Orpheus and Eurydice: Reception of a Classical Myth in International Children’S Literature

chapter 19 Orpheus and Eurydice: Reception of a Classical Myth in International Children’s Literature

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Don’t Look Back! is the fifth book in the popular “Mad Myths” series by Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore.1 Those readers who have some basic knowledge of ancient myths might suspect that the title refers to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. The image on the book cover supports this conjecture, since it depicts a three-headed dog-like monster that puts two children to flight. The blurb on the back cover mysteriously announces that the main protagonists Percy and Andy meet the “most famous musician in ancient Greece busking in a tube station” which leads to the boys joining him on a journey into the Underworld. Interestingly, the name of the famous musician is not mentioned until the end of Chapter 2, when he introduces himself to the boys. While this parodist story makes fun of the ancient myth, portraying Orpheus as a loser, Eurydice as a snappish lady, and Hades and Persephone2 as an elderly narrow-minded couple, other children’s books deal with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth more earnestly, focusing on the love story and the obstacles Orpheus has to over- come in the Underworld. In any case, the fascination with ancient myths and subjects taken from Greek and Roman history has not decreased in international children’s literature; quite the contrary, it has obviously increased since the beginning of the new millennium.3 Given the fact that the majority of young readers nowadays are not acquainted with these subjects at school, the question arises why children and adolescents still hunger for stories that focus on ancient mythology.

1 See Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore, Don’t Look Back (London: Barn Owl Books, 2006). 2 In the children’s books under discussion, Persephone does not play a major part, whereas the Persephone myth is prevalent in modern girls’ fiction, as shown in Holly Virginia Blackford, The Myth of Persephone in Girls’ Fantasy Literature (New York–Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 3 See, for instance, Sheila Murnaghan, “Classics for Cool Kids: Popular and Unpopular Versions of Antiquity for Children,” Classical World 104 (2011): 339–351. An overview article on the reception in international children’s literature can be found in Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, “Children’s and Young Adult Literature,” in Manfred Landfester in cooperation with Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, eds., Classical Tradition, vol. 16.1 of Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclo- paedia of the Ancient World (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2006), coll. 750–754.

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One might also ask which strategies the authors use to convey the background knowledge that is essential for understanding the whole story. From a corpus of more than fifteen titles I have chosen five children’s books from four countries (France, Germany, uk, and us) in order to delineate the multiple intertextual references to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, namely: Werner Heiduczek’s Orpheus und Eurydike [Orpheus and Eurydice] (1989), Yvan Pommaux’s Orphée et la morsure du serpent [Orpheus and the snakebite] (2009), Tony Abbott’s The Battle Begins (2011), Katherine Marsh’s The Night Tourist (2007), and Cornelia Funke’s “Tintenwelt” [Inkworld] trilogy, consist- ing of the volumes Tintenherz [Inkheart] (2003), Tintenblut [Inkspell] (2005), and Tintentod [Inkdeath] (2007).4 These books not only represent an astonish- ing array of (mixed) genres, for instance, comic, fantasy,5 detective story, and young adult novel, but also reveal a broad range of multiple meanings and intertextual references which largely contribute to the books’ narrative complex- ity. Since the authors usually cannot expect that young readers are acquainted with the Orpheus myth, they employ different strategies to prompt the child to realise that the story—although situated in a contemporary setting and time— subliminally alludes to the ancient myth. The question arises why children’s literature authors have chosen this particular myth. It could be because the Or- pheus myth deals with universal topics, such as the significance of friendship and true love, and the contemplation of death. These are generally valid issues, which attract young readers who are eager to reflect on the meaning of life. In the following sections, I demonstrate how these issues are realised in five children’s books, which I have arranged according to their inherent degree of difficulty in deciphering the intertextual allusions to the Orpheus myth. While Heiduczek retells the Orpheus myth in full extension, Pommaux chooses an- other strategy as he intermingles ancient and modern times. In contrast, Ab- bott and Marsh gradually prepare the reader for the connection by inserting

4 A comparative analysis of the depiction of classical mythology in modern children’s literature is a promising endeavour, as shown in Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, “Der Sturz des Ikarus: Klassische Mythologie als Prätext in der modernen Kinderliteratur,” in Martin Koren- jak and Stefan Tilg, eds., Pontes iv. Die Antike in der Alltagskultur der Gegenwart (Innsbruck– Wien–Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2007), 49–60. 5 The majority of children’s books focusing on the Orpheus myth belong to the fantasy genre. An exception to the rule is Dakota Lane’s The Orpheus Obsession (New York: Harper Col- lins, 2005), whose setting is situated in a story world which resembles our own and does not display any fantastic elements. Nancy Springer’s The Friendship Song (New York: Atheneum, 1992), however, hovers between realism and fantasy. Because of the first narrator’s unreliable narration, the reader cannot definitely decide whether the strange events that happened in the backyard really happened or were an offspring of the narrator’s imagination.