In Search of Myths and Heroes

Michael Wood. 2005. In Search of Myths and Heroes: Exploring Four Epic Legends of the World. ISBN 0-520-24724-8. University of California Press, Berkeley. 260 pages, numerous full color and full page photographs, short bibliography, an index.

The book In Search of Myths and Heroes was written in conjunction with a public broadcasting program of the same name, produced by Maya Vision and the BBC. The program In Search of Myths and Heroes, which I have not seen, aired on the British Broadcasting Company over several nights in 2005.

In Search of Myths and Heroes reports on Michael Wood’s wistful journey to the homelands of four of the western world’s best known legends: Shangri-La, the Queen of Sheba, Jason and the Golden Fleece, and Arthur of Camelot. Archaeology has its origins in such searches, of course. Every 19th century archaeologist worth his salt went looking for Troy or the Ark of the Covenant or Atlantis. To modern archaeologists, these searches represent a wistful longing for some version of the past that never existed, and in the process creating a new story about the world before it was corrupted by the messy reality of human kind.

The written forms of the stories that Wood investigates are each at least 1000 years old, stories that were even then remote in time or geography. Shangri-La is the only story of the four that was written in the present tense; its roots are in the late 10th century tantric writings of India, but they speak of Tibet, distanced from the storyteller and his listeners by the ferocity of the Himalayas. The Queen of Sheba is from the Old Testament, written between 600 and 200 BC and, from textual clues, about events that may or may not have happened about 800-1000 BC in Africa or Arabia. Jason, of course, is a tale told by Homer probably about 700 BC about events that took place 1200-1300 BC, far from Homer’s Athens. And Arthur stems from a 9th century AD tale from the monk Nennius, about the 6th century AD, possibly in Wales or France. These stories was passed down through generations of story tellers before appearing in writing, story tellers decades and centuries removed from the actual events and with their own agendas and embellishments. To search for the reality of these events seems, to this modern archaeologist anyway, a quixotic task.

To provide the text for Myths and Heroes, journalist and filmmaker Michael Wood traveled to India and Tibet, Ethiopia and Wales, France and Greece and Turkey. He talked to local people and learned the local legends; he talked to archaeologists and learned the archaeological legends. His prose is approachable and lively, if a bit on the wistful side. Photographer Steve Razzetti’s images appearing in this book are quite beautiful and epitomize the wistfulness of the purpose and hue of the text. They remind me of the photographs that appeared in Life magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, where everything in the shot is perfect. The sky is perfectly blue, the light perfectly dawn or dusk, the people perfectly garbed in traditional clothing, the buildings and even the ruins perfectly uncluttered with modern rubbish or tourists. The landscapes are empty, the ruins float in time and space, in a mist or dappled in sunlight, seemingly untouched by 21st century troubles.