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Guest Blog: Randy Hoyt
...and I'm back! Thanksgiving and the following week have been very busy here as we've moved and have been unpacking boxes and trying to find the floor under our piles of books. But this week, I had a real live guest blogger, so I had to make sure to return by Friday!
I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Randy Hoyt, who introduced me to the idea of "freelance scholarship," at MythCon this year. Randy had started an electronic journal for myth related articles called Journey to the Sea, which he was happy to tell me about, and which I've been following devotedly since. In the current issue, I also had the privilege of being a contributor--after seeing what I'd been writing about here, Randy asked me to talk a bit about mythology and role playing games. (The discussion after the article has been as much fun for me as writing the article itself!)
Without further ado, here is Randy's guest blog, discussing what drew him to start Journey to the Sea.
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My first memorable encounter with mythology came in my eighth grade world history class. We read many different creation myths, and the differences and similarities among them fascinated me. I remember in that class developing a particular fondness for the stories and rituals of ancient Egypt: I even briefly wanted to be an Egyptologist when I grew up. I have since spent considerable time since getting acquainted with the gods and goddesses of Greek and Norse mythology, the adventures and battles in the epic poems of ancient India, the delightful legends of Native American tricksters like Raven and Coyote, and many more stories from other great mythological traditions around the world.
Although I first discovered what anthropologists would describe as "myths" in middle school, a similar reaction had been evoked in me earlier by another type of narrative: fantasy fiction. I read quite a bit as a child, but stories like Redwall and The Chronicles of Narnia had a much greater impact on me than more realistic novels. These fantasy stories carried me away to other worlds, to long-forgotten pasts of legends and magic, and filled me with powerful images of joy and heroism, of sorrow and loss, of longing and hope. My imagination was overwhelmed when I finally saw Star Wars in high school, years after most of my peers, and I knew that I would never be the same after my time in that galaxy far, far away.
I have continued to be delighted and nourished by these stories over the years, all of which I classify as "mythic narratives" or "myths." A little over a year ago, after reading a couple of books on mythology by Joseph Campbell, I decided to put forth greater effort in reading, studying, and writing about these stories. Being a web developer by trade, it was natural for me to channel that effort into a new web site called "Journey to the Sea" that I describe as "an online myth magazine." Since launching the site last summer, I have been publishing new issues monthly; each issue contains three or four semi-scholarly articles from various contributors about mythic stories.
In the first six issues, the articles have already covered a wide array of very interesting material: disobedience against the divine in such stories as Paradise Lost and the Greek story of how the turtle got its shell, magic in the imagined America of Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, and the appearance of secular Aesopic fables in the religious writings of the Sufi master Rumi. The latest issue looks at a variety of works like stained-glass windows and comic books that use more than just words to communicate myths or to recall them to mind, and Alana has contributed an excellent article to that issue titled "Games As Interactive Storytelling." I hope you'll come by and visit the site at [http://www.journeytothesea.com]; I'm sure you'll discover exciting new myths or find some new ways to look at myths you thought you already knew.
I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Randy Hoyt, who introduced me to the idea of "freelance scholarship," at MythCon this year. Randy had started an electronic journal for myth related articles called Journey to the Sea, which he was happy to tell me about, and which I've been following devotedly since. In the current issue, I also had the privilege of being a contributor--after seeing what I'd been writing about here, Randy asked me to talk a bit about mythology and role playing games. (The discussion after the article has been as much fun for me as writing the article itself!)
Without further ado, here is Randy's guest blog, discussing what drew him to start Journey to the Sea.
--
My first memorable encounter with mythology came in my eighth grade world history class. We read many different creation myths, and the differences and similarities among them fascinated me. I remember in that class developing a particular fondness for the stories and rituals of ancient Egypt: I even briefly wanted to be an Egyptologist when I grew up. I have since spent considerable time since getting acquainted with the gods and goddesses of Greek and Norse mythology, the adventures and battles in the epic poems of ancient India, the delightful legends of Native American tricksters like Raven and Coyote, and many more stories from other great mythological traditions around the world.
Although I first discovered what anthropologists would describe as "myths" in middle school, a similar reaction had been evoked in me earlier by another type of narrative: fantasy fiction. I read quite a bit as a child, but stories like Redwall and The Chronicles of Narnia had a much greater impact on me than more realistic novels. These fantasy stories carried me away to other worlds, to long-forgotten pasts of legends and magic, and filled me with powerful images of joy and heroism, of sorrow and loss, of longing and hope. My imagination was overwhelmed when I finally saw Star Wars in high school, years after most of my peers, and I knew that I would never be the same after my time in that galaxy far, far away.
I have continued to be delighted and nourished by these stories over the years, all of which I classify as "mythic narratives" or "myths." A little over a year ago, after reading a couple of books on mythology by Joseph Campbell, I decided to put forth greater effort in reading, studying, and writing about these stories. Being a web developer by trade, it was natural for me to channel that effort into a new web site called "Journey to the Sea" that I describe as "an online myth magazine." Since launching the site last summer, I have been publishing new issues monthly; each issue contains three or four semi-scholarly articles from various contributors about mythic stories.
In the first six issues, the articles have already covered a wide array of very interesting material: disobedience against the divine in such stories as Paradise Lost and the Greek story of how the turtle got its shell, magic in the imagined America of Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, and the appearance of secular Aesopic fables in the religious writings of the Sufi master Rumi. The latest issue looks at a variety of works like stained-glass windows and comic books that use more than just words to communicate myths or to recall them to mind, and Alana has contributed an excellent article to that issue titled "Games As Interactive Storytelling." I hope you'll come by and visit the site at [http://www.journeytothesea.com]; I'm sure you'll discover exciting new myths or find some new ways to look at myths you thought you already knew.
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