Goddesses a go-go

[steepholm]

This one's from a student of mine: "Where are the mother goddesses in children's fiction?" Not just goddesses, but mother goddesses, particularly those of a naturey, earthy kind, but at any rate really authoritative types. Minor godesses, chthonic or simply bloodthirsty goddesses, probably don't count - unless their bloodthirstiness is very firmly established as an element of a natural cycle. (Sulis in my Death of a Ghost might just scrape in under this definition, but on reflection she's too much a genius loci, and somehow not sufficiently "above the fray" to qualify. Must think more on this...)

Anyway, I discussed this with lady_schrapnell the other day, and we came up with a few ideas, which I carefully wrote down on one of my infamous scraps of paper, and then just as carefully mislaid. But from memory, our haul looked something like this...

Susan Cooper: Gaia (from Green Boy) indubitably, and maybe also the Lady from The Dark is Rising sequence.
Diana Wynne Jones: Libby Beer (from Drowned Ammet - a book that does gods and goddesses the way I really want them to be).
Frances Hodgson Burnett: Susan Sowerby (from The Secret Garden). A metaphor, maybe, but a pretty insistent one! But then again maybe she's more a priestess of Cybele?

We ummed and aahed over the maid-mother-crone combos represented by, for example, the Carlisle witches in Margaret Mahy's The Changeover - and not because the maid is a man-maid. Personally I don't think their magic is quite fecund enough for true Mother Goddess status, but since I'm not really sure what I mean by that statement (I have been proved 100% Intuitive - see last post - and should never be pressed on such matters) I'm not the least prepared to defend it.

I did wonder about Catherine Fisher's Ceridwen (in Darkhenge), but hit my shins on a similar kind of doubt. You couldn't say that a Gravesian muse is uncreative, exactly, but - well, I don't know. (I do not know much about goddesses - though I think that Hafren is a strong brown one.)

Well, there we kind of dried up. Surely there must be so much more to say about children's lit mother goddesses? Help me (and my student) out, please!

Comments

[altariel.livejournal.com]

God(dess) help me, but all that came to mind was Mrs Bagthorpe.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The Bagthorpes are a shameful gap in my education, but from what I've heard that sounds very plausible!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I think they are absolutely hilarious - I reread a couple earlier in the year. The jokes were funny enough when I was 10, they're even better and wickeder when you're an adult.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh, what a fun idea! It made me think of Eve in Hilary McKay's Casson family books too, who'd be an interesting study as a mother goddess. Not what's being looked for at this point, sadly, but what a great topic.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I've been relistening to the audio version of The Lord of the Rings over the weekend, and was struggling to think of a mother goddess type in Tolkien, and wondered whether Melian the Maia (mother of Luthien) counted.

Oh, and the instant I type that, I think of Yavanna the Vala!