"I loved all the world's mythologies"
About this Quote
There is a childlike swagger in "I loved all the world's mythologies", but it isn’t naive. It’s a declaration of appetite: not for one canon, one sacred story, one sanctioned past, but for the whole messy, contradictory library of human meaning-making. Lloyd Alexander, best known for The Chronicles of Prydain, isn’t just name-checking myths as cool source material. He’s staking out a creative ethic. Myth, to him, is not a museum exhibit; it’s a toolset for building worlds that feel older than the page.
The phrasing matters. "Loved" is emotional, not scholarly. It pushes against the posture of the collector or the academic who classifies myths like butterflies. Alexander’s intent is closer to allegiance than curiosity: an insistence that these stories deserve attachment, not merely analysis. And "all the world's" is a subtle rebuke to provincial fantasy traditions that treat Northern Europe as default and everything else as garnish. It’s inclusivity without the performative checklist; the emphasis is on hunger, not virtue.
Context sharpens the line. Alexander wrote in a 20th-century Anglophone landscape where fantasy was often flattened into medieval cosplay or Christian allegory with swords. His work borrows from Welsh myth, but this quote hints he saw mythology as a global commons: different languages, similar pressures - mortality, power, betrayal, wonder. The subtext is practical, almost political: if you love many mythologies, you resist the idea that any single story owns the right to explain the world.
The phrasing matters. "Loved" is emotional, not scholarly. It pushes against the posture of the collector or the academic who classifies myths like butterflies. Alexander’s intent is closer to allegiance than curiosity: an insistence that these stories deserve attachment, not merely analysis. And "all the world's" is a subtle rebuke to provincial fantasy traditions that treat Northern Europe as default and everything else as garnish. It’s inclusivity without the performative checklist; the emphasis is on hunger, not virtue.
Context sharpens the line. Alexander wrote in a 20th-century Anglophone landscape where fantasy was often flattened into medieval cosplay or Christian allegory with swords. His work borrows from Welsh myth, but this quote hints he saw mythology as a global commons: different languages, similar pressures - mortality, power, betrayal, wonder. The subtext is practical, almost political: if you love many mythologies, you resist the idea that any single story owns the right to explain the world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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