Gods, Graves, and Scholars

The reviewer of a recent book on Greek mythology for the Times Literary Supplement pauses to consider one of the most widely read compilations of the tales -- that Penguin standard, The Greek Myths by Robert Graves.

I knew that Graves's fascination with his own private quasi-Jungian"white goddess" cult was proto-New Age bullchowder. Turns out, it also left an imprint on his retelling of the classical myths.

There's nothing like manufacturing erudition from pure guesswork as you go along:

The barmy etymologies that enliven Graves’s index of names are the product of nothing more than amateur self-amusement with a Greek lexicon; and nuttier still are the astounding pseudo-scholarly interpretative commentaries on each section, which historicize everything in terms of Graves’s personal mythology of the White Goddess, under which nasty patriarchal Dorians displace matriarchal Pelasgians worshipping Graves’s triple goddess, and commemorate it all in dying-god rituals which encode the truth Da Vinci-style for scholarly cryptographers to decipher. Unlike the narrative portions, none of this stuff is even cosmetically source-referenced – for good reason, as Graves has made it up from whole cloth.

When you're a poet, I guess you can get away with that sort of thing.

A tip of the hat to my friend and colleague Frank Wilson at Books, Inq. for the link.