The book begins with a boy named Max dressed in a wolf suit misbehaving, terrorizing the dog and talking back to his mother. He is sent to bed without any supper. But a strange thing happens: his room magically transforms into a forest with a nearby ocean. He boards a boat and sails across the ocean for nearly a year before he comes to an island inhabited by terrible monsters known in the book as “wild things.” Max manages to tame them, and they crown him king of all the wild things. After an indefinite amount of time, he grows lonely and wishes to return home. He gives up being king, boards his boat, sails back across the ocean, and returns to his room. He finds there his supper waiting for him.

Many fantasy novels have characters who journey between our world and another world. In some works, like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, these other worlds are accepted as true: within the story, that is, they exist as real places. In others, though, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Bridge to Terabithea, the voyages to these other worlds are presented — even within the story — as dreams or as journeys of the imagination. It is not clear how to classify Max’s voyage to the land of the wild things along these lines. The narrator, on the one hand, always describes the events of the story in factual terms:

In Max’s room a forest grew […] and the walls became the world all around.

He sailed off through night and day and […] he came to the place where the wild things are.

Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye and sailed back […] into […] his very own room.

But on the other hand, one subtle element in the artwork convinces me that Max’s adventure is meant to be understood as an imaginary one. An illustration of an early scene contains a picture Max drew before he went on his adventure. Max had not yet been to the place where the wild things are when he made this drawing, yet his drawing looks exactly like one of the wild things he would later meet.

The text of the story does not refer to Max’s drawing at all, but it is an important clue in how to understand the story. I think the similarity between the drawing and the wild thing demonstrates that both originated in his imagination. Even though the narrator takes Max’s journey at face value, I think it is intended to be understood as an imaginary journey.

Throughout this imaginative journey, a change occurs in Max. At the beginning, he is just a naughty little boy. He is eager to escape his room, where he serves his sentence for misbehaving, and imagines himself as the “most wild thing of all” instead of as a well-behaved boy. He sends the wild things to bed without any supper — perhaps directing some negative feelings for his mother towards these innocent creatures of his own imagination. But as he sits alone, he has a change of heart:

Max […] was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. […] So he gave up being king of where the wild things are […] and sailed back […] into […] his very own room.

He no longer wishes to be with the wild things: he now wants to be with his mother. Max’s imaginative journey gave him a new perspective on his life, and this new perspective resulted in a different attitude and (presumably) in different behavior after his return. The illustrations capture this effect on Max in a subtle but powerful way. Before Max’s journey, the illustrations of Max’s real world are always contained by a white border on all four sides. As his room transforms into the forest, that border slowly shrinks until the illustrations fill the whole page. (The added black border represents the edge of the page.)

The world of Max’s imagination is larger, more wonderful, and less bounded than the real world. Every page depicting the land of the wild things has illustrations that bleed to the edges of the page; not one of them has a white border surrounding it on all four sides. When Max returns to his room from his imaginative journey, though, the border does not return.

The broadening of the illustration nicely mirrors the broadening of Max’s perspective. In the very first article here, discussing how we define “myth” on this site, I said that the mythic narratives found in ancient mythology and modern fantasy can dramatically change the way we look at our own world. As we read the story of Max’s imaginative journey, we can engage our imaginations to participate to some degree in his journey. We may even be able to have our perspective, our attitudes, and our behavior transformed in a similar way. In both the plot of the story and in some subtle details of the artwork in his Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak conveyed the role of imagination in this transforming power of mythic narratives.

Reference

• Sendak, Maurice. Where The Wild Things Are. Harper & Row: 1963.

