Yup. Those daulaire books are the best. My kid loves them.
The Norse mythology I liked best was Kevin Crossley-Holland.
He's not entirely scholarly -- by which I mean, he gets some things wrong -- but he's very readable.
I liked Kevin Crossley-Holland's collection of norse myths as a, well, middle-schooler I guess, enough that I can actually remember his name.
The Norse mythology I liked best was Walt Simonson's run on Thor.
They're probably not too young for the shorter Icelandic sagas.
Also, re: Greek myths, shock was expressed just this morning that we expose children to them (the proximate topic being Zeus's habit of falling upon women in various forms).
Ha, yes!
For the Greek and Roman myths, I used a graphic novel version by Cirro Oh. Just called Greek and Roman Myths, Vol. I and II. It was pretty good, as far as scholarship.
I used the Crossley-Holland in my Mythology-as-Lit class here at the U. and both when I was home-schooling the kid.
When I was in graduate school, I liked Robert Graves' version, Greek Myths, b/c he gave so many different versions of each myth. I am pretty sure you need to skip his interpretations though.
It's true that the myths are super rapey. Not good rapey, very rapey. It does give one pause.
I feel like the most unfogged-correct answer here might be Ovid and the Prose Edda.
I am pretty sure you need to skip his interpretations though.
Once as a callow undergraduate I asked JZ Smith about The White Goddess and he remarked that one of the reasons the end of Graves' The Golden Ass works so well is that Graves really believes in the cult of Isis. I'm sure I've mentioned this here before.
The Prose Edda will be a great opportunity to introduce your kids to the concept of euhemerism, which (I predict) will be increasingly important as the 21st century proceeds.
9. Yes, Graves' interpretations are barking. Unless O's kids are older than I think, I suspect his book would be a bit too heavy. But useful later on.
When I was a kid there were comics that did pretty straight treatments of e.g. the Perseus myth or the Argonautica. But I don't know if they're still available.
Gosh, I'll be sad when Smith dies. :'(
This seems like a question for JRoth.
14 Me too. I loved his work back when I was doing the history of religions thing. Did you study with him?
The Norse mythology I liked best was Walt Simonson's run on Thor.
The part in the Elder Eddas where the spaceship Skuttlebutt delivers a horse-alien to fight Múspell's sons is my favorite.
16: I took several classes with him as an undergrad (one each on The Golden Bough, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms volume 2, and Elementary Forms of Religious Life). I didn't study with him in any formal sense, though.
The second class also read The Myth of the State.
Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Greek Heroes is a good retelling for children age 6-8. A summary of Hesiod's Theogony, plus the stories of Perseus, Heracles, Theseus, and Jason. Green's Myths of the Norsemen is also excellent.
Comment 12 amused me greatly though I don't know doink about the Prose Edda.
Surely one of you nerds must have previously recommended Craig P. Russell's graphic novel sequential art bande dessinée comic book versions of Wagner.
You could have them read (as back up, not for their primary text) the Percy Jackson books which have the Greek gods as main characters. So many of my students come to my Myth as Lit classes through those novels.
Eurocentrism to the moon round here.
Legally, I think the OP is exempt from that charge.
Current ongoing popular anime series broadcast on Japanese tv, in its fourth rendition since the early 1990s, is based on the Persian epic Amir Arsalan. Another takes place in an Aztec-based imaginary realm, with various animal totemic superheroines (!).
There may be more.
Yet, American white liberals will be quick to search out racism in Japan, while limiting what they teach their kids to Greeks, Romans, and Norse legends.
If the answer is that Euromyths are at the center of our culture, that is a fucking problem and challenge, not an excuse.
Carry on, enlightened ones.
I got most of my Japanese myths, like that of the single great robot-god that forms from several separate robot-gods, from commercial television.
Also I kind of draw the line at encouraging my kid in Aztec spirituality.
34: They're pretty much interchangeable in context.
To the OP, definitely the d'Aulaires as a starting point. Edith Hamilton is also good. I read a bunch of mythology books as a kid, but those are the two that really stand out. I'll try to remember some of the others.
Yes, based on my memory plus the two of my kids who were interested in mythology. Some version I had as a kid (~ 55 years ago) also had Sohrab and Rustum plus maybe some other non-European ones (assuming Iceland as European).
As a kid, I gained a love of Greek mythology through reading the book of myths that came with the board game "By Jove."
38: I had that game too! I had totally forgotten about it until just now.
Cricket magazine always had a good retelling when I was a kid. It was perfect-bound at the time and the best thing.
31: I'm hoping impending Grexit will give my children's mythological exposure a retrospective post-Ottoman flavour.
