In Search of Myths and Heroes

In some respects, then, In Search of Myths and Heroes is itself a fairy tale. What Wood does differently than the early archaeologists is talk to the people about what they believe about the stories. Edward Said, briefly mentioned in Myths and Heroes, seems to have been an underlying force for this book. Said, one of the West’s most formidable critics, argued that when westerners report on non-western countries, they circumscribe those countries as ‘the other’, exterior, inferior to the authority of the western scholar. Interestingly, these stories may have had much the same purpose, to render comprehensible the mysterious ways of unknown peoples and cultures, to recreate unknown foreign powers as vulnerable to the cleverness or courage of the western hero. Wood makes an effort to talk to the people living in those countries, to investigate the varied stories that are told today.

But the damage done by the western writers of the 19th and 20th centuries in forming the identity of the past is apparent. Wood visits a master builder of ships in Greece, who is building an Argo, using as model an 8th century oared boat from an Aegean graffito from Volos. The hardest thing of the work, the man tells him, “is to think like them. To think simply”.

Myths and Heroes is wistful, in both the writing and the photography. I don’t know what the BBC series is like, but the book adds to the mythology of the legends, not by providing a clearer image of what the past was like or even the likelihood that a particular story actually happened; but in the romantic tradition of a favorite story told again and again.