Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

I have a confession to make: I did not love Norse mythology growing up. In fact I was only dimly aware of its existence. 

I loved Greek mythology, which I read in turn to my kid. And I picked up various fictional-world mythologies via osmosis, by reading things like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and playing role-playing games, like RuneQuest, that were set in richly-detailed worlds. (Thank you, Greg Stafford, and may you rest in peace.) But for whatever reason, Norse mythology never really did much for me.

This was true even after reading American Gods, my second-least-favorite Neil Gaiman book (though I’m enjoying the hell out of the TV series), even though I pretty much love everything he writes. It was true even after watching some of the Marvel movies that include Thor and Loki because, well, of course those characters are only loosely based on their mythological prototypes. I wasn’t even inspired to learn much about it when I learned that the days of our week are named after Norse deities, or after getting a crow tattooed on my left shoulder--that was a crow, not a raven, and especially not Hugin or Munin.

But I do love most of Neil Gaiman’s work. Particularly when he goes off in a new direction--which he does often. (Though what you can really call a “new direction” for a writer who is a genre unto himself could be an interesting discussion.) Rewriting the Norse myths, bringing them alive for the modern age, struck me as the perfect job for a man of his background and peculiar talents. And I was right.

Gaiman’s gods have voices of their own. Voices, and faces, and gestures, and tastes in food and in women (and in some cases, in men and even in stallions), and, so help me, after reading this version of the Norse myths I feel like I could tell them apart by their body odor. These are manly myths about manly gods--Gaiman wasn’t making any effort to modernize these stories. The gods misbehave in all the expected ways: they drink too much, covet each other’s property too much, become violently peevish when things don’t go their way or they’re just bored. They aren’t role models.

What they are is vividly real, in this retelling, outsized technicolor warts and all. I don’t approve of them, and nor am I meant to. They’re gods, after all, and beyond a mere mortal’s approval or disapproval. They’re also fascinating to read about. Highly recommend.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Narrated by Perdita Weeks

When I was about 14 years old, I read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and it changed my life. It was the story of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. I’d always loved Greek mythology, but under Lewis’ skillful hand, this story and the world it’s set in came vividly to life. Suddenly these were real people with real flaws dealing with, yes, problems on a more-than-human scale, but in a very human way. It was like that moment in The Giver when Jonas begins to learn to see in color. If the people in this story were really human, maybe the people in other myths were, too—maybe they were all human stories, about people not so different from me. All a question of perspective, and mine had shifted, permanently.

Then I reread it as an adult with adult critical faculties—and was deeply disappointed by it. The misogyny that runs through it is so deeply ingrained in the plot and the characters that there was no ignoring it, no compartmentalizing it or separating it from an otherwise beautifully-written book. The whole premise of the thing was that Psyche’s older sister was ugly, and the fact that her younger sister was beautiful and got all sorts of goodies for it—adventure, romance, the attention of the gods—twisted her insides up so badly that she became as ugly on the inside as on the outside. And this was just natural: of course any ugly woman would be so twisted with envy and hatred for any attractive woman that her life would be one big bitter pill. Even if it was her baby sister.

I may go back to it a third time. Maybe I’ve mellowed enough with age to appreciate its virtues as well as its faults. Maybe.

But I don’t have to. Madeline Miller has written Circe, and I so, so wish I could go back in time and hand it to 14-year-old me. It would have blown her mind in exactly the same way as Till We Have Faces, but without the nasty misogynistic-garbage aftertaste.

There’s not much to say about the plot of this book if you’re at all familiar with Greek mythology. Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ crew into swine (and well they deserved it); she’s the one who turned the nymph Scylla into the hideous sea-monster to whom we unwittingly refer when we say “between a rock and a hard place” (the original rock being the one Scylla lived in, and Charybdis, another sea monster or maybe a whirlpool nearby, being the hard place—it was apparently not an easy thing to navigate safely between the two); she’s the goddess of magic, or maybe her daughter; she’s a nymph; she’s a misfit; she’s a mother of heroes; she’s the daughter of the mighty titan, Helios.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes all of these disparate identities and scraps of legend and weaves them into one complex but utterly believable being. I mean, aren’t we all a little complicated, and, once we’ve lived enough of life, wouldn’t the people who knew us best at one point in our lives hardly recognize us based on descriptions of us from people we knew in other eras?

Circe is no angel, and this novel isn’t an attempt to reform her. Thank the gods. Nor, however, does it romanticize her dark deeds, and neither does it wallow in them. What it does is create a portrait of an immortal life drawn from many, many strands, setting that life in an ancient Greece where magic is very real and the gods are all too manifest, and this portrait is clear and believable enough to seem like a window we could almost walk right through.

We see the court of Helios with its bickering nymphs, pitch-black and frozen by day while its lord is away and brilliant but brittle when he is in residence, through the eyes of his most neglected daughter. We see her exile to Aeaea, beset by wild beasts and worse sailors, as something she loves and hates in turn, and which in the end facilitates her coming into her own power and protecting her son. We see a person and a life in all of their facets. And maybe, if we’re women of a certain age, we see a little of ourselves.

But you don’t have to be any particular age or gender to be thoroughly ravished by this book. Five out of five stars.