Jörg’s Reviews > Das große Sagenbuch des klassischen Altertums > Status Update

Sometimes Köhlmeier mentions variants himself. More often, he chooses one most to his liking and retells it in his own moody interpretation. Not always the most conventional one as comparisons with the myths on Wikipedia show. He firmly sticks with Iason being a swaggerer only excelling in charm. He changes the Roman Amor back to Eros in Amor and Psyche. Other Roman sources are used for Aeneas and with Ovid.

Lots of recurring patterns in those myths. Mixing with gods will not end good. Choosing one will anger the others. Prophecies will come true, especially those involving to not try to father a son. He will be born and devastate his father. Multiple most beautiful women in the world, a certain recipe for dead kings and suitors. Greece must have been full of monsters, to be slain by some hero to fulfill a task.

Köhlmeier is acting like a cozy old fairytale teller. It is obvious by reappearing repetitions that each tale was written to stand on its own but with a view to the whole project when he references to tales to be told another time.
I enjoy his personal assessments of gods and when he puts myths into context with the bible, the Nibelungen or later revisions and variants.

Those gods were a mischievous bunch of buggers. Sensous and mostly promiscuous. And what about those titans. One of them, Prometheus, brought fire to mankind and in a variant was the demiurge creating us from ashes.

I don't like Köhlmeier's style in this but I'm here to refresh and structure my fragmentary knowledge of Greek mythology. It is even more bloody than the old testament.