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;
