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Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins review – gloriously interwoven tales

The classical stories of eight weaving women are depicted on their looms’ warp and weft in this thoughtful, dazzlingly illustrated collection

There is no shortage these days of lively, well-written retellings of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but Charlotte Higgins has embraced a central metaphor – weaving – that leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings. Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity.

As part of her research, Higgins herself learned to weave with replicas of ancient equipment. In any pre-industrial society, textile production is socially conspicuous, if only on account of the sheer number of hours required to transform parts of plants and animals into sails, tents, fishing and hunting nets, clothing, carpets, blankets, awnings and ornamental wall hangings, with elaborate scenic designs. Male poets borrowed their creative metaphors from textiles: a Homeric singer, a rhapsode, is literally a “song-stitcher”. Potters designing intricate stick people, chariots and funeral biers on geometric pottery produced at the time of the early bards copied their grid-templates from women’s weaving patterns. Roman authors self-consciously played on the etymological relationship between “text” and “textile”. For the momentous task of creating workable threads from tufts of wool, dyeing them, and labouring at huge looms was the responsibility of women.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3vVDi0q
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