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Slangen in de kinderkamer
Het begon op een ochtend in Thessalië. Een jonge visser zag tussen enkele rotsen een vrouw met een weegschaal. Zij vertelde de visser dat Thetis, de godin van de zee, een kind zou krijgen dat groter en sterker zou zijn dan zijn vader. Maar opeens was de vrouw weg. De visser vertelde het verhaal aan iedereen die het horen wilde, maar iedereen zei dat hij een visioen had gehad. Zo ook vertelde hij het verhaal aan een oude man. Deze man trok overal rond om verhalen te vertellen over goden in ruil voor een nachtje onderdak.
Intussen hoort hij overal over Heracles en mist hij hem steeds net.
Intussen hoort hij overal over Heracles en mist hij hem steeds net.
188 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1973
2 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
About the author
Leon Garfield
120 books49 followersLeon Garfield FRSL (14 July 1921 – 2 June 1996) was a British writer of fiction. He is best known for children's historical novels, though he also wrote for adults. He wrote more than thirty books and scripted Shakespeare: The Animated Tales for television.
Garfield attended Brighton Grammar School (1932-1938) and went on to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but his studies were interrupted first by lack of funds for fees, then by the outbreak of World War II. He married Lena Leah Davies in April, 1941, at Golders Green Synagogue but they separated after only a few months. For his service in the war he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. While posted in Belgium he met Vivien Alcock, then an ambulance driver, who would go on to become his second wife (in 1948) and a well-known children's author. She would also greatly influence Garfield's writing, giving him suggestions for his writing, including the original idea for Smith. After the war Garfield worked as a biochemical laboratory technician at the Whittington Hospital in Islington, writing in his spare time until the 1960s, when he was successful enough to write full-time. In 1964, the couple adopted a baby girl, called Jane after Jane Austen, a favourite writer of both parents.
Garfield wrote his first book, the pirate novel Jack Holborn, for adult readers but a Constable & Co. editor saw its potential as a children's novel and persuaded him to adapt it for a younger audience. In that form it was published by Constable in 1964. His second book, Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), won the first annual Guardian Prize and was serialised for television, as were several later works (below). Devil was the first of several historical adventure novels, typically set late in the eighteenth century and featuring a character of humble origins (in this case a boy from a family of traveling actors) pushed into the midst of a threatening intrigue. Another was Smith (1967), with the eponymous hero a young pickpocket accepted into a wealthy household; it won the Phoenix Award in 1987. Yet another was Black Jack (1968), in which a young apprentice is forced by accident and his conscience to accompany a murderous criminal.
In 1970, Garfield's work started to move in new directions with The God Beneath the Sea, a re-telling of numerous Greek myths in one narrative, written by Garfield and Edward Blishen and illustrated by Charles Keeping. It won the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Garfield, Blishen, and Keeping collaborated again on a sequel, The Golden Shadow (1973). The Drummer Boy (1970) was another adventure story, but concerned more with a central moral problem, and apparently aimed at somewhat older readers, a trend continued in The Prisoners of September (1975) republished in 1989 by Lions Tracks, under the title Revolution!, The Pleasure Garden (1976) and The Confidence Man (1978). The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1972) was a black comedy in which two boys decide to test the plausibility of Romulus and Remus using one of the boys' baby sister. Most notable at the time was a series of linked long short stories about apprentices, published separately between 1976 and 1978, and then as a collection, The Apprentices. The more adult themed books of the mid-1970s met with a mixed reception and Garfield returned to the model of his earlier books with John Diamond, which won a Whitbread Award in 1980, and The December Rose (1986). In 1980 he also wrote an ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished at the 1870 death of Dickens, an author who had been a major influence on Garfield's own style.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985. On 2 June 1996 he died of cancer at the Whittington Hospital, where he had once worked.
Garfield attended Brighton Grammar School (1932-1938) and went on to study art at Regent Street Polytechnic, but his studies were interrupted first by lack of funds for fees, then by the outbreak of World War II. He married Lena Leah Davies in April, 1941, at Golders Green Synagogue but they separated after only a few months. For his service in the war he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. While posted in Belgium he met Vivien Alcock, then an ambulance driver, who would go on to become his second wife (in 1948) and a well-known children's author. She would also greatly influence Garfield's writing, giving him suggestions for his writing, including the original idea for Smith. After the war Garfield worked as a biochemical laboratory technician at the Whittington Hospital in Islington, writing in his spare time until the 1960s, when he was successful enough to write full-time. In 1964, the couple adopted a baby girl, called Jane after Jane Austen, a favourite writer of both parents.
