Year: | Our Mythical Childhood Survey

Rosemary Sutcliff

Frontier Wolf is the third book in a series of novels that recount the adventures of various generations of the Aquilii family down to the Norman period. In each case, one of the protagonists owns a Dolphin Ring, which has been passed on through the family. The publishers, Oxford University Press, state that the primary audience for the Dolphin Ring saga is an age-range of 11–16*.At the opening of Frontier Wolf, set in the early 340s, the twenty-three-year-old centurion Alexios Flavius Aqu(...)

literary

YEAR: 1980

COUNTRY: United Kingdom

TAGS: Christianity Hadrian Mithras Roman Army Roman Britain Roman Empire Roman History

Pamela Allen

Mr Archimedes’ Bath

A humorous picture book about the principle of water displacement discovered by the Greek mathematician, Archimedes. In this book, ‘Mr Archimedes’ shares his bath with three animals: a goat, a wombat, and a kangaroo. Trial and error in the bath (in which each animal is ‘blamed’ in turn for taking up too much room) show the principles of displacement in action. Finally, Mr Archimedes shouts ‘Eureka!’ and explains to the animals that they are all making the wate(...)

literary

YEAR: 1980

COUNTRY: Australia

TAGS: Archimedes Greek Science

Gerald McDermott

Sun Flight

In contrast to other retellings, which contextualise the story of Daedalus within the Cretan mythic cycle, Sun flight begins at the point at which Daedalus has completed the construction of Minos’ palace, with the labyrinth below it ‘to hide the horrible monsters of King Minos’ (no page numbers). The labyrinth is represented by a repeating pattern of Greek square spirals in shades of blue and purple, which contrasts with the warm colours of the palace buildings above, which res(...)

literary

YEAR: 1980

COUNTRY: United States of America

TAGS: Crete Daedalus Icarus Labyrinth Minos Minotaur Monsters

Otari Dumbadze

The Rock of Sisyphus [Камень Сизифа (Kamen' Sizifa)]

The film is made as a hand-drawn animation with colourful schematic pictures that smoothly flow into one another, changing colour patterns. It starts with a white dot on a blue and brown background that evolves into the figure of a man pushing a rock. During the entire film the man is rolling the rock or lets it fall.In the first part of the film, we see the face of Zeus, and the narrator announces the verdict to Sisyphus: “Not for wisdom, not for royalty, not for the care of his peop(...)

audiovisual

YEAR: 1980

COUNTRY: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)

TAGS: Aphrodite Nike Sisyphus Thanatos Tyche Zeus

Joan Aiken

The Shadow Guests

Following the death of his mother and brother in the outback, Cosmo Curtoys is sent to Oxford from Australia, to live with his aunt, Eunice Doom, a Professor of Mathematics. During the week he attends a boarding school in Oxford; at weekends, he returns with Eunice to the family home at Curtoys Mill. He learns that his family is cursed. In the days of the Roman occupation of Britain, a Roman soldier killed the son of a priestess of a British forest deity, for neglecting the worship of Mithras, a(...)

literary

YEAR: 1980

COUNTRY: United Kingdom

TAGS: Gladiators Roman Britain