MS/150/40/018 [Video file]

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

• Author: Tittl, Larissa
• Summary: 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.
• Subjects: Renault, Mary. King must die; Renault, Mary--Criticism and interpretation; Frazer, James George, 1854-1941. Golden bough;
• Genre: Conference papers and proceedings; Literary criticism;
• Additional Authors: Shaking the Tree, Breaking the Bough: Frazer's Golden Bough at 100 (Conference); Tully, Caroline Jane; Budin, Stephanie Lynn; University of Melbourne;
• YouTubeURL: https://youtu.be/2zjjK9TDmXA
• UUID: 595438B4-56EE-8FA1-4783-7A23DF62868B
• File: `ms150-40-018_tittl-larissa_great-goddess_2023-02-12.mp4` Bytes: 577861705 MD5: 82E8467A789B4C4C76AD73DD4EB6A4F7