Garfield wrote his first book, the pirate novel Jack Holborn, for adult readers but a Constable & Co. editor saw its potential as a children's novel and persuaded him to adapt it for a younger audience. In that form it was published by Constable in 1964. His second book, Devil-in-the-Fog (1966), won the first annual Guardian Prize and was serialised for television, as were several later works (below). Devil was the first of several historical adventure novels, typically set late in the eighteenth century and featuring a character of humble origins (in this case a boy from a family of traveling actors) pushed into the midst of a threatening intrigue. Another was Smith (1967), with the eponymous hero a young pickpocket accepted into a wealthy household; it won the Phoenix Award in 1987. Yet another was Black Jack (1968), in which a young apprentice is forced by accident and his conscience to accompany a murderous criminal.
In 1970, Garfield's work started to move in new directions with The God Beneath the Sea, a re-telling of numerous Greek myths in one narrative, written by Garfield and Edward Blishen and illustrated by Charles Keeping. It won the annual Carnegie Medal for British children's books. Garfield, Blishen, and Keeping collaborated again on a sequel, The Golden Shadow (1973). The Drummer Boy (1970) was another adventure story, but concerned more with a central moral problem, and apparently aimed at somewhat older readers, a trend continued in The Prisoners of September (1975) republished in 1989 by Lions Tracks, under the title Revolution!, The Pleasure Garden (1976) and The Confidence Man (1978). The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris (1972) was a black comedy in which two boys decide to test the plausibility of Romulus and Remus using one of the boys' baby sister. Most notable at the time was a series of linked long short stories about apprentices, published separately between 1976 and 1978, and then as a collection, The Apprentices. The more adult themed books of the mid-1970s met with a mixed reception and Garfield returned to the model of his earlier books with John Diamond, which won a Whitbread Award in 1980, and The December Rose (1986). In 1980 he also wrote an ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished at the 1870 death of Dickens, an author who had been a major influence on Garfield's own style.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985. On 2 June 1996 he died of cancer at the Whittington Hospital, where he had once worked.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
September 3, 2014
gods and monsters, monsters and men, gods and men and monsters all together, sometimes all in one.
The Golden Shadow is a re-telling of selected Greek myths. it has a loose narrative: a nameless storyteller and Heracles live their lives. their paths cross once, but to no consequence. the sad storyteller has cursed himself... he wants to believe in the myths and legends he tells but something in his nature causes him to constantly sabotage himself and his ability to see the greater world above and beyond and even around him. Heracles too has been cursed... snakes sent to slay him as a child, snakes of the mind sent later, causing him to slay those around him. both are beautifully tragic figures. surprisingly, despite his uber-heroic and godlike stature, Heracles turns out to be the more sympathetic and understandable. he's an endearing creation, which makes his central tragedy all the more terrible and even rather hard to read. the storyteller is more frustrating in his disbelief, in his stubborn, complacent blindness. their stories are framed by the stories of the sea goddess Thetis, mother of Achilles, told by fate that she would bear a child greater than his father, and Peleus, brother-slayer, a great man weakened by his hatred of being surpassed. also told are a handful of other myths. invulnerable Meleager's tragic boar hunt; dispassionate Atalanta's cruel race; naïve Admetus' search for a person to take his place in death. these stories come and go and flow in and out of each other. an ouroboros of a story, or perhaps a helix; circles within circles, most closed, others widening and opening as they appear to end; stories curving and spiraling into each other, Heracles and the storyteller, Thetis and Peleus, two pairs of intertwining helices making a singular, multi-faceted tale.
