Honeysuckle: The Inspiration - by Bar Fridman-Tell

The thing about myths is that they are always changing. They dart between our fingers, quicksilver bright, the moment we try to grasp them. You look away for a moment, and a cautionary tale turns into a love story. You blink again, and a story of a national hero is now one of societal decline. Even the word ‘myth’ itself is a slippery thing, shifting meanings depending on who you ask, and quite possibly, the weather – sometimes swelling to encompass legends and folktales, sometimes slimming down to a specific period and culture.

I think it was this elusive quality that drew me to myths in the first place. I remember, sometime in primary school, looking up from my copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology – which had been enthralling me for months – and spying The Odyssey on the bookshelf. The moment of Oh. The realization that they were the same story, and yet funhouse-mirror different. That events that in Hamilton’s retelling lasted a few chapters could swell to whole books. That the language could shift and change, prose turning to meter and back again. And close behind it came another realization: one must be a derivative of the other, a shadow cast. It was that moment, I think, holding these two books in my hands, that launched my slight obsession with finding the ‘real’ myth. It lasted… a while.

As a teenager, I combed second-hand bookstores, looking for books that looked older, longer, statelier. Narrative in verse and meter was a promising sign. No author name, even better. But still, no sooner had I picked up a book, sure I’d found ‘the real version’, than another, older one materialized – a little like a will-o’-the-wisp leading me deeper into the bog (or, in my case, persuading me to spend much more of my allowance than I had planned in my favorite bookstores).

By the time I started university, my fascination hardened into resolve. Surely, here, surrounded by people whose job was to know things (yes, you’re allowed to laugh at me), I’d find the real version of a myth. The first one. In my mind, I imagined it a bit like Zelazny’s Amber – the single story all others were reflections of, shining and enduring and majestic. And just to make double sure it wouldn’t slip between my fingers again, I did a double major – art history and comparative literature – and made sure to take every class that had even a whiff of myth or folklore in its syllabus.

Can you guess how well it went?

Here is what I discovered: in essence, myths are a bit like cats – they will sit there, tantalizingly within reach, until the moment you extend your hand to pet them, only to disappear around the corner with a dismissive flick of their tail. It wasn’t until my senior year as an undergraduate, when I doggedly tried to pin down the first appearance of Circe for a seminar on Classical antiquity art, that I started to realize that perhaps my inability to find the original myth was not so much a bug as a feature. That perhaps the very thing that makes myths myths is their proliferation, the way their roots stretch deeper than I can follow – to the point it is, in fact, myth-turtles all the way down.

But more importantly, I realized that it was that ability to shift and change while remaining wholly and essentially themselves that made myths so tantalizing, so magical, to me. A myth, I realized, is a bit like a corridor of mirrors: each version reflecting back our culture and values from a slightly different angle; each version whispering a secret not only about the story it’s telling, but also about ourselves. And each new retelling becomes another mirror in this chain, refracting the myth to say something current, something personal.

This, I think, is the thing I love most about myths: the way they change. The way they constantly shapeshift, Nereus-like, in our grip. And how, once I stopped looking for ‘the original’, I could savor the richness of it.

And, a few years later, add one more mirror, or retelling, of my own: a reimagining of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd—the story of a bride cobbled together from flowers, only to be turned into an owl as punishment.

In Honeysuckle, I pull at the thread of the myth that frames Blodeuwedd as a villain, despite being given no choices—not even control over her own body. It follows Daye, a girl made of flowers who must be rewoven at the end of each season or fall apart, and Rory, a lonely boy who will go to any lengths to stop this cycle of bloom and decay. And I still can’t quite believe that I get to share this version of Blodeuwedd’s myth—a story that has, at turns, enchanted and haunted me ever since I first read it—with readers.