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Author: Elizabeth Cady

Liz is a sometimes professor, often reading, often writing mom who lives in Wisconsin. Her first book was published under the pen name Anya Getty, and can be found on Amazon!
Ancient Worlds: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man will still eat you for supper.

Ancient Worlds: In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man will still eat you for supper.

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After Odysseus, famed warrior and inventor of the Trojan Horse (the original wooden one, not the one you can pick up from questionable internet sites), left behind the Island of the Lotus-Eaters, he sails on to a far more dangerous location: the Island of the Cyclops.

16polyphemus

Cyclopses.

Cyclopes.

Whatever. The island where a bunch of one-eyed cannibalistic giants live.

Unfortunately for Odysseus and his men, they don’t realize that they’ve staggered out of a naval adventure movie and into a horror flick. All they know is that they arrive on shore, starving and desperate for shelter, and find a giant cave stocked with cheese, and only a complete monster would object to starving, desperate, lost travellers eating. Right?

They’re in for a shock when Polyphemus returns. He not only objects, he turns around and eats two of Odysseus’ crew members (thus proving that the Red Shirt trope is older than dirt). Odysseus objects to this, claiming that it is wrong to eat one’s guests. Or anyone, for that matter. Polyphemus responds that since Odysseus is his guest, he will give him the gift of eating him last.

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Ancient Worlds: The Island of the Lotus-Eaters

Ancient Worlds: The Island of the Lotus-Eaters

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bluelotusThe Odyssey stands alongside Gilgamesh as perhaps the earliest Western examples of fantasy literature. You can still start a fight among Classicists over who wrote the epic and its companion, The Iliad: for that matter, you can start a fight over precisely when it was written. (Or compiled. Or told by one person and written down by another. Or, according to one theory, the year that a Boeotian sat down and decided to invent the Greek alphabet solely for the purpose of recording the best story he’d ever heard.) The current consensus says the 8th century BCE, but ask again in twenty years.

While thematically the Iliad is a work about power and anger, the Odyssey is about the consequences of anger, about the effort it takes to leave warfare and vengeance behind. But above all else, it’s about homecoming, and what homecoming means in the aftermath of Troy. Most specifically, it’s about the journey of Odysseus, the architect of the Trojan Horse, from the beaches of Asia Minor to his home on the Greek island of Ithaca.

The trip would have been faster if he had decided to walk.

Odysseus’ journey home is told in the first person: he has washed up on the shores of Phaeacia and is found by Nausicaa, daughter of the king of Phaeacians. She brings him home (hoping to keep him), and once he’s gotten a bath and his first hot meal in years, he begins to tell the story of why, ten years after the fall of Troy, he still hasn’t managed to make it home. As he tells of his adventures, he quickly moves out of the known world (first Troy, then an encounter with the Ciconians of Thrace) into the unknown, the land of myth.

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The New Kid

The New Kid

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tsAs one of the new recruits here at Black Gate, I’ll be bringing you a series of what I hope you’ll find to be interesting posts soon enough. But first I wanted to say howdy and tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m Liz. I’m an Academic by training: a Classicist to be precise, and a philologist to be downright pedantic. (My dissertation was written on ancient cognitive theory, the philosophy of emotion, ethnography, and Lucan, but I promise if I bring up Aristotle here it will be purely for the “COOL!” factor.) Words are what I do. I’m a writer by hobby and a geek out of sheer passion. Above all else I love story, in all its forms. Told over a set of dice, in verse, interactively through a video game, on the big screen, small screen, or in ink and paper, it’s the blood in my veins.

So what will I be doing here?

Every story needs a setting, and before Narnia, Middle Earth, and Wonderland there was Aeaea, Asgard, Hyperborea, and the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. As long as we have been telling stories we’ve been inventing new worlds to set them in, and my goal is to spend some time exploring these worlds. I’ll begin with my own bailiwick, which is the Greco-Roman world, and go from there. I am, of course, eager to hear any suggestions any of you might have.

Walk with me, if you’re so inclined, and let’s see what we shall see.