It just got to be too much; the only sites I have visited were those who visited me, and I’m a bit behind even in those. I will be catching up and finally getting around to reading those posts I have promised myself.

 But I’m glad I had a go at writing something every day. And the theme was a good one - yes? Just writing about it reminded me of how many books, short stories and films have myths or folk tales in their backgrounds. It’s all part of our cultures, reminding us where we come from.

I have a review to write, so I will keep this short, but thank you to all those lovely people who have visited and commented, whether you were taking part this year or not. I couldn’t have done it without knowing you were reading and enjoying.

Cheers!

Sue

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth and Folk Tale in Fiction - Z Is For Zoology!

Z is for Zoology, or, fantastical critters in fiction.

For the last post in this series, we will check out some of the unusual folk lore of mythical creatures to be found in fiction.

We’ll start with unicorns, those virgin-hunters who can be trapped by a pure maiden. Not necessarily a young girl - in Terry Pratchett’s Lords And Ladies, the elderly witch Granny Weatherwax is able to force the unicorn to come with her to be shod.

Unicorns vary from book to book. The unicorns in the Harry Potter books are the kind we think about first when we think of that word. They are beautiful, innocent beings which have blood that will bring you back from the brink of death, but which curses you because how dare you kill something so innocent and pure! They do prefer “the woman’s touch”, so Professor Grubbly-Plank, covering Hagrid’s class, gets the girls to come to the front.

On the other hand, there are the dangerous ones. The one in Lords And Ladies is running around the kingdom killing people on behalf of the evil Fairy Queen. 

In Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London novel, Broken Homes, the paranormal police Constable Peter Grant is investigating a case in the countryside when he encounters a unicorn which is huge, totally crazy and carnivorous. The fairies are around too, and they are not nice either. The unicorn is definitely not sweet, innocent or pure. It kills!  I do recommend this series, by the way, it’s funny and touching and - did I say it was funny? 

Arthur Rackham, Questing Beast: public Domain

                                                       

We first meet the Questing Beast, or “beast Glatisant”,  in Malory’s Morte D’Arthure. Well, it’s where I first met it, anyway! It has the head and neck of a snake, the body of a leopard, haunches of a lion and feet of a hart. It makes a sound like “thirty couple of hounds questing.” I believe it’s to be found in a lot of Arthurian literature. In Malory, it’s the beast traditionally hunted by the family of King Pellinore. I assume they never catch it. It does eventually get caught, in Malory, by the Saracen knight Palomides. 

T.H White writes it into his Arthurian novel The Once And Future King. In that novel, Pellinore is a comical character who isn’t really trying to kill the Beast; he just collects its fewmets(hard droppings). They have a relationship - the Questing Beast enjoys the hunt. 

The Beast appeared in an episode of Lost In Space, along with a knight chasing it. When the knight finds out the Beast is female, he doesn’t want to continue, so the Beast, feeling sorry for him, teases him into hunting her again. 

Dragons appear in so much fantasy fiction, it’s just too much for this post, so I will just note a few. 

As you may know, dragons are different in the east and the west. In Asia, they are benign water beings which are respected. The only Asian dragon novel I have read is Tea With The Black Dragon by R.A MacAvoy. The Black Dragon of the title, Maryland Long, is in human shape for reasons explained later in the novel. He is a distinguished Chinese gentleman who works with the heroine, Martha Macnamara, a middle-aged woman who is a folk musician to find her daughter, who has gone missing. It’s a lovely, charming novel,well worth a read.

And then there are the other kind of dragons. You know - the fire breathing Western dragons. In tradition, they are not benign animals. They are connected to the devil. When St George kills the dragon and rescues the maiden, he is saving the Church. There are dragons which are symbols, such as the red and white dragons seen fighting in the story of young Merlin, which symbolise the British(red) and the Saxons(white). 

Those do turn up in Arthurian fiction. 