I remember the Greek myths for kids in my primary school library / book club were by Evslin(?). No idea how well they do from a scholarly perspective but I remember appreciating them leaving in much of the sex and violence (though muting the rapiness which does raise all sorts of dodgy compromises).
Don't forget the Saami d'Aulaires book too!
There's also Rosemary Sutcliff's Black Ships Before Troy.
There's a band playing at my local tonight with the unforgettable moniker of "The Pleasure Horse" -- this occasioned much hilarity.
In addition to all the other recommendations, they can learn a bit about the Trojan War by listening to this ABBA song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os_bSwg02J4
Are all ABBA songs secretly about war? Fernando, Waterloo, etc. It was really militarist propaganda with pop music icing.
I have no idea what you are talking about ;)
To be fair, they also wrote songs about divorce.
The Prose Edda will be a great opportunity to introduce your kids to the concept of euhemerism
I'm more of a metahemeralism man myself.
Are all ABBA songs secretly about war? Fernando, Waterloo, etc.
"Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight" s/b
"le vrai courage, c'est celui de trois heures du matin."
What the hell is going on in modern-day Greece? I don't understand - - anti-austerity vote, dramatic exit because we've got the creditors on the run, now this. Was Varoufakis hoodwinked or the most cynical man alive? Was Tsipras always planning to do this? I DON'T UNDERSTAND.
(Are we talking about this on another thread? I didn't see anything.)
The other threads are about dog kicking and rational decision making.
Or, as UPS corporate attorneys call it, "Monday."
And what is Germany (the IMF? I've lost track of exactly where the current demands are coming from.) thinking? This does not look like a normal negotiation at all.
Basically:
EU suggests austerity as part of bailout offer
Varoufakis says "referendum"
EU withdraws offer
Greeks vote to reject offer
V goes back to Brussels and says "the people have spoken, give us a better offer"
EU laughs out loud
V says "OK, we will accept austerity as part of bailout as per the offer"
EU says "No, you will accept more austerity and close supervision because we don't trust you, as a precondition to even starting to negotiate on a bailout"
V accepts.
Varoufakis? Tsipras, throughout. Ugh. Coffee.
Honestly I know it will be terrible in the short term, but I'm not sure Grexit is worse for the Greeks than what they're getting now, especially long term.
The Guardian had a quote from a troika "senior official" saying that Tsipras was warned that if the Greeks voted "No" the terms would be much harsher. Maybe this is that. Honestly, I suspect this whole thing has ceased to be primarily about money some time ago.
I'm kind of with 58, with the caveat that I am unable, through lack of direct experience, to really have a feel for how bad the short term will be.
58: yeah, you and Krugman both. I suspect the Greeks are banking on being able to gradually roll back the austerity conditions (or just not comply with them) starting in about six months' time. Grexit would have been a clean break - it's not like they could have gradually sneaked back into the euro. But if in six months it is revealed that the Greeks haven't quite put through, say, the VAT reforms they promised, then maybe Europe will be more inclined to fudge rather than have another exhausting round of last-minute crisis talks.
If the U.S. had a true visionary leader, we would have stepped in with an offer to Greece to become our 51st state.
That would probably ruin the toplessness.
And what is Germany (the IMF? I've lost track of exactly where the current demands are coming from.) thinking? This does not look like a normal negotiation at all.
I think the goal is to make it official that there will no longer be a Greek government, and all decisions regarding Greece will now be made as if it were a German colony, exclusively for the benefit of Germany.
63
I was just thinking, if we really wanted to fuck with the EU, we should offer to bankroll the Grexit and rebuild Greece. Maybe under Pres. Sanders we can do a Marshall plan for countries seeking out of the EU.
64: No, that's legal here in Ohio. You remember that, don't you?
Legal, but not normative. I saw more toplessness is one day in Greece than in 8 years in Ohio.
68: You didn't attend the gay pride parade, did you?
No. It was just a regular day at the beach in Greece.
Basically, Syriza is incompetent, like the cynics all said. They could have folded a long time ago on more favorable terms.
Other cynics have said that the German government wants Greece out, and the way that each time Greece says yes the Troika demands increase suggests this is true. But it's equally likely that they have the measure of Tsipras, and that he's all bluster.
I think Greece had a strategy of messy exit that they could have pursued, given the weak central European institutions. There's no formal way for them to leave the Euro-zone, right? They could just announce that the ECB has abrogated its legal responsibilities, and issue IOUs. Then they could sue. I think you could make a decent argument that the ECB has in fact abrogated its legal responsibilities -- they deliberately pushed the Greek banking system into insolvency to punish Syriza. Given the political realities I'm sure that Greece would lose, but in the ensuing chaos their fortunes might improve.
