The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green
The tale of Helen and Paris’s condemnation, the gathering of Heroes, and the siege of Troy; Achilles and his weak spot after being fed wild honey and lion marrow by the Centaur; and Odysseus, the last of the Heroes, his scheme for the wooden Horse, and his numerous misadventures on the protracted journey back to Greece. Best-selling novelist Michelle Paver provides a lovely preface, and there is supplementary end matter that includes an author profile, a who’s who, activities, a glossary, and more.
The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green
Amazon.com
The Heroic Age of the Five Ages of Man, as defined by Herodotus (which, incidentally, Ovid interestingly omitted in his Roman version of the Ages of Men), is when divine immortals directly and promptly and freely made love with their lovely mortal subordinates, as told in Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Tale of Troy, is a refreshingly cracking retelling of the Trojan War.
Drawing from a collection of classical stories by ancient authors, primarily Homer’s Iliad, Green retells the beginning and end of the Trojan War, reprises the scenes of the heroic characters and erratic Immortals, and remasters the thematic theatre of dramas so captivating to our contemporary minds that the story collapses a significant divide between realms of heaven and earth, of the ancient and the modern, with his genius story-telling skills as an erudite but aff
Green takes you as far back in time as he can, to the Christ-like titan Prometheus punished for his divine compassion for mankind, to the wedding banquet of Menelaus and Helen in Sparta where the goddess of discord Eris first presented an apple of discord, to Paris of Troy happily living with Oenone, a mountain nymph on Mount Ida, to the Greek Camp outside the Wall of Troy where Agamemnon and Achilles were arguing over their attractive Trojan female.
The Tale of Troy, which actually focuses on the last few weeks of the war’s final year, is the literary equivalent of a Matryoshka, a frame narrative buried behind a plethora of stories that leave you excitedly wondering “what comes next?” As a result, it lacks the pedantic display of archaeological artifices and showy authority of academic knowledge typically associated with classical works, which could be considered boring.
