D’Aulaires’ Babies

As children, we tend to remember particular versions of myths as if they were the definitive ones, only later to discover that there is no such thing as an “original” myth or fairy tale, but, instead, thousands of variations passed down through literature and oral tradition. I first read about Orpheus in “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a sumptuously illustrated book that I pored over nightly. In that book’s version of the story, “the fluttering souls hushed” when Orpheus entered the realm of the dead and begged for his bride. Even “Hades, the pitiless king of the dead … was so moved by the music that tears rolled down his sallow cheeks.” As a child, I never understood why Orpheus doubted Hades’s promise to send Eurydice back to the world behind him—the pitiless king had wept, after all, upon hearing Orpheus’s music. But my confusion at Orpheus’s faltering was quickly replaced by horror when the Dionysian nymphs entered the scene, yelling and wild. “The river stopped its gurgling to listen,” the d’Aulaires write, “for the haunting voice of Orpheus still issued forth from his dead lips when he floated down to the open sea.” Thus the story of Orpheus was imprinted upon me....

- Kate Bernheimer