I can see why I loved this so much as a child. the adventures are thrillingly told - but in a different sort of way, almost as uncertain dream adventures being retold the morning after. haunting, filled with menace and dread, moving from hyperreal clarity to murky obliquity. there's a child's voice in the second half - Iolaus, companion to Heracles - with whom I may have excitedly identified. there is sexuality - certainly nothing graphic, but it is quite clearly there - that must have mystified and tantalized me. and there are the spare, spidery, sinister line drawings throughout... wonderfully eerie.
there was just as much to enjoy as an adult. all of the above paragraph, of course, and the twisting and twining of narrative strands. and then there's the prose! oh the prose. wondrously poetic prose, delicate and strange and delicious, created with an impressive economy of words. and the irony! it is suffused throughout the stories. a dark and very adult sort of irony, one that gives a sharpness and a sting to each of the tales. and the characterization! not just Heracles, who comes fully alive, or the storyteller in his smallness and greatness, or brave little Iolaus... everyone is depicted in such careful, witty, even resonant ways, from the sardonic princess Atalanta to the repuslively complacent Augeias to Molorchus, who makes his personal tragedy his lifetime work, to Heracles' creepily fastidious and small-minded cousin Eurystheus, building his sunken bronze bowl of a room to skulk in whenever his cousin appears.
best of all, the wisdom. I have no idea who Leon Garfied was, but he was clearly a man who knew his fellow men well. he has the gracious empathy of a kindly man, forgiving of faults - and yet it is also the empathetic man who knows how to give the sharpest stings. he has the imagination of a born storyteller, one who can re-tell and reinvent old, old stories and make them feel fresh and new, exciting and thoughtful, terrible and wondrous, all at once. but are these tales lies, or at best, mere mortal conceits? so thinks the sad storyteller. as the saying goes, Garfield weaves a tangled web. he is a particularly skilled weaver: he takes the familiar tales and makes them unfamiliar; he takes their timelessness and makes of them something warmer, something stranger. Garfield weaves a tapestry of mortal and immortal conceits that are dark and golden in hue, shadows and a sunset glow, an enchanting dream of a tapestry.
Little by little he became absorbed in a small patch of ground where a nation of insects were toppling hither and thither, bearing tiny boulders of dust to raise walls, palaces and temples in a country an arm's length off. He fell to wondering if they could see his huge face, and if his eyes were their grey skies with two black suns glaring down? Was this a great occasion for them, to be remembered for generations? Perhaps even now they were praying to him to be forgiven for their insect sins. Great Face, what must we do to atone? Shall we catch a huge fierce bee and offer it up to you? Shall we build you a temple as high as the tallest blade of grass?it's awesome to re-experience something and find it to be as compelling and satisfying an experience as it was the first time. I loved this book as a kid; 30 years later, it is just as good. actually it's even better, now that I care about things like prose, now that I love things filled with melancholy and ambiguity and dreams.
The Golden Shadow is a re-telling of selected Greek myths. it has a loose narrative: a nameless storyteller and Heracles live their lives. their paths cross once, but to no consequence. the sad storyteller has cursed himself... he wants to believe in the myths and legends he tells but something in his nature causes him to constantly sabotage himself and his ability to see the greater world above and beyond and even around him. Heracles too has been cursed... snakes sent to slay him as a child, snakes of the mind sent later, causing him to slay those around him. both are beautifully tragic figures. surprisingly, despite his uber-heroic and godlike stature, Heracles turns out to be the more sympathetic and understandable. he's an endearing creation, which makes his central tragedy all the more terrible and even rather hard to read. the storyteller is more frustrating in his disbelief, in his stubborn, complacent blindness. their stories are framed by the stories of the sea goddess Thetis, mother of Achilles, told by fate that she would bear a child greater than his father, and Peleus, brother-slayer, a great man weakened by his hatred of being surpassed. also told are a handful of other myths. invulnerable Meleager's tragic boar hunt; dispassionate Atalanta's cruel race; naïve Admetus' search for a person to take his place in death. these stories come and go and flow in and out of each other. an ouroboros of a story, or perhaps a helix; circles within circles, most closed, others widening and opening as they appear to end; stories curving and spiraling into each other, Heracles and the storyteller, Thetis and Peleus, two pairs of intertwining helices making a singular, multi-faceted tale.