Terry Pratchett has dragons that only stay solid if you believe in them, in his first Discworld novel The Colour Of Magic. It’s not a good idea to stop believing while you are riding one in flight…

Mostly, though, there are the little swamp dragons, which are so fragile they can and often do, explode. They first appear in Guards!Guards!, the first novel in the City Watch series which features policeman Sam Vimes. Someone has been calling up a “noble dragon”, a much bigger variety which no longer lives on Discworld. It turns out not to be a good idea at all, as the dragon can’t be controlled. Sam visits Lady Sibyl Ramkin, who breeds, shows and sells swamp dragons. By the second novel, Sam marries her.

It’s a very funny story and be careful not to be drinking tea when reading it, as the laughs start on the first page. 

The Gorgon is a being from Greek mythology we are all familiar with. She was a beautiful woman turned into a hideous creature with snakes for hair, turning people into stone if they come near. In the end, she is killed in her cave by Perseus, while minding her own business and asleep. It’s not even to protect a community, just to  achieve a quest Perseus has been set by an evil king who wants to marry his mother and is getting him out if the way.

I have just started on a collection of Tanith Lee short stories The Gorgon: And Other Beastly Tales. The book’s title tells you all. Each story is about a fantastical being. The title story has a meeting on a Greek island with a mysterious masked woman. The reason for the cover up is not quite what you might think, but at the end, the narrator, a professional writer, does feel he has been turned to stone if not in the way you would expect from a Gorgon. I bought this in Apple Books, where it’s cheap.

In the anthology Mythic Resonance(in which I have a story) there is a story called “Through These Eyes I See” which is a twist on the story of Medusa. Mandy is a girl, living with her parents, who has a gift of healing - her look heals, not turns to stone. She has a room full of mirrors, which protect her, not those who come for healing. She is being used; the gift doesn’t help her. The book is available in Apple Books. 

Australian author Simon Haynes wrote a very short piece in which, in modern times, the Gorgon has become a sculptress who takes men home and… well, you can guess what happens next!

Finally in this post, werewolves. The standard werewolf of folklore turns into a wolf at the full moon. Professor Lupin in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban is that kind of werewolf. Once in wolf shape he can’t control himself, which is why the Whomping Willow and the Shrieking Shack are set up for his benefit while he is at school, before his friends work out a way to become animagi and join him in animal form. You can be turned into a werewolf by being bitten, as in folklore, and Remus Lupin was turned as a child by a nasty piece of work called Fenrir Greyback who specialises in turning children. I couldn’t help feeling, as I read, that it’s a symbol for pedophilia - and shuddering. 

But many werewolf stories don’t bother with the full moon thing. In Petronius’s Satyricon, there is a story told about a werewolf who protects his clothes before simply changing, with a spell created by urinating in a ring around them. (I used that idea in my werewolf novel!). There are stories in Greek myth about men turning into wolves for several years before turning back.

Terry Pratchett’s character, Angua, a member of the City Watch, is a werewolf. You are born a werewolf in this series, and there are great werewolf clans in her country, Uberwald. It’s not possible to be turned. She is an aristocrat where she comes from, and not very fond of her family. Silver does affect her, though only in the sense of controlling her. A family member was born a wolf instead of human with shapechanging abilities, and killed by her family. A brother of Angua’s fled the family home and has done well, getting himself a job as a sheepdog. 

Tanya Huff’s novel Blood Trail is one I found intriguing because it did something different with werewolves. There is a peaceful werewolf family with a farm. They aren’t just humans who can shapeshift, they are a pack of wolves in human form, so the brother and sister have to be separated from each other before they do something incestuous, not acceptable for humans.

A fascinating series, by the way, one I do recommend highly. It involves Vicki Nelson, a private investigator with an eye condition that forced her to leave the police force and makes working at night almost impossible. Her partner is Henry Fitzroy, the son of Henry VIII, who has lived for hundreds of years as a vampire, so he can work at night and needs help during the day. Henry makes a living as the author of bodice rippers. He doesn’t harm anyone, as he only needs a small amount of blood, which he takes from sexual partners who have no idea what he is doing! 

I think I will leave it here, with a short reflection tomorrow. I’m going to catch up with visiting your blogs in the next day or two. I have been held up for various reasons, but I do want to read what you have done. 

  I hope you have enjoyed this set of posts as much as I have enjoyed sharing them with you! Thank you for following! 

