Myth and Children - Romulus and Remus (including video)

Myth and children - Romulus and Remus

https://youtu.be/0j1pnJTwL4I

For this blog entry I originally wanted to look at Augustus’ use of the founding myth in the establishment of his principate. However after the lecture on Myth and children and how children see myth today I thought it would be fun as well as an educationally strong idea to try and create an animated version of the Romulus and Remus myth for children. This turned out to be much harder than I anticipated and hence why this blog post is a little later than I had originally planed. Eventually though I did manage to create a video I am quite happy with, having never done this kind of thing before and being no artist I tried to keep it as simple as possible, which I think also makes it accessible to children. Obviously, some of the themes are not appropriate for very young children, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the ancient versions of the myth so kept most of the myth as authentic1 as possible. This strive for accuracy led from a discussion in class, after talking about childhood encounters with mythology we discovered that the versions of the myth children hear at a young age is often the version they take forward into adulthood and those childhood inaccuracies then cloud there readings of myth in later life. The most striking example we discovered was the story of Helen of Troy in which she is often pictured as a damsel in destress waiting to be rescued by her loving husband Menelaus after being abducted by Paris. Of course this retelling is so far removed from the original myth, but we discovered that when asking around the younger members of our family or indeed people who have just never studied classics that this is the version of the myth they tell us. 

Now with that all being said when it came to making my version of the myth I struggled with what to include. One of the things I really wanted to demonstrate was that there are many different versions all with differing events and approaches. So I made sure to mention Livy as his version of the myth is quite different from others and in particular it is different from the version that is usually told. The other thing that I was conscious of was time, I didn’t want the video too long as children tend to tune out if something goes on to long. This meant that I had to condense what I wanted to say into key points and events, unfortunately this meant missing out somethings I would have liked to say for example what happened to Rhea Silva is not mentioned in the video as I felt it was not directly relevant to the founding myth. The events following the death of Remus (the rape of the Sabine women) was also not included partly due to time and the age of the audience but also due to the fact I felt that the story I was telling didn’t benefit from going beyond the death of Remus.

I had a lot of fun making this video but it was also one of the most frustrating things I have ever done and probably not something I will be in a rush to do again. However I am glad I did it and  know that I can if I need to in the future. 

1  Vocabulary of key terms adapted from Lorna Hardwick’s pioneering book (2003) Reception Studies: New Surveys in Classics, Greece & Rome, New Surveys in the Classics 33. Oxford: Oxford University Press see esp. pp. 1-11