I can see why I loved this so much as a child. the adventures are thrillingly told - but in a different sort of way, almost as uncertain dream adventures being retold the morning after. haunting, filled with menace and dread, moving from hyperreal clarity to murky obliquity. there's a child's voice in the second half - Iolaus, companion to Heracles - with whom I may have excitedly identified. there is sexuality - certainly nothing graphic, but it is quite clearly there - that must have mystified and tantalized me. and there are the spare, spidery, sinister line drawings throughout... wonderfully eerie.
there was just as much to enjoy as an adult. all of the above paragraph, of course, and the twisting and twining of narrative strands. and then there's the prose! oh the prose. wondrously poetic prose, delicate and strange and delicious, created with an impressive economy of words. and the irony! it is suffused throughout the stories. a dark and very adult sort of irony, one that gives a sharpness and a sting to each of the tales. and the characterization! not just Heracles, who comes fully alive, or the storyteller in his smallness and greatness, or brave little Iolaus... everyone is depicted in such careful, witty, even resonant ways, from the sardonic princess Atalanta to the repuslively complacent Augeias to Molorchus, who makes his personal tragedy his lifetime work, to Heracles' creepily fastidious and small-minded cousin Eurystheus, building his sunken bronze bowl of a room to skulk in whenever his cousin appears.
best of all, the wisdom. I have no idea who Leon Garfied was, but he was clearly a man who knew his fellow men well. he has the gracious empathy of a kindly man, forgiving of faults - and yet it is also the empathetic man who knows how to give the sharpest stings. he has the imagination of a born storyteller, one who can re-tell and reinvent old, old stories and make them feel fresh and new, exciting and thoughtful, terrible and wondrous, all at once. but are these tales lies, or at best, mere mortal conceits? so thinks the sad storyteller. as the saying goes, Garfield weaves a tangled web. he is a particularly skilled weaver: he takes the familiar tales and makes them unfamiliar; he takes their timelessness and makes of them something warmer, something stranger. Garfield weaves a tapestry of mortal and immortal conceits that are dark and golden in hue, shadows and a sunset glow, an enchanting dream of a tapestry.
May 24, 2017
The authors' adaptations of several Greek myths, each held together by the common figure of the "Old Storyteller." Stories of Atalanta, Meleager, Heracles [Hercules] and a childhood incident, his Twelve Labors, life with Omphale, and death, also Peleus. Beautiful literary retellings, more complete than the usual. In the Twelve Labors, the authors draw on the version in which Heracles is helped by Iolaus. Interesting black-and-white drawings complement the tales.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
October 24, 2017
This book is a treasure—I love it to death. It turns the Greek Myths, particularly that of Hercules, into a wise, sly, colorful narrative, bringing to life all the characters, including the old storyteller that represents Homer. The illustrations by Charles Keeping are stunning—beautiful and shocking. One to pass on to your children. There is a companion book called 'The God Beneath the Sea' that is almost as good.
March 8, 2025
Fun retellings of some more myths, mainly centered around Heracles. Not sure if I liked how Homer was represented by an actual character, but a nice read nonetheless. Illustrations were really cool again.
"Then Heracles threw his club for Cerberus to fetch. At once the monster leaped upon it, snarling and barking; and while its three heads fought among themselves for possession of the club, Heracles seized the creature round its middle and lifted it, snapping and raging in the air."
"Even though he was the hound of Hell, he was still only a dog"
"Then Heracles threw his club for Cerberus to fetch. At once the monster leaped upon it, snarling and barking; and while its three heads fought among themselves for possession of the club, Heracles seized the creature round its middle and lifted it, snapping and raging in the air."
"Even though he was the hound of Hell, he was still only a dog"
December 13, 2019
I read this book many times when I was a child. I was already familiar with many of the stories from older, more traditional books of ancient myths in my parents' bookshelves, but this book brought real human emotion and frailty to those stories. The vigour and anger of youth, adult love, jealousy and despair, the weakness and regrets of age, all these are made vivid and brought the old stories to life for me. So I didn't mind at all, as some of the other readers seem to have done, that only excerpts from the central heroic stories are shown to us. After all, the story is half-told from the perspective of a travelling storyteller who keeps arriving too late to see the action (sometimes years after, sometimes just half a day, sometimes even an unknowing witness to part of the story). Only seeing part of the story is the point. Those parts we do get to see are vividly portrayed and give key insights to the motivations and emotional history of the characters.
The stories are made richer by the different ways they are told to us. Sometimes we see them directly, sometimes the storyteller is hearing them second or third hand from a servant, sometimes we hear the storyteller giving the account he has been able to put together from various sources - at one point his story gains a cynical commentary from Peleus, who has been a jealous rival to his hero Heracles. And the illustrations are good, communicating the distant part of history the stories are from through their crudeness and strength.