 

A To Z Challenge 3023: Myth And Folk Tales in Fiction - Y Is For Jane Yolen

 I see I have already written about Jane Yolen in a previous post, back in 2019, but this one is based on the theme of using fairy tales in modern fiction and she is THE reteller of fairy tales.

Jane Yolen is an American Jewish fantasy writer. I specify the Jewish because there are so many Jewish elements in her writing. 

She is also a writer of a lot of fiction based on fairy tales. 

Her book How To Fracture A Fairy Tale features several of her short stories based on fairy tales, then blurbs explaining what she had in mind when writing them. I have a copy in Apple Books, but you can also get it in Kindle, print and audiobook.

The good news is, there is literally a Jane Yolen book for every day of the year, whether adult, children’s, YA, picture book or poetry - 365 so far and I see there are more coming! 

I haven’t read anywhere near all of them so far and there wouldn’t be space in this post anyway, so I’ll just cover a few.

I’ve said a lot of her fiction has Jewish elements. In How To Fracture A Fairy Tale there is her short story “Granny Rumple” which sets the story of Rumplestiltskin in 19th century Ukraine. It’s not a kingdom, just a small town, and the father’s boast is that his daughter can do amazing tapestries when she can’t. She borrows from a young Jewish moneylender who organises to buy the tapestries and goes easy on her with the loan. She marries the mayor’s son and when she hasn’t repaid the loan, the moneylender’s wife goes to try to get the money. The woman screams that they want her baby and this leads to a pogrom and the death of the moneylender. It’s an interesting take on the fairy tale; the author says that in the fairy tale the only character who does what he promises and isn’t lying is Rumplestiltskin. 

Another story in the book is Holocaust themed, “Slipping Sideways Through Eternity” in which the heroine slips away from a Passover Seder, following the prophet Elijah, who has a task for her that involves time travel and rescue of some concentration camp inmates. Elijah the prophet is a folklore character as part of Passover celebrations. As well as leaving an extra seat for the stranger who might turn up you leave a glass of wine for Elijah. At some stage in the ceremony the children are sent to open the door for him. I remember doing this as a child. My father used to drink the prophet’s wine while I was at the door. 

Her novel Briar Rose is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty set during the Holocaust. You can’t get this one in ebook, but in paperback. 

Mapping The Bones is based on “Hansel And Gretel”, also set during the Holocaust. When you think about “Hansel And Gretel”, the image of an oven pops up. It’s easy to make the connection with the ovens of the Nazi death camps. It’s available in audiobook from both Amazon and Apple Books and in print, but not in ebook.

She doesn’t only write Holocaust themed fiction. The stories in How To Fracture A Fairy Tale vary from a story seen from the viewpoint of the bridge crossed by the Billygoats Gruff to another in which Icarus doesn’t die of his fall, but…

And there is, of course, the verse novel Finding Baba Yaga I mentioned in a previous post.

A children’s book, Merlin And The Dragons is available very cheaply on Apple Books and it’s read by Kevin Kline!

She isn’t the only reteller of folk tales by any means, but is certainly the most prolific!

 

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth and Folk Tales In Fiction - X is For EXtras!

 Let’s face it, X is always a difficult letter to come up with a post for - I think I only managed it once, for Greek mythology - X Is For Xanthus and Balius(Achilles’ horses). 

So, this post will cheat a bit and I’m using it for writing about a few books that didn’t quite fit into any of the other posts.

Here they are.

The Time Of The Ghosts by Aussie writer Gillian Polack is set in Canberra, Australia’s capital city. The main characters are three older women, Ann, Lil and Mabel, who enjoy each other’s company and dinner parties. 

One of them is dating the ghost of a bushranger. Another of them is actually mediaeval water fae Melusine, who has allowed herself to age so she doesn’t have to keep moving on. There are flashbacks to her memories of other times and places.

Melusine, in case you don’t know about her, is a folklore character who met Raymond of Poitou and agreed to marry him on condition he never tried to see her on a Saturday. They had ten sons and she built him fabulous castles, but like other men of this kind of fairy tale, he just had to take a peek eventually, didn’t he? He was shocked to see his wife sitting in the bath as a snake from the waist down, so she had to leave him. Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s Queen, was supposed to be descended from Raymond and Melusine, which would make her an ancestor of the British royal family. Just saying. 