Having said that, Alexander’s five Prydain novels — along with a subsequent collection of short stories, The Foundling and Other Tales from Prydain, published later — contain a veritable treasure trove of references (both large and small) to the mythology of Wales, particularly to that group of medieval stories first published in English under the title of the Mabinogion by Lady Charlotte Guest. These include people — for example, the Dynasties of Don and Llyr, lifted wholesale from the Mabinogion and dropped into the background of Alexander’s fictive world; Medwyn, Prydain’s stand-in for Nevydd Nav Neivion, a figure in Celtic mythology similar to the biblical Noah; and Arawn Death-Lord, the Welsh Master of the Underworld, set up as Prydain’s arch-villain. Alexander’s mythological sources also include places — fortresses and kingdoms such as Caer Dathyl, Cantrev Mawr, and Spiral Castle. (Robert Graves discusses the Spiral Castle and other aspects of Welsh mythology in his book The White Goddess, many which Alexander used.) He also borrowed (but rearranged) features of the landscape, such as the rivers Ystrad and Alaw. And Alexander even included things of Welsh mythology — artifacts and weapons such as the sword Dyrnwyn: in the Welsh sources, this is “the sword of Rhydderch Hael, […] one of the thirteen precious things of the Island of Britain” (Tunnell 73); in Prydain, this becomes the magical flaming sword of Lord Gwydion, Prince of Don.

Among Alexander’s wide and allusive borrowings from the Mabinogion, and from Celtic mythology more generally, I would like to single out for a closer examination the shadowy origins of Dallben connected to the witches Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch. Dallben is a central figure to the entire Cycle, playing a role in all five novels, and he represents many things: the caretaker of Caer Dallben, keeper of the prophetic Book of Three, guardian of the oracular pig Hen Wen, advisor to Lord Gwydion and the Sons of Don, and (perhaps most importantly) the teacher and protector of the Cycle’s principal protagonist Taran. He is based largely on a small character in the Welsh Tale of Kilhwch and Olwen (Tunnell 57-8, 62). The tale itself says very little about Dallben; however, Lady Guest’s notes following the tale reveal a bit more. Dadweir Dallpen, as the original character is named, is said to have indeed possessed a famous pig, Henwen, and to have employed as his swineherd Coll ab Collfrewi, one of the three most renowned swineherds in all Britain. (Readers of Alexander will, of course, also recognize both Hen Wen and Coll as fellow residents of Alexander’s village of Caer Dallben.)

Over the course of the Prydain Cycle, Dallben remains a somewhat mysterious character, but readers learn more about his shadowy origins in “The Foundling”, a story Alexander wrote some years afterwards. He is found alone, floating in a wicker basket by the three witches, Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch, in their home, the Marshes of Morva. Unsure what else to do, they take him in (showing uncharacteristic kindness). One day, the witches ask Dallben to continue stirring a bubbling witches’ brew while they’re out of the house, cautioning him against tasting any of it. He obeys, but the potion comes to a boil and some of it splashes out of the cauldron. Dallben pops his scalded fingers into his mouth without thinking, tastes the potion, and instantly acquires all the knowledge, wisdom, and magical abilities of the three witches. After that, they have to send him away, because “[y]ou can’t have that many people knowing that much all under the same roof” (Black Cauldron 105). They offer him a choice from several enchanted gifts to take with him, of which he chooses The Book of Three, a tome of great weight and prophecy. So great, in fact, that the burden of the knowledge ages him overnight into an old man — the bent and wizened figure Taran and his companions (and readers along with them) come to know and love.

The witches, Alexander tells us, “have appeared in other guises […]: the Three Norns, the Moirae, the Triple Goddess, and very likely some other transformations they decline to admit” (Author’s Note, Taran Wanderer). Though there are three of them, they have the disconcerting tendency to shift their shapes, and even shift their consciousnesses between each body. It is suggested that they “take turns being” Orddu, Orwen, and Orgoch. Most of the time, they appear as decrepit old hags: Orwen recognized by a necklace of milky-white stones, Orgoch by the deep cowl hiding her face, and Orwen (the usual spokesperson for the three) by the absence of any of these distinguishing features. But some of the time, they appear as beautiful enchantresses — particularly when they believe no one is looking. It is in this guise that they appear to Taran at the conclusion of the Cycle, offering him a fateful choice.