At this point, fascism has to be a pretty likely outcome for Greece, unless some economic miracle occurs. Given the level of national humiliation the Troika is imposing on Greece, I'm not sure that if I were Greek I wouldn't vote for a far-right figure who promised to stand up to the Germans.
Entertainingly, the lab Sally's interning in is heavily Greek -- the PI is Greek-American, but with strong links to Greece, another professor is a Greek immigrant, the grad student who was supposed to have been supervising her actually got stuck in Greece last week, I guess some flights were cancelled -- so the whole place is buzzing with politics.
Basically, Syriza is incompetent, like the cynics all said.
Syriza started as, and essentially always was, a left unity campaign front. Very hard for such an entity to run a capitalist government, although they might have been able to run a revolution. However, they chose not to, and my guess is that they will now rapidly decompose into their constituent parts. 71.4 seems about right, although personally I wouldn't vote for Golden Dawn under any circumstances.
I also slightly blame the Danish government, which is in the EU but not the Euro, for not cabling Tsipras last week: "Come on in, the water's fine!" (Cameron could theoretically have done it too, but he's too heavily committed to evil.)
If the U.S. had a true visionary leader, we would have stepped in with an offer to Greece to become our 51st state.
I am pretty sure that they would rather starve. The Greek left might prefer being run by the US to being run by the Turks, but it would be a close call.
What about having Greece run by Cyprus as a compromise?
It is becoming more and more obvious that leaving the euro is unthinkable for Tsipras. Trouble is, it's now obvious to the creditor nations too, so Grexit is not really a credible threat.
74: well, never having been in the euro would be obviously better for Greece than being in the euro, but it's less obvious that leaving the euro would be better - it would certainly involve a lot of short-term pain.
Plus it should not be underestimated how un-European the Greek political setup actually is. They are not Denmark with ouzo. They're almost more like Tunisia with caryatids.
So we're all pretty much bumfuzzled that various people didn't do various things which seemed like probably the smart thing to do at the time and with hindsight seem like definitely the smart thing to have done. Sigh.
The part that troubles me the most for the long term health of Greece is their having to put government assets in a "fund" so they "might" be privatized "later."
Actually, there seems to be a little room to manuever if Tsipras has any political will to do so to protect the most important industries/sectors. Nothing to stop the next PM from cashing it all in, though.
77.last: Could you explain that analogy (btw, banned)? Greece doesn't seem like it has/had a Ben Ali equivalent.
75: Really? Even if we promise them an Athens Disneyworld?
79: as in, the low-tax/low-welfare/familial support/nationalisation/spoils/patronage setup in Greece is very different from what you would see in northern European countries, and more like what you would see in north African countries.
And it's not an analogy, dammit, it's a comparison.
Is there any credible scenario in which one end result is the complete and permanent dissolution of the Greek system at U.S. universities?
My main insight into German elite opinion comes from a family friend who is an economist and an EU consultant to the Merkel cabinet, so in a position of real power.
1. In 2012, he told me the Germans were looking for a way to kick Greece out of the eurozone while still holding them responsible for their debts. From what I've gathered, it looks like the Germans have either figured out how to do that or have decided they just want Greece out.
2. He was part of the team of economists who initially evaluated the Greek economy and gave them the green light back before they first joined in the 70s/80s. He feels that the Greeks never deserved to join the euro and blatantly lied to his face about it, something he now finds personally offensive. Probably the most charitable reading of the issue from the German side (which I am not sympathetic to) is that they feel Greeks lied to get in, enjoyed 30 years of riding high on their ill gotten gains, and now want to be bailed out by the Germans. The initial act of dishonesty has really pissed Germans off (though the anger is not directed towards the banks that cooked the Greek books, but rather the Greek people). Also, Germans get really really pissed when people don't pay their taxes.*
3. He is also super pissed at the Greeks for "squandering" bailout money that could have gone to Spain, Portugal, or Italy. He thinks the EU ignored those economies to focus on Greece, when money to help out Spain would have been far better spent, and without spending the money on Greece, there would the political capital to give Spain meaningful amounts of money. (I don't know if this could have ever happened, but I actually think this would have been mutually beneficial for Greece and the eurozone. Greece takes a painful 2008 exit but then can rebuild without IMF/German meddling, and Spain/Portugal/Italy get substantive help.)
Another attitude I've found among Germans is a sense of betrayal. I've been told by baby boomer age Germans that they were the first people willing to visit Greece after the junta, and Greece wouldn't be where they were today without the German tourist dollar. A sense of "We made you and we can break you if you turn on us" underlies some of the German anger. The fact the one of the first things the Greeks did in 2008 was call the Germans Nazis also added to this anger. I have no idea if this perception is in any way true, but I found it somewhat pervasive among my German acquaintances.