In the novel, she has also participated in the story of Bisclavret, a story written by Marie De France(if you want a YA novel based on that story, check out my novel Wolfborn, available in ebook, or print on demand.) Oh, and she long ago converted to Judaism. Gillian Polack does a lot of fiction with Jewish characters and themes. 

It’s my favourite of her novels and is available in ebook, both Kindle and Apple Books.

Sophie Masson, who wrote a version of Cinderella, Moonlight And Ashes, mentioned in an earlier post, has also done a novel about Snow White, set in the same universe as Moonlight And Ashes. 

This novel, Hunter’s Moon, is also set in the 19th century. Her heroine is called Bianca, daughter of the owner of a department store chain, who is known as “the king of elegance”, rather than a regular king. Her stepmother is the beautiful, elegant Belladonna, whom Bianca admires greatly till Belladonna tries to kill her. The Mirror is a newspaper! When it declares Bianca the fairest instead of her stepmother, Belladonna is not impressed… 

If you like fairy tale retellings, this author is worth checking out, as she has done several.

Melissa Marr is the author of the YA Wicked Lovely series of urban fantasies. In this series, punk fairies hang around the city streets and are tattooed as part of their culture. (The author said it was because she liked tattoos, but it works) There is rivalry between the Summer and Winter courts. It has a lot of Celtic folklore elements in it, including Beira the winter queen, who is a part of Scottish myth and legend. Melissa Marr is a PhD in this area and her bibliography includes a number of books I used to research Wolfborn.

I have just started reading Juliet Marillier’s YA novel Wildwood Dancing, which is the Grimm fairy tale  of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” set in Transylvania. The sisters are the daughters of a wealthy merchant. I’m enjoying it so far. Juliet Marillier is a wonderful interpreter of fairy tales and I recommend anything she writes.

I also recommend anything edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, who have done several amazing fairy tale anthologies, which feature well known authors. They are prolific writers themselves, but best known for their editing of fantasy fiction. 

Tomorrow: Y Is For Jane Yolen

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - W Is For The Wee Free Men

Two books for you today. Firstly, The Wee Free Men.

 Terry Pratchett wrote a series of novels set on the Discworld, in a part that was similar to the south of England. The heroine, Tiffany Aching, is nine years old in The Wee Free Men, and grows up in the course of the series, becoming a witch and training with the two witches from the other Discworld novels, Grsnny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. She lives on a farm with sheep and her grandmother was a highly respected shepherd, also probably a witch, though one who never trained in the profession. 

Tiffany is a highly intelligent child who has read the dictionary from cover to cover, and knows a lot of long words. She first  meets the Wee Free Men - the Nac Mac Feegles - while down by the river, where they warn her about the coming of the monster Jenny Greenteeth - “the green heid!” 

She uses her little brother Wentworth as bait and hits the monster with a frying pan, which later comes in useful against the Queen of the Fairies.

The Feegles are six inches high, fierce warriors with Scottish accents who love strong drink and fighting, in no special order, either or both will do. They first appeared in Carpe Jugulum, in which their leader(and mother)the kelda, helped Lancre King Verence escape from the spell of the vampires who have invaded the kingdom. They were thrown out of Fairyland for getting drunk in the afternoon. They believe that they are dead and in heaven because of the amazing opportunities for boozing and fighting. When they do die, it’s assumed they have gone back to the first world.

Terry Pratchett used folklore extensively in his books. There are many folklore references in this one. Jenny Greenteeth is a creature of British folklore, probably designed to scare children to keep them

out of danger. But also the Fairies are not the sweet little things who hang around in flowers. They are dangerous and scary. These are the real fairies of folklore. And their Queen kidnaps Tiffany’s little brother. 

Time to get out the frying pan.

