The Recreation of Myth

So often people consider myth to be something locked into time, unchangable. Sometime in the past (generally outside of living memory) a myth was born, and it has been passed on to today. Myth flows along the lines of time and is restrained by it.

In reality, though, myth is not static, but living. We retell myths, and with every retelling something changes. At some point, after enough changes, the myth is a new myth.

In fact, in class on Wednesday, we invented a new myth. Most of you probably missed it, but as we were discussing Leda and the Swan a new myth was born. No longer does Helen of Troy come from the egg, but Angelina Jolie.

Shakespeare too is known for the reinvention of the myth (which is really any story). He was not the first to write King Lear, Hamlet, or Troilus and Cressida, but he made a new myth in the telling of them. Many of the greatest tales that can be told have been told, so now they must simply be retold in a way that matters.

That is modern myth, the recreation of the old. Fantastic Medievalism (the use of a fictional middle ages as a setting in a story) exemplifies this trait, taking not an old story, but an old time and taking it forth unto to today.

If we limit ourselves to only the myth that is static, we have not only killed myth, but destroyed imagination.