Stealing Helen: The Myth of the Abducted Wife in Comparative Perspective is the recent publication of the classicist Lowell Edmunds. In Stealing Helen the author aims at showing the existence of a specific international tale type, which underlies the Trojan War myth, especially the abduction of Helen by Paris in Homer’s Iliad. Edmunds attempts to establish a typology of a folktale on the basis of ancient Greek accounts of Helen and by comparing the similarities in the story pattern to other tales and stories from around the globe, as well as to later receptions of the Helen myth. Edmunds then uses his findings to challenge prevailing theories in classical studies on the origin of Helen.
In the first chapter, Edmunds proposes an international tale type, The Abduction of the Beautiful Wife, which does not refer to an existing tale type number in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index. Edmunds attempts to define a tale typology for his abduction tale on the basis of similar story patterns of Helen and her abduction in ancient Greek sources, which he compares to forty text examples. The author’s text corpus consists of folk and fairy tales, local legends, and literary genres such as romances, from all around the world and from all times, which Edmunds believes to be variants of the abduction tale type. There is, for example, the Egyptian folktale, “The Two Brothers,” preserved on papyrus, from around 1200 B.C.E. and an Icelandic romance from the fourteenth century as well as a Yupik tale collected in the 1970s. After a comparison of the Helen myth and the forty text examples, a synopsis based on the major motifs of Edmunds’s abduction tale type may read as follows:
A wife, of miraculous origin, is recognized by a powerful ruler because of her outstanding beauty, often through a picture. The abductor, who is more powerful than the husband, carries off the wife, often while the husband is absent. The husband sets out immediately to recover his wife by a ruse or magic. After the recovery, the abductor faces punishment, but is left unpunished in some instances. The recovered wife and her husband live either happily ever after or the wife is punished or killed.
In his second chapter, Edmunds especially emphasizes the existence of Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Welsh variants of the abduction tale, which leads him to the conclusion that the underlying folktale of Helen’s abduction has an Indo-European origin and might even be influenced by a narrative tradition from outside the Indo-European sphere.
The second half of the book then focuses solely on the figure of Helen. In chapter 3, Edmunds returns to the Helen myth and examines more closely the different cognates of the abduction tale type in comparison to ancient Greek accounts of Helen as well as to vase paintings and other art objects. The author concludes that the Greek myth of Helen is indeed a variant of his abduction tale type and is, therefore, also the basic story underlying the Trojan War myth. Based on these findings, Edmunds states in chapter 4 that Helen of Troy is, first and foremost, a heroine of folktale and epic, rather than an Indo-European cult goddess or a so-called “self” in literature, which have been major approaches to the nature of Helen in classical studies and literature so far. In chapter 5, Edmunds returns to the Helen of narrative and discusses later receptions of the Helen myth, as well as Helen as a fictive character in literature, where the author shows, for example, a literary continuity of the figure of Helen from Simon Magus to Goethe’s “Faust.”
Edmunds’s statement that the abduction of Helen of Troy might be only one variant of a widespread international folktale, and that he, therefore, rejects extra-narrative theories on the origin of Helen, is interesting and even stimulating. The reader might, however, get the impression that Edmunds takes the Greek myth of Helen, his declared “target ‘text,’” for some kind of prototype, which would be superior to the claimed forty variants of the abduction tale type. This notion seems problematic in that each variant of a tale type should be regarded as equally important and meaningful. The main reason for this might be the fact that Edmunds does not undertake his folkloristic excursion for the sake of it, but rather for obtaining a tool or argument for criticizing the prevailing theories on the origin of Helen in classical studies. Therefore, Edmunds’s folkloristic approach turns into a mere side story, which is mirrored by the structure of the book.
Despite the fact that Edmunds claims insistently throughout the book that he is not in search of the origins of the Helen myth himself, the approach in chapter 2 renders a rather different impression. Edmunds’s emphasis on similar story patterns in Sanskrit, Old Irish, and Welsh texts, and his suggestion of an Indo-European origin of the folktale behind Helen’s abduction, underline the author’s idea of a highly superorganic transmission of the abduction tale and its supposed variants, through time, place, and narrative genre, along the Indo-European language branches. As folklorists have pointed out, this is even difficult to prove for single words, let alone whole tales. The most curious part seems to be Edmunds’s attempt to establish a folktale typology, which would somehow follow up directly on the work of folklorists such as Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, and Hans-Jörg Uther. However, scholars have shown before Edmunds that one may find folk and fairy tales in ancient texts by comparing already classified tale types to their ancient analogues (see for example, Graham Anderson’s Fairytale in the Ancient World [2000] and William Hansen’s Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature [2002]). With regard to these prior works, Edmunds’s attempt might be evaluated as either an innovative alternative or a failed enterprise, but this is up to the reader to decide.
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[Review length: 978 words • Review posted on September 27, 2016]