The Feegles might be Pratchett’s, but are also a part of the folklore of Britain. It is said that if you leave sixpence and an unshod horse, your sixpence will be gone next day and so will the horse. This is a joke, of course, based on the saying about Wayland Smith. There is another one about leaving milk out for them, upon which they will break into your house and empty the drinks cabinet. This is a send up of the folk tales in which you leave out milk for the fairies, which help out on the farm. Er, no - the Feegles won’t do that. Not for a saucer of milk, anyway.

The series is available everywhere, in print and ebook and audiobook, read by Stephen Briggs(complete) or Tony Robinson(abridged)

W is also for Whom The Gods Would Destroy by Richard  Powell. It’s my favourite Trojan War novel. The hero, Helios, is a Trojan boy captured by the Greeks on the first day of the war, and brought up with Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. 

During that time his mentor and father-figure is Odysseus, who is shown as the only one of the Greek leaders with a brain. The author has a lot of fun describing the leaders in terms of their pompousness and foolishness. They are very much like they were in the Iliad. Nestor of Pylos, the oldest of them, was described in mythology as wise, but in this novel he just will not shut up and everyone has to sit and listen to him waffle on.

At one point in the novel, the boys find Helen bathing and are very excited because they think this will end the war. No such luck; the leaders don’t want her back! At least not this way. And she knows it all too well.

 It’s really an interpretation of the myth rather than rewriting it. There are original characters, true, including Deira, a granddaughter of Theseus. But it’s a version of the myth I can recognise.

The print book is only available second hand, I wax in my teens when it was published, but you can find it on Kindle.

Happy reading! 

 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Myth And Folk Tales In Fiction - V Is For Valkyries!

 So, let’s talk about some more Norse(V is for Viking?) stuff. Well, also German, same stories, right? 

Valkyries are the “choosers of the Slain”, who pick up slain warriors who have died bravely from the battlefields and carry them off to Valhalla, the “Hall of the Slain” where they double as waitresses to serve the permanently partying warriors their food and booze. They are found in a fair bit of fiction.

They appear in a couple of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. The first is Soul Music, in which Death’s granddaughter Susan Sto Helit has to take over the round while Death is off somewhere grieving about the deaths of her parents, Mort and Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell. One of Susan’s spots is a battlefield where she sees a loud bunch of Valkyries arrive singing “Hoyotoho!” The head Valkyrie offers her a job, as they are short on sopranos.

The next Is Interesting Times, in which wizard Rincewind meets the “Silver Horde”, a group of elderly heroes, led by Cohen the Barbarian, who have plans to conquer a country that’s the Discworld equivalent of China. They have brought with them a school teacher to help them learn manners and etiquette. He is really with them because of his romantic ideas about being a barbarian. He has hopes that if he gets killed he will go to Valhalla. He does. The Valkyries come to carry him off. Death in the Discworld can be whatever you believe - in another novel, Maskerade, a murder victim who has been working with the chorus at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House asks if there will be choirs in the after life. “Do you want one?” Death asks.

In Magnus Chase And The Sword Of Summer, (see the S post), there is a part-time Valkyrie, Samirah, a daughter of Loki by an Iranian Muslim woman, a doctor who treated him in Emergency. 

Samirah was offered the job by Odin when she bravely saved her schoolmates. She still goes to school and does homework in between missions.

A retelling of German poem The Niebelungenlied  is The Wolf And The Raven by Diana L. Paxson.  It’s the first of a trilogy, Wotan’s Children, set in Germany. The heroine is Brunahild, related to Attila the Hun. She is not a fantastical “Chooser of the Slain.” The Valkyries in this novel are perfectly human priestesses whose job is to point their spears at those chosen to be killed in the battle. And they are under orders, as it’s a political thing. Brunahild gets into trouble when she refuses to go along with it.

You may recognise this as the story of Wagner’s opera The Valkyrie, of course, as that’s where Wagner got his storyline. The story is also in Old Norse as part of the Volsunga Saga. I have a (translated) copy somewhere which I got at a school fete in my teens. Goodness, those characters are vicious! 

The Diana L. Paxson book is available on Amazon in print and Kindle. I see she has also written some non fiction about Odin and runes, which tempt me greatly!

