There’s something sensuous about the attraction they hold, something almost physically satisfying about their shapes we like to run them through our minds, we like to stroke their contours, we like to arrange the light so it brings out their features and throws interesting and form-revealing shadows. We could argue about it for ever, and our pleasure would never pall.īut what is certain is that writers and novelists and poets, people who have a visceral need to tell stories, find themselves coming back again and again to those narrative shapes and forms and structures we call myths. Or else they claim to have discovered that every different story is a variant of one basic story, such as Cinderella, or the quest for the Holy Grail.Īnd they find no lack of listeners, because our interest in how stories work and in what sort of stories there could be is almost as powerful as our appetite to hear them told.
Or only three, or only eleven, or whatever. įrom time to time someone comes up with the idea that there are only seven stories in the world. We’re making it available here to celebrate the republication of Pullman’s own fascinating, controversial retelling of Christian mythology The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. This short essay from Philip Pullman on the resilience and wonder of myths was first published in 2005 to accompany a boxset of myths and their retellings that featured Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson and Karen Armstrong.
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