Anyways, regardless of how accurate these narratives are, it's clearly in the Greeks' interest to get out, since the Germans have no interest in not making the Greeks suffer.
*I think austerity is evil and the German self-righteousness is undeserved, but I do get this. Most grad students I know are open and unabashed tax dodgers, and I generally just want to punch people in the face all tax season.
83 is somewhat reassuring. I assumed the Germans would want to turn a lot of other Eurozone countries into German colonies with no government of their own as well. But if German people just really really hate Greek people for some reason, maybe it'll stop here.
Germans must really hate Greek people. They ruined their own invasion of Russia just to help the Italians beat them.
So the takeaway lesson is that you can have people be nice to you before you call them Nazis but afterwards not so much.
Olivia Coolidge's Greek Myths, if you want to have your kid wake up screaming after seeing the picture of Arachne being turned into a giant spider.
Olivia Coolidge's Greek Myths, if you want to have your kid wake up screaming after seeing the picture of Arachne being turned into a giant spider.
83.2: Weird. I was under the impression that EU policymakers knew about the swap contracts that let Greece meet the Maastricht criteria.
I've come to think that collective Germans are loony on economics, a looniness that their economists suffer from, and as a consequence Germany will never be as rich as the United States. Germany has done direct damage to their own economy to pursue their moralistic fantasies in Greece.
You know who had loony theories about economics?
89.2 seems fucknets. The amount of damage the U.S. has done to its own economy to pursue moralistic fantasies is huge. War on drugs, the health care system, the educational system....
89. 1: Eurostat knew, encouraged them, and lied about it afterwards. To me, personally. Whether the German government knew, I don't know.
92 gets a big fat whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat from me.
If anything I'd think that Germany and most other European countries are a little better when it comes to the moralizing/economics thing. The "household budget!" metaphor that gets trotted out every time Republicans want to stop Democrats from doing something socially (and economically) beneficial is a pretty endless bit of American society. And the German government doesn't sound too different from the neo-liberal/centrist view in the US.
91: If you take in that generality, then yes, the US is obviously capable of stupid policies for moralistic reasons. But US macroeconomic policy is consistently better, and it has led to consistently higher economic growth. Consider the fact that at this point the US housing bubble has on net hurt the German economy more than the US economy.
Anyway, the macroeconomic factors seem more important than terrible policymaking in other realms. Consider the way the US wasted trillions of dollars on war in the Middle East, and at the end of it is still richer than Germany per capita.
No, it's worse. The household budget metaphor is pervasive in Europe as well. In the US at least there's some level of familiarity with Keynesian ideas that doesn't exist in Germany, and is weaker in Continental Europe as well.
Germany not only constitutionalized a balanced budget requirement, it then basically imposed it on the rest of Europe. This is part of why public investment is so low in Germany, despite super-low interest rates.
Greece implementing an oversight body for the fiscal compact is, I believe, part of the new agreement. Sigh.
I have an extremely annoying, probably mentally ill neighbor who is super into neighborhhod disaster planning and keeps urging me to show up at 4 hour meetings on Saturdays to talk about her disaster responsiveness plan for our street and some city-sponsored disaster training she's into. She likes to go door to door on the street with one of those ridiculous orange vests and a construction helmet on. It's depressing that this person is going to be my only lifeline and will probably leave my family abandoned when the big one hits but no way am I spending a weekend going to her fucking training.
Pointing to consistently higher growth as proof that your country understands economics better than other countries is not a great argument once you start looking at all the countries that have outgrown the US over the last few decades.
102: That really doesn't make a difference to the argument. Poorer countries grow faster than the US because they are catching up. In the 60s and 70s Germany also grew much faster than the US, and it was generally assumed this would continue until Germany caught up, but it hasn't. Why? But they're fucking loony on macroeconomics. They stumbled into a boom in 2011-2012, because they were the one European country for whom interest rates were low enough, and they immediately fucked it up. Since then they've had two years of flat growth, even though the US, UK, and Japan have all managed to grow over the same period. Is the main political issue in Germany domestic growth? No, it's how best to fuck up Greece.
The U.S. has had growth, but hasn't it all gone to capital and not wages? Fuck that.
And in the latest twist on Greece, the IMF weighs in on the Greek side.
105. Oddly enough, that was predictable from the noises the IMF have been making over the last couple of weeks. They're losing their edge as the go to villains of choice.
The CDU: too crazy for the IMF. They should make it their slogan in the next election.
The U.S. has had growth, but hasn't it all gone to capital and not wages?
Yes. I have a whole lot of charts about it, each more sickening that the last.
Fuck that.
Yes.
Try Geraldine McGaughrean. If it's okay to comment on the original question.
Unexpected, but always welcome.
This thread has fallen off the front page. How are we supposed to even know what the original question was?