Katy
asked
Scott Hawkins:
Hi! Did you get the idea for the Bull from Dante's Divine Comedy (specifically the Inferno)? Or did you discover the Sicilian Bull in a different source? Or was it purely your brain child that also happens to be a real thing?
Scott Hawkins
Hey Katy,
The first time I heard about the bull was from my third grade teacher, Mrs. Marx. She was big into ancient history and mythology, and she used to give us the lowdown on Medusa & co. In hindsight, I'm not sure why she'd share something like the brazen bull with a bunch of third graders, but it was a different world back then. Or maybe she was just nuts?
It definitely made an impression. I was one of those vivid imagination kids.
After I got over the initial trauma I didn't think about it for decades. I wish I could say it came up again in some sort of scholarly research context, but the truth is that around the time I was doing a rewrite of Mount Char, I stumbled on a Cracked article that mentioned it.
At the time I was working an angle that Father was the hidden hand behind a lot of recognizable historical stuff--he was secretly Genghis Khan, he built pyramids all over the world, that kind of thing. The bull played neatly into that in that it was horrifying, had some basis in historical reality, and hadn't been done to death.
The "hidden hand of history" idea ended up not being a huge part of the final product, but the bit with the bull obviously stuck. And it's not an accident that the Library is a pyramid shape.
Scott
The first time I heard about the bull was from my third grade teacher, Mrs. Marx. She was big into ancient history and mythology, and she used to give us the lowdown on Medusa & co. In hindsight, I'm not sure why she'd share something like the brazen bull with a bunch of third graders, but it was a different world back then. Or maybe she was just nuts?
It definitely made an impression. I was one of those vivid imagination kids.
After I got over the initial trauma I didn't think about it for decades. I wish I could say it came up again in some sort of scholarly research context, but the truth is that around the time I was doing a rewrite of Mount Char, I stumbled on a Cracked article that mentioned it.
At the time I was working an angle that Father was the hidden hand behind a lot of recognizable historical stuff--he was secretly Genghis Khan, he built pyramids all over the world, that kind of thing. The bull played neatly into that in that it was horrifying, had some basis in historical reality, and hadn't been done to death.
The "hidden hand of history" idea ended up not being a huge part of the final product, but the bit with the bull obviously stuck. And it's not an accident that the Library is a pyramid shape.
Scott
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