Very few children's books tell stories of this kind with this level of complexity and maturity.
The stories are made richer by the different ways they are told to us. Sometimes we see them directly, sometimes the storyteller is hearing them second or third hand from a servant, sometimes we hear the storyteller giving the account he has been able to put together from various sources - at one point his story gains a cynical commentary from Peleus, who has been a jealous rival to his hero Heracles. And the illustrations are good, communicating the distant part of history the stories are from through their crudeness and strength.
Very few children's books tell stories of this kind with this level of complexity and maturity.
April 5, 2022
Golden Shadow, the sequel to “The God Beneath the Sea,” is another Garfield/Blish narrative compiling of various Greek myths into one story. The main theme of Shadow is more focused than Beneath the Sea, with the story centering on the life and “labors” of Heracles/Hercules. While most of Garfield’s books are supposedly for children (though most may be seen as a bit too dark and disturbing for many children), this one is certainly not for any “sensitive” child – lots of blood and sensuality/sexuality is present in almost every vignette. That being said, this is a GREAT introduction to ancient Greek mythology, if maybe for an older (say, 8th grade to adult?) audience. Both Beneath the Sea and Golden Shadow were a joy to read.
August 14, 2020
A good retelling of the Labours of Hercule. The stories are tied together nicely by the wanderings of the old poet Iolaus in a pleasing mirror of the tying together of the worlds of gods and men. There is a slightly remote, distant tone which is pleasing. The illustrations are good. I enjoyed this one quietly.
May 24, 2022
Whilst I enjoyed Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen’s first jab at Greek Myths, The God Beneath the Sea, I actually felt this sequel was better.
It had the same intensity as the first book, the same skipping and playing with language but the stories were tied more closer together. First, the book tells the stories of heroes, particularly Hercules and secondly, that the point-of-view is lower than the previous book, dwelling with the people and particularly one storyteller.
The storyteller is elderly at the beginning of the book and starting to doubt his belief in the wondrous stories he’s been telling. By the end, he’s even older and even more cynical. He has so many narrow misses with the Gods, demigods and sprites he tells about, almost meting Thetis, almost seeing Prometheus chained in the mountains, coming close to meeting Hercules but not realising it, until one day he meets Hermes, the psychopomp sent to lead him to the Underworld. There’s an interesting through-line that his life actually has a great purpose unbeknown to him which he eventually fulfils. I really enjoyed the sense he had of living in a post-God world even as he lived in the time of legendary heroes.
One of the other things the book does really well is to contextualise the labours of Hercules, not as noble or heroic acts but as penance for a moment of murderous madness. It made him a more interesting person, a sunny person of super-human power tethered by guilt to serve people lesser than him - ending up as a court jester in drag before being stirred from his malaise.
In many ways this book is more of the same for people who enjoyed The God Beneath the Sea but it has a tighter format, is more grounded and I found it more engaging as a result.
It had the same intensity as the first book, the same skipping and playing with language but the stories were tied more closer together. First, the book tells the stories of heroes, particularly Hercules and secondly, that the point-of-view is lower than the previous book, dwelling with the people and particularly one storyteller.
The storyteller is elderly at the beginning of the book and starting to doubt his belief in the wondrous stories he’s been telling. By the end, he’s even older and even more cynical. He has so many narrow misses with the Gods, demigods and sprites he tells about, almost meting Thetis, almost seeing Prometheus chained in the mountains, coming close to meeting Hercules but not realising it, until one day he meets Hermes, the psychopomp sent to lead him to the Underworld. There’s an interesting through-line that his life actually has a great purpose unbeknown to him which he eventually fulfils. I really enjoyed the sense he had of living in a post-God world even as he lived in the time of legendary heroes.
One of the other things the book does really well is to contextualise the labours of Hercules, not as noble or heroic acts but as penance for a moment of murderous madness. It made him a more interesting person, a sunny person of super-human power tethered by guilt to serve people lesser than him - ending up as a court jester in drag before being stirred from his malaise.
In many ways this book is more of the same for people who enjoyed The God Beneath the Sea but it has a tighter format, is more grounded and I found it more engaging as a result.
March 19, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews