Hi everybody.
Welcome to my writing shed.
My name is Helen Lovatt and
I am Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham,
where I work mainly on Greek and Latin epic and its reception.
So this is massive,
great big poems about heroes, and battles and journeys.
And what I want to talk to you today is the Argonautica.
So this is the story of Jason and the Argonauts who go
across the Black Sea into the unknown regions to Colchis,
to bring back the Golden Fleece.
And it's a bit like you've got gathered together
all the most amazing heroes in the Greek world.
It's a bit like Avengers Assemble.
And it's very exciting.
And it's also a really interesting myth
because it is incredibly varied.
So we don't have a full narrative version
until the Hellenistic version of
Apollonius in the 3rd century BC.
So there's all sorts of
variance from the early parts of the tradition.
And it's still used in
all sorts of different ways right up until the present day.
And I just thought I would show you
a few items from my Argonaut collection.
So, this is one thing that I was very,
very excited when I found. It's called the Merlin Codex.
It's a trilogy of fantasy books by Robert Holdstock.
And it mashes up the Argonaut myth,
with the Arthurian legends.
So you've got the figure of Merlin imagined as a wizard,
who goes through history in all sorts of
different shapes and actually was an Argonaut himself.
And his, sort of,
his lover is Medea.
And they resurrect Jason and bring him
back with the Argo as well from under a deep frozen lake.
And then there's a whole bunch of Celtic warriors who
go on a big expedition to Delphi.
And, and Jason then goes on a quest
to find his children that were killed by Medea.
So it's a really exciting, complex,
bizarre mash up in the fantasy genre,
sort of dark mythology.
So that's one of my real favourite versions of I
hope to write a lot more about it in the future.
I've been writing a,
I've been writing a book on the Argonaut
tradition called In Search of Jason and the Argonauts.
And some of the versions
I'm most interested in are versions written for children.
So when we think about myth,
we quite often ignore
children's literature as being less important for some reason.
Probably because we don't think of children as being that important.
And children's literature has a really big effect on how we
remember and think of myth.
This is one, a particular one I've chosen by Sofia Zarabouka,
which is published by the Getty.
And I chose this one to show you because it's just really
beautiful and also really interesting as well.
There are all sorts of lovely moments in here.
Here we've got the Harpies attacking the prophet Phineas.
And you can see these sort of
bird ladies coming down and carefully dressed.
But they've also got bat wings,
which we'll be coming back to.
And that really shows
the influence of the 1963 classic Jason and the
Argonauts film with amazing special effects
by Ray Harryhausen and where he was
the first person really to give the harpies bat wings
because it was a much easier way to make them.
and then here I've got a version
by James Riordan with illustrations by Jason Cockcroft.
And this one really interests me because it comes slightly
after the next big sort of movie version,
the 2000 TV miniseries.
And it has elements, I think,
of Troy about it. If you've seen Brad Pitt in Troy.
And it also uses vase paintings.
You can see some of
the lovely evocations of Greek vase painting.
But it also is strongly linked to the 2000s TV movie. So
here you can see
the use of stars towards the beginning
and that also happens at the beginning
of the movie.
It's a way of reflecting on the fact that lots of
the figures in the myths became stars.
And then when the whole crew are gathered together,
you can see that a lot of the members of the crew
evoke the representations of the crew in the TV movie,
so you've got a Black Orpheus.
You've got Atalanta
in relatively modest non-sexualized clothing.
You've got a relatively young looking Jason
and an older Hercules.
So this one, shows a lot of influence from the 2000 film.
And I also really love this graphic novel by Dan Whitehead
and Sankha Banerjee.
It's quite a complex one which really deals with the whole story,
including the tragedy of Medea,
where she ends up killing her and Jason's children.
But I just wanted to show you the Talos episode.
So in the Harryhausen movie,
he's a big bronze man,
who stands on the cliffs and attacks them.
And you can see him here looming
over them and the big rock that he's going to throw at them.
And then what interests me about
this version is all
the connecting devices and the way he looks.
A much more industrial.
sort of, robotic figure in this version,
almost like the Iron Giant in the film.
And there's loads of lovely images,
some of which do also I think evoke
one or other of the films.
We do have this very,
very dramatic red dragon.
And I just want to show you the brilliant,
where they clash. They go through the clashing rocks. Here we go.
You can see this very long narrow panel
with a long narrow passageway.
And they're worried that they're going to grind together.
So the visuals give us another way into the story.
And they also show some of
their allegiance to particular versions.
As well as giving us a whole bunch more stuff to interpret.
I'll just finish with one more that I can't really
talk about in any depth in the book
because it's quite hard to convey.
And that's the board game Argonauts.
I was very excited when I found this.
It was made in Greece and translated into English.
And it's quite complicated.
It's actually a collaborative game rather than competitive.
So you each have a sort of
stable of Argonauts and you have to work
together to fight off
dangers and collaborate get your ship home.
It's actually pretty hard to win.
I think we have so far died several times.
And it's really interesting again how the different cards,
and it includes all these event cards,
which include many more of the events
than you would normally get in a film with a,
with a Greek flavour to
the transliteration, so it keeps
its sense of Greekness much more strongly.
And you can see the Talos here,
Talos is quite a Harryhausen,
sort of Talos, so
a little bit more polished and modernist and dramatic looking.
We've got harpies, they've got their bird
wings back, they're not bat winged harpies but they are
a bit more sexualized than the ones in the children's book.
And we do have quite a similar Red Dragon
to the one in the graphic novel.
And the characters are quite interesting.
They reveal a variety of different backgrounds,
but, so Argos, for instance,
does look exactly like the Argos in the 2000 film.
As does Media, she is very similar.
Her sort of orientalised dress and her striking makeup.
And then you also have an Atalanta.
So keeping the feminist representation,
one of the things I found is that there are
very few, Atalanta does occur in one of the ancient mythographers,
Apollodorus, which means it's likely
she was in a tradition in some of the early versions,
but she isn't included by
our main narrative version, Apollonius.
And then is not really popular at all until
the Victorian period when she arrives and just stays.
So pretty much all the 20th,
21st century versions have Atalanta. And Jason.
Jason is interesting here because he is
a lot more masculine and muscular and heroic-
looking. So it's interesting how in the board game, the sort of gender
representation is a lot more polarised than in the 2000 TV movie
or in children's literature.
Anyway, I could talk about this for hours,
but I won't! Thank you very much for listening.
And I hope one day to see you in my Jason and the Argonauts module.