First, please allow me to apologize for not publishing a series entry last Friday. It was completely my own fault. I knew I was going on vacation last week, and figured that, since any time I had on the computer would be limited, that I would personally write an entry for the week at some point. Did not happen. So, this week, I am publishing that which I had intended to publish last week.
By the way, I am looking for folks interested in writing an entry in this series; contact me to be added to the calendar.
Before Tolkien, Lewis, Alexander, Homer, Vergil, Baum, Peake, the Icelandic eddas and the rest, there was D'Aulaire (or more properly, were the D'Aulaires). I have spent much of my life wandering the roads of internal imagination, becoming a party to what I was reading, rather than an observer. I owe that to this wondrous couple.
I was already an inveterate reader ate age 4, when D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths was published in 1962. My parents and my siblings and I were all avid readers, untroubled by the distraction of television (I missed participation in the collective American trauma of JFK's assasination the following year). So my parents did not buy books for us children to "improve" us. They bought them because reading was what we did.
One day, my mother came home with this book. I opened the book, and read the following:
IN OLDEN TIMES,
when men still worshiped ugly idols, there
lived in the land of Greece a folk of shep-
herds and herdsmen who cherished light and
beauty. They did not worship dark idols like
their neighbors, but created instead their own
beautiful, radiant gods.
I was hooked from the word Go. The writing was so lyrical, so dreamlike. But that was not the whole story. The illustrations for the book were just magnificent. Some gloriously colored and anthropomorphic. Others chromatic, but filled with melancholic humanity. (Click on the Amazon link I have included above. Go to the "Look Inside" feature, and scroll through the first few pages which have been excerpted. You will understand.)
I will never forget watching and reading as Gaea is seduced by Uranus, Echidna protects her offspring, Athena emerges from Zeus's skull, Tantalus strains vainly for water or fruit.
I was already, at that point, a bit of a dreamy boy. But the D'Aulaires introduced me to another world. So, when I first read Tolkien at age 8, I found myself travelling along through Middle Earth. In the real world, I spent a lot of time going off on long walks, through sun, fog and rain, finding markers of these other worlds along the way.
Look, that stone is Aslan, waiting to come alive again when needed.
I am walking into an oak grove; elves are watching me from the trees.
This hail is as the stones falling in the battle in front of Troy.
There is Aphrodite above, now clothed in her new name Venus.
No, don't litter; Gaea will weep.
Yes, I love fantasy and mythology. But the D'Aulaires did not just open up my mind to that. They confirmed a nascent belief that reading was important and meaningful. That a life without reading is woefully incomplete.
Nowadays, I am more of an agnostic reader. I am no longer devoted solely to the misty avenues. But I can still carry myself into the page, regardless of the genre. That allows me access to the inner selves of the writers, and helps me understand ideas and opinions which might otherwise be foreign to me. And helps me stand with the writer, appreciating his or her blood, sweat and tears.
Do yourself a favor. If you have a young child, who is just beginning to read, introduce him or her to the D'Aulaire's world. You won't regret it. And read it for yourself. Allow that childlike sense of wonder you may have misplaced to flow back through you. You won't regret it.