From there to here and back again: Evan's Great Goddess, Frazer's Dying King and Mary Renault's popular fiction
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Authors
Tittl, Larissa
Issue Date
2023-02-12
Type
Video
Language
en_US
Keywords
Renault, Mary. King must die , Renault, Mary--Criticism and interpretation , Frazer, James George, 1854-1941. Golden bough , Conference papers and proceedings , Literary criticism
Alternative Title
Abstract
This paper will explore how Frazer’s dying god and sacrificial king are taken up and reimagined in The King must Die, by twentieth century novelist Mary Renault. A pathway from Frazer’s dying god and sacrificed king to Renault’s boy-king imagined as Greek hero Theseus is traced through the Frazerian-influenced excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, and later British poet Robert Graves. Evans imagines a vegetation-focused ‘Great Goddess’ with a dying son/consort for his Minoans, also drawing on the figures of Minos and the minotaur from later Greek myth: these motifs are central to Renault’s novel. Graves’ influence on Renault, himself deeply influenced by Frazer in The White Goddess, is seen in the novel’s embedded narrative of a matriarchy overpowered by a horse-riding sky-god worshiping patriarchal culture. Renault connects this to the site and cult practices of Eleusis, where Theseus meets an unnamed Queen, and is called upon to kill her husband/king. This paper will explore how Renault reimagines these mythic narratives for her mid-twentieth century audience, embedding these motifs in an ongoing tradition of misinterpretations and misplaced popular assumptions about Bronze Age Crete in a way that continues the work of both Evans and Frazer before him.
Additional Authors: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough: Frazer's Golden Bough at 100 (Conference); Tully, Caroline Jane; Budin, Stephanie Lynn; University of Melbourne;
Description
1 video file. ms150-40-018_tittl-larissa_great-goddess_2023-02-12.mp4 .mp4 551.09 MB 577,861,705
Citation
Tittl, Larissa. "From there to here and back again: Evan's Great Goddess, Frazer's Dying King and Mary Renault's popular fiction." Paper presented at the Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough: Frazer’s Golden Bough at 100, Melbourne, Australia, February 12, 2023. In New Age Movements, Occultism, and Spiritualism Research Library. Archives and Special Collections. Valdosta State University. Valdosta, GA. https://hdl.handle.net/10428/7063
Publisher
New Age Movements, Occultism, and Spiritualism Research Library
License
Permission to post this digital asset provided by Larissa Tittl to the Valdosta State University Archives & Special Collections to be part of the New Age Movements, Occultism, and Spiritualism Research Library.