Who owns classical myth? Last time I posted to this blog, I applied the question to children, to raise some issues around what it means for children to use - and so own? - classical myth. This time, I want to pose a different question, namely what is it that anyone actually owns? Is it whatever a teacher or storyteller gives them? And as for the teachers of storytellers, as gatekeepers of myth, are they so different from those envisaged in Plato's Republic, whose 'first business is to supervise the production of stories, and choose only those we think suitable, and reject the rest'?

I am doubly invested in these questions at the moment. For one thing I am revisiting the topic of my previous posting - because I am writing 'up' the paper I mentioned there, on monsters in myth and how their reception changes myth, and how this change bears on the acculturation of children. And though I have been silent on this blog for a while, I have blogged a little on this paper in a second blog, and a third blog has been charting my activities over the past year or so around children's culture and mythology.

Secondly, later this week, I shall be in Cambridge for an event I'm organising along with Frances Foster, Sonya Nevin and Katerina Volioti. This event is gong to brainstorm ideas about the pedagogic value of mythology. As we set out in the blurb:

Greco-Roman mythology is used widely and imaginatively in teaching and outreach activities, in both secondary and higher education. Nonetheless, there have been few opportunities to analyse the pedagogical benefits and pitfalls of teaching mythology, or to share and explore effective practices and innovation in the field. 

I'm hoping that the event, as a first step to addressing this gap, will prompt me to think further about mythological ownership, about what it is for me to be an owner - and a gatekeeper - and about where this places me in relation to others involved in communicating myth.