Beautiful, Radiant Gods: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths

There is no easier way to get a kid hooked on Greek mythology than early exposure to d’Aulaire. 

E. Rose Nelson

Every generation of American children seems to have its own gateway into the Greek myths. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson has been an entry point for a lot of today’s kids, but for Generation X and many children that followed, it was d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, an oversized volume that was one of the most lasting collaborations of Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire.

There seem to have been a lot of couples like the d’Aulaires in the years between the First and Second World Wars: people who didn’t find satisfaction at home and traveled across the Atlantic to find personal and professional fulfillment. (The book I’m currently reading, Last Night at the Telegraph Club, profiles a set of journalists who traveled in the opposite direction. Wherever you go, there you are, but sometimes you’d just like to be somewhere else.) Edgar was born in Munich to Italian and American parents; they separated when he was six, and he spent his childhood traveling around Europe. Ingri was born in Norway to a family that encouraged her talent; by 15, she was studying art formally, in Norway, Germany and France. (Her father wrote poetry and translated the Icelandic Eddas into Norwegian.) They met in Munich in 1921 and married four years later; she was 21, he 27. By 1929, they were sharing a walk-up¹ apartment in Brooklyn. Edgar focused on book illustration, while Ingri focused on portraits. They threw dinner parties,² and at one of them, a librarian at the New York Public Library suggested they try creating children’s books together³. They resisted the suggestion at first, but in 1931, they published The Magic Rug, and embarked on a forty-year literary collaboration. They won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 1940 for their biography of Abraham Lincoln, and moved to Connecticut the following year. In the 1960s, they turned their eye toward mythology, starting with d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths in 1962.

If you haven’t seen the book in person, it’s hefty, close to 200 pages, weighing more than two pounds and just over 9″ x 12″. It’s not an easy volume to open or manipulate, to be honest, even as an adult, but I don’t remember it being particularly intimidating when I read it as a child. Mostly I remember the illustrations, soft-edged and naïve, reminiscent of both a child’s drawings and the work my grandmother did (she’d been encouraged to go to art school as a teen, but her father had refused to support her). The large format of the book makes the gods feel larger than life, though their expressions make them very human.

The d’Aulaires used two techniques to make their children’s books, beginning with stone lithography — a physically demanding process where art is literally applied to stone — and switching to printing on acetate sheets until the cost grew prohibitive. In either case, each color is applied separately and it is a painstaking and careful process.

The prose is somewhere between workaday and poetic, generally defaulting to matter-of-fact and clear language, starting with the creation of the world and the Titans. It outlines the major gods and tells many of the most popular myths before getting to the founding of Rome and a perfunctory final page explaining that the reign of the gods ended and “the Muses fell silent, but their songs live on to this very day, and the constellations put up by the gods still glitter on the dark blue vault of the sky.” It’s an interesting way to approach the end of a belief, and a far more respectful one than many books for children. (They’re a bit less respectful of the pre-Greek gods, dismissing them as “ugly idols.”)

Of course, there are still adjustments. Hylas has become Hercules’ good friend, and while Medea still murders Jason’s new wife, the book doesn’t mention her children. More notably, the gods “marry” quite often, putting seduction, abduction and outright rape in a vaguely described polyamorous bucket.⁴

Despite the edits⁵, the D’Aulaires’ writing is still appealing even as an adult. They may blunt some of the harsher truths, but they don’t condescend to their readers. I suspect this respect, alongside that enchanting art, is why d’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths has joined fellow Caldecott winner The Snowy Day, the Frances books, the works of Maurice Sendak in the decade’s immortal kidlit. E. Rose Nelson and I both remember the book being in our schools, and the book stayed in print for more than fifty years before the online era made “in print” something of a moving target. There’s even an audiobook version with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, among others.

The d’Aulaires published Norse Gods and Giants, which applied the same approach to the Poetic and Prose Eddas, in 1967, and continued living in Connecticut and working together to the end of their lives (they also owned a farm not too far from my own home in Vermont). Ingri died in 1980, just four years after the publication of their last book, The Terrible Troll Bird, still working on another. Edgar died six years later. But their songs, of course, live on to this very day.

1. Walk-ups, as you might have guessed, don’t have elevators. It was also a cold-water apartment, which is also exactly what it sounds like. ↩︎
2. Imagine washing the dishes after your fancy dinner party in a cold-water apartment. I know dishes washed in cold water get just as clean as long as you use enough soap, but still! You’re either heating up a ton of water on the stove or your hands will freeze. Maybe both! ↩︎
3. I wasn’t able to confirm it but it was probably Anne Carroll Moore. ↩︎
4. It’s not great! ↩︎
5. Which, to be fair, are still much better than Disney… ↩︎