Aussie author Keith Taylor wrote a series of fantasy novels about the adventures of an Irish bard - the series was called … Bard. In one of the novels he has a scene in which he shows a very different version of Valkyries to what we imagine. Far from being beautiful maidens, they are scary creatures worthy of horror fiction. The author reminds us that Odin was a god of the gallows(sacrifices to him were hanged) and that the eight legs of the horse Sleipnir were meant to symbolise the legs of four men who carried a dead person, on a bier or in a coffin. Not much like the dignified version of the Allfather presented in comics and films!

The series was first published in the 1980s, so you would think it would be well and truly out of print, but it seems to be back up and running, so you can get these books in ebook - both Kindle and Apple Books - and print.

Animated feature Thor: Tales Of Asgard is a Marvel story with Valkyries in it. In it, the teenaged Thor is a spoilt prince who is indulged, even by his brother Loki. They go off with the Warriors Three to Jotunheim on a quest for a sword. Sif doesn’t go because, fed up with Thor’s behaviour, she has gone off to join the Valkyries, in the Marvel universe an elite female army. They have their own training place where men are not welcome, but Thor and his friends desperately need to borrow their winged horses. In this story, Sif is the romantic interest(and so she should be! She was his wife in the myths), The role is played by Tara Strong, a well known voice actress whom you may have heard as the voice of Miss Minutes in Season 1 of Loki. She doesn’t have a Southern accent, by the way.

I bought my copy on Apple TV.

Finally, I highly recommend comedian Anna Russell’s twenty minute Ring Cycle, for which she was famous. She actually manages to tell the story of the entire Ring cycle in just over twenty minutes!  You can watch it free on YouTube. It’s very funny, and she has done several other operas. 

 

A To Z Challenge 2023: Myth and Folk Tales in Fiction - U Is For Under The Greenwood Tree(Robin Hood)

 Okay, I’m cheating slightly, but “Under The Greenwood Tree”is from the Shakespeare play As You Like It (In fact, it’s the title I gave my Robin Of Sherwood fanzine), but also from the opening lines of the poem Robin Hood And The Monk. It opens with a pretty description of the spring including how nice it is to hang around “under the greenwood tree”, then goes on to be one of the nastier, more violent of the Robin Hood tales.

So, today, I will be talking about the folk hero Robin Hood and where he fits into fiction. 

Just for the record, Maid Marion didn’t turn up until the May Games of the 15th century, just as Sir Lancelot was late into Arthurian fiction. Nobody seems to worry about it these days. She has become a part of the legend.

There are a number of mediaeval poems about him, some of which   later made their way into books and films. For example, the 1950s TV series The Adventures Of Robin Hood, with Richard Greene, had an episode called “The Knight Who Came To Dinner.” This story is based on the mediaeval poem A Geste Of Robyn Hode. In both poem and TV show, Robin is like King Arthur in deciding he won’t eat a feast until something interesting has happened. So he sends a couple of his Merries out to look. They encounter a knight(played in the TV series by Ian Hunter, who was Richard the Lionheart in the Errol Flynn Robin Hood movie) and take him back to camp. He hasn’t the money to pay the traditional half of his purse towards the meal. When they find out why - he owes money to the church and will lose his lands - the outlaws offer to help him. Which they do. 

Mediaeval Robin is not a fan of the church, though he does devoutly worship Our Lady. The TV series had a pretty left wing attitude to rich lords and abbeys. There was a reason for that: the people who wrote and produced the show were Americans who had fled the McCarthy witch hunts for England . But not so different from the original. As I recall, the Sheriff of Nottingham was involved in trying to prevent the knight, Sir Richard of the Lea, from paying his debt.

There are a number of children’s books which feature Robin Hood. 

Knight’s Castle by Edward Eager is set in the 1940s. A group of children, siblings and cousins, are taken to see the film of Ivanhoe. After it, they go home and play with some toys - a castle with knights and ladies - and decide that the figures are characters from Ivanhoe. That night, with the help of magic, the characters come to life as the characters from Ivanhoe, including Robin Hood and his band. It’s very funny, because the kids fiddle with the castle and knights during the day, which affects what they find when they return to the world of Ivanhoe that night, including Ivanhoe having a flying saucer(an actual saucer). Hilarious stuff!

