The great myths, retold

These are the stories themselves, at length. Not summaries, not plot outlines, not a paragraph telling you that a goddess was abducted and spring was invented — the whole thing, written to be read straight through the way you would read any other story.

Why they are written rather than reproduced

There is a great deal of mythology on the internet, and almost all of it falls into two piles. One is the out-of-copyright translation: accurate, free, and written in a nineteenth-century register that most people give up on by the second page. The other is the plot summary, which tells you what happened without giving you any reason to care.

Every retelling here is a third thing: original prose, written from the ancient sources by someone who has read them, aiming to do for a modern reader what the original did for its own audience. That means real sentences, pacing, and characters whose behaviour makes sense — and it means these are not translations and are never presented as such. Where a famous line matters, it is quoted and attributed. Everything else is written fresh.

What each retelling tells you that a novel would not

A myth retelling here carries its evidence with it.

• The source work is named, and where the story survives in several works, each is named with what it uniquely contains.
• The version being followed is stated. Where the sources diverge — and they diverge constantly, over who was present, how many objects, whether a bargain was made in advance — the retelling picks a line and says so rather than pretending the choice was not made.
• The alternatives are given, briefly, after the story rather than interrupting it. That ordering is deliberate: footnotes inside a narrative destroy it.
• Nothing is invented. No dialogue is supplied that the tradition does not contain, no motive is assigned that no source supports. Where a character's reasons are genuinely unstated in the ancient material, the retelling leaves them unstated, because the gap is often the most interesting thing about the story.

The problem of the version everybody knows

A surprising number of the most familiar mythological stories are not the ancient ones. The version in circulation is frequently late, foreign to the tradition it is attributed to, or invented outright in the last few centuries — a Roman poet's literary reworking of a Greek story, a Victorian children's collection smoothing an ending, a film that needed a third act. None of that makes the popular version worthless; it makes it a different object with a different date.

Where a retelling here departs sharply from the story you were told at school, it says why and names the text responsible for each version. That is usually the most interesting paragraph on the page, because watching a story get rewritten to suit a new audience is watching mythology work.

Choosing where to begin

If you have read no mythology at all, take a story from a tradition you think you already know — the familiarity is a useful handrail, and the ancient version will surprise you.

If you want the greatest possible distance from what you expect, take something from the Mesopotamian or Irish material. A story written down four thousand years ago in a language nobody spoke for two millennia does not behave like a modern narrative, and that is the pleasure of it.

If you are reading with a child, or teaching, note that these follow the sources rather than the nursery versions. The ancient material is frank about violence and sex, and this site does not soften it into something it never was, though it does not dwell either.

How these connect to the rest of the site

Every figure who appears in a retelling has, or will have, a portrait page of their own, and the two are written to do different jobs. The story gives you the events as narrative. The portrait explains who the figure was to the people who worshipped them — the cult, the epithets, the sanctuaries, the family arguments between sources — which a story cannot carry without stopping being a story.

The same division applies to the family trees, which show the relationships a retelling can only gesture at, and to the tradition hubs, which explain how the story reached us at all. A myth page assumes none of that context, so you can start here and follow the links outward, or read the hub first and come back. Both routes work.

What is here and what is coming

The retellings on this site are chosen by two criteria: the story has to be substantial enough to sustain a full telling, and the sources have to be good enough to write from responsibly. That excludes some famous episodes which survive only as a sentence in a late compiler, and it includes several that are less well known than they deserve — the Irish and Mesopotamian sections especially, where the best material is not the material that circulates.

New retellings are added regularly, and the longest and most-cited stories are written first.