Speaking of Fate, this indeed seems to be the role of the three witches in Prydain. Like the Greek Moirae, Alexander’s three witches are a weaver, a spinner, and a cutter of the threads of men’s lives. But their names, like so many others in the Cycle, are drawn from Celtic mythology. Orddu and her mother Orwen are mentioned in the Mabinogion, specifically (again) in the Tale of Kilhwch and Olwen. It has been suggested that the description and disturbingly omnivorous tastes of the third witch, Orgoch, reveal a connection to the Irish Morrigu, who is herself sometimes portrayed as a triple goddess (Lane 27).

It would be possible to fill many pages with a detailed exegesis of the sources for all of Alexander’s careful borrowings (and indeed, this is partly what Michael Tunnell’s book The Prydain Companion attempts), but in the interests of brevity, I will leave further explorations for the reader. Instead, I will conclude by looking at Alexander’s own words for the effect this borrowing creates: “ancient source materials became transformed into a world whose mythological roots are recognizable yet elaborated into something highly personal and qualitatively different” (Foreword, The Prydain Companion). His meticulously thought-out adaptation of mythological elements allows Alexander to frame a story for young people (of all ages). Even though young readers may not fully appreciate the depth of Alexander’s research, his personal attachment to Wales, or the larger currents of mythology running through the Cycle, this is rather beside the point. All of these things work together to provide a vivid and compelling backdrop to more effectively convey his own stories with their many lessons in morality, loyalty, sacrifice, and love. And this, in part, explains their enduring popularity.

References

• Alexander, Lloyd. The Chronicles of Prydain: The Book of Three (1964), The Black Cauldron (1965), The Castle of Llyr (1966), Taran Wanderer (1967), The High King (1968). New York: Henry Holt and Co.
• Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Noon Day Press, 1966.
• Lane, Elizabeth. “Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain and Welsh Tradition.” Orcrist 7 (1973): 25-9.
• Tunnell, Michael O. The Prydain Companion: A Reference Guide to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. 1989. New York: Henry Hold and Co., 2003.

First, though, some history, which is well known to Polish audiences of Wajda’s film, but perhaps less familiar to others. Katyń is the name of a forest near Smolensk in western Russia, one of the locations where over 20,000 Polish military officers and other Polish prisoners of war were executed by the NKVD, the Soviet internal security police, in the spring of 1940.  The Polish prisoners had been captured by the Soviets in September 1939 when the Soviet army invaded Poland from the east, according to the agreed upon plan between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, who were then allies. In April 1940, the Soviets began the systematic massacre of the Polish prisoners, who were executed, one by one, with a gunshot to the back of the head. The killing took place non-stop, day after day (except for the May Day holiday), until 20,000 men lay buried in mass graves in the Katyń forest and other secret locations in western Russia. The Nazis discovered the Katyń graves in April 1943 and exploited the Soviet crime for their own propaganda purposes (by then the Nazis and Soviets had dissolved their non-aggression pact and were at war with one another).  When the Soviet Army finally drove the Nazis out of the Katyń area in September 1943, the Soviet government then launched a counter-propaganda campaign, proclaiming that the Nazis had been responsible for the massacre, which they claimed had not taken place in 1940, but in 1941, when the area had been under German occupation. The Soviets maintained their innocence for fifty years, until April 1990, when the  government of Mikhail Gorbachev expressed official regret for the massacre and acknowledged that the executions had been carried out in 1940 by the NKVD.

The great Polish film director Andrezj Wajda, whose own father died at Katyń, has now made a film about the event — or, rather, as he explains in an interview, about two events: his subject is both the crime of the Katyń massacre, and also the lies that were told about it by the Soviet authorities. At the same time that Wajda has created a film whose central theme is the tension between lies and truth in history, he has also created a work of art, a fiction — not a documentary. The incidents in the film were all taken from memoirs and personal recollections of the events at the time, but the  characters of the film are fictional. The film weaves together the story of a general (two generals, as well as a naval admiral, were actually executed at Katyń) and three other military officers, along with the stories of their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. It is these women, in fact, who are the main focus of the film, and this reflects Wajda’s personal experience. What Wajda first knew about Katyń was the effect he saw on his own mother, and the suffering she endured.