The whole series is available on Apple Books, including a radio play of Half Magic, a novel about the adventures of these children’s parents.

Another children’s book with Robin Hood in it is Geoffrey Trease’s Bows Against The Barons. This is a story of Robin’s last great adventure, when he is an old man, seen from the viewpoint of a boy who joins his band. It’s a left wing retelling of the tale, in which Robin tells his followers that it shouldn’t be about Saxon against Norman but about poor against rich. He leads a rebellion against the rich. I have an early paperback of the novel and it’s illustrated but missing a picture with a huge crowd of peasants waving their tools, including a cheekily drawn crossed hammer and sickle. This is Trease’s first novel but he wrote a lot of wonderful historical novels for children, including Cue for Treason, set in the Elizabethan era, with a girl disguised as a boy who gets into Shakespeare’s company. (Shakespeare picks up she is a girl, but doesn’t give her away). I have the audiobook of that, read by Clive Mantle(Little John in Robin of Sherwood). Bows Against The Barons is, alas, well and truly out of print, but there are a fair few copies available on ABEBooks. 

 In Lady Of The Forest by Jennifer Roberson, Robin is shown as a sort of Vietnam veteran with PTSD, after the Crusades. I read this years ago, but gave away my copy. It’s out of print, but you can get the audiobook on both Apple Books and Amazon. The Apple Book is cheaper.

Robin McKinley’s Outlaws Of Sherwood is one of the gentler retellings of the legend. There are women in his band, apart from Marion, something I don’t think we saw again until the BBC Robin Hood series, in which the Merries include a Saracen woman  called Djaq. She is a strong, gutsy lady who refuses to do the cooking and ends up having to rescue her team mates in one episode. She eventually marries Will Scarlet and they settle in the Holy Land(she proposes). 

Outlaws Of Sherwood is available in print on Amazon, Kindle and audiobook. In fact, if you buy it in Kindle you can also buy the audiobook cheaply.

Parke Godwin wrote two Robin Hood books, Sherwood and Robin And The King. It’s amazing how this American writer could write such wonderful novels about British heroes.  His Robin lives in the time of William the Conqueror. No reason why not - it was, as I recall, Sir Walter Scott who gave us the version of Robin in the time of Richard the Lionheart. 

Robin, a country gentleman, loses his lands when the Normans invade - which did happen to Saxon landowners. William had a lot of followers who were younger sons or bastards(like William himself); he had to give them lands as rewards for their help, after all. Robin is outlawed when trying to help one of his tenants. However, his lands and tenants are well looked after by, would you believe, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Ralf FitzGerald, who is a decent man in this duology. The two meet in the dungeons of the Earl of Huntingdon, whom Robin refuses to support in his planned rebellion because it will lead to civil war. He now supports King William. Ralf marries Robin’s cousin Judith, who is a lot higher in the aristocracy than Robin. The two men become friends.

Robin And The King, the sequel, is rather too sad for me, but it’s implied that it’s Robin who creates an early version of Magna Carta.

Again, out of print, but you can get it. Amazon has some copies and it’s worth checking the second-hand site ABEBooks.

There are so many Robin Hood books, not possible to talk about them all here, so just one more.

You probably know about the villainous Guy of Gisburne if you are at all familiar with the legend. In the poems he is a mercenary who wears a horse skin coat. 

In Toby Venables’ Hunter Of Sherwood books, he is the good guy and Robin, who used to be his friend when they were serving together as mercenaries, is the villain - and, in fact, responsible for that horse skin coat, having killed Guy’s war horse. Guy worked as a mercenary to pay the bills, having nothing left after King Richard took his lands to raise money for his Crusade. 

When we meet him, Guy is working on some missions for King John, as a sort of cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond, something the author admitted. King John is basically M, while Guy has his own Q, a Welshman, who creates gadgets for him to use. The series is great fun and I’m pleased to say you can buy it in print or ebook. Two of the three books of the trilogy are available as an omnibus in Kindle or Apple Books. 

Put this one on your TBR pile!