It is the tragedy of the mourning women, in fact, which prompts Wajda to weave a mythological motif into the film: the ancient Greek myth of Antigone. As the story is told in Sophocles’s play, Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, had been killed in the civil war of the city of Thebes, contending for the throne that had once belonged to their father Oedipus. Their uncle, Creon, who is now the king, decrees that Eteocles will be honored but Polyneices will be left as carrion on the battlefield. Although Ismene, Antigone’s sister, begs her to obey the law, Antigone rejects her pleas and defies Creon by performing a symbolic burial of her brother. Creon then condemns Antigone to be buried alive.

Wajda sees a parallel here between the defiant Antigone and the women of Poland who defied the Soviet authorities in honoring their dead husbands and in telling the true story of their deaths. There are various ways in which the women in the film are shown defying the authorities, but the most dramatic story is that of a woman, Agnieszka, who wants to erect a tombstone for her brother, whose name was on the list of the dead at Katyń. She has the tombstone inscribed with the date April 1940, even though her sister Irena  begs her not to do so. But when Agnieszka takes the tombstone to have it placed in the church, the church officials turn her away. Then, when she takes the tombstone to the family grave at a cemetery, the police arrest her and smash the tombstone. Why? Because of the date Agnieszka has had inscribed on the tombstone: 1940. If the executions took place in 1940, it was a Soviet crime, as Katyń was under Soviet occupation at that time. If it took place in 1941, it was a Nazi crime, under the German occupation of western Russia. All Agnieszka had to do was to remove the date from the tombstone, or to put the date 1941 instead. She refused, and chose the truth instead. Like Antigone, she is buried alive; the last time we see her, she is in prison, descending the steps leading down into her cell.

Of course, making mythological allusions is a risky business in any form of art, so Wajda makes sure we recognize the connection between Antigone and Agnieszka by weaving Sophocles’s play Antigone into the plot of the film. To pay for her brother’s tombstone, Agnieszka sells her hair to the theater in Krakow so that it can be made into a wig. An actress at the theater explains that the German actresses had taken all the wigs away with them when they evacuated the city. The actress needs a wig because her own hair was shaved off in the Auschwitz concentration camp (located just thirty miles from Krakow). As the hairdresser is cutting off Agnieszka’s hair, the actress recites some lines from the role she will play — but still without any mention of the name Antigone. She speaks about someone who has lost the will to live after her brother has died, a woman who has gone mad in a world filled with evil. Wajda is giving us one clue after another, provoking us to see the myth in the history.  Finally, just in case we did not detect Antigone in the actress’s recitation of her lines, the myth is revealed unmistakably in the next scene: when Agnieszka collects the money for her hair at the ticket window, there is a large poster advertising the play, with the name “Antygona”  prominently displayed  in very large letters, plain for all to see.

This story of a tombstone, in a different form, took place in Wajda’s own life, many years after the war. In defiance of the authorities, Wajda dared to inscribe his father’s tombstone with the date 1940, as he explains in the interview accompanying the film: “The date was what mattered” (“Data była ważna”). The date on a tombstone is the historical fact that connects the story of Wajda’s own life with the fictional character of Agnieszka in the film, and with the ancient Greek myth of Antigone.

Thus, not only does Wajda expose the lies of the Katyń coverup, he also gives the story a mythological dimension. The tragedy of Antigone becomes the tragedy of every mother, wife, and child of the Katyń victims, women like Wajda’s own mother, women who could not honor their dead and who could not name their executioners. Unlike the Soviet lies that pretended to be the historical truth when they were not, Wajda uses both the power of fiction and the power of myth to tell, at last, a true story of Katyń.

Works Cited:

• Wajda, Andrzej, director. Katyń. Screenplay by Przemyslaw Nowakowski, based on the book Post Mortem by Andrzej Mularczyk. (The DVD contains an hour-long interview with Andrzej Wajda.) 2007.