Love Potion Number Nine

Ah, young love. You burn, you pine, you perish. A smile sends you soaring; a glare tumbles mountains around your head. You just have to feel for those two crazy kids, thrown together by their unruly hearts. Sometimes. After all, if the object of your affection doesn't return your

The Love Potion, Evelyn De Morgan

feelings, you can always brainwash them with a handy love spell! Those never backfire!

For all their ubiquity in myths, it is a rare story where the love spell actually works out all right. There's Cupid and Psyche, sort of; he scratches himself with the arrow of love, falls head over heels, and... abducts her, woos her while invisible, and has to abandon her to a torturous set of quests before they can be reunited. And that's the happy one.

It's much easier to find a love spell gone wrong. Sometimes it's played for laughs, as Shakespeare does in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Frequently it's the province of a villainous woman, a "false bride" seeking to blot out a man's memories of his beloved and claim him for herself. (There's a splendid Grimm story, Sweetheart Roland, in which the heroine's loss of her beloved is just one of the many trials she faces.) More often, however, a love spell leads to total disaster. And I'm not talking about Our Hero and Our Heroine not ending up together. I'm talking about the breaking of the world.

Aphrodite Leading Helen to Paris, Jack Pane

The most famous of these is, of course, Helen of Troy. The jury will probably always be out on whether or not Helen went with Paris willingly, but in the Iliad she has no doubt of the answer: she demands to know if she is to be sent hither and yon, crazed with desire, whenever Aphrodite has a new mortal favorite. Obviously this was a flawed love spell, since Helen's own wishes can still make themselves felt, but it's still highly potent. Helen does in the end sleep with Paris, and the direct outcome of Aphrodite's love spell is the destruction, not just of a city, but of an entire generation.

Helen is a particularly sad case because not only has she been brainwashed, she knows it. The gods can force mortals to do their bidding; Helen knows all too well that no matter how much she might want to go home to Sparta, she will never be able to fight off Aphrodite's mind control. The best she can do is complain about it, and even that arouses the wrath of a goddess who's notoriously vindictive when thwarted. There are plenty of love-spelled bridegrooms unaware that they're about to marry the wrong girl; Helen is fully conscious all the time of just how much she doesn't want what Aphrodite's love spell is forcing on her. Hell with brainwashing - this is torture.

Tristan and Isolde, Yoshitaka Amano

Later stories shift the blame away from the lovers. Tristan and Isolde drink a love potion unknowingly (again, the jury is still out on whether it really was an honest mistake, or whether Isolde's mother or maidservant thought that Isolde would be better paired with Tristan than with King Mark). It's just as unfair for them as it is for Helen; while their love is deeply felt, it's also created without their consent, and locks them into a fate as destructive as Troy's. For a long time they choose to deny their love, unlike Helen and Paris, for the sake of preserving the political alliance that Isolde's marriage creates. But all that that does is drive them to distraction and inflame Mark's suspicions. When they run away together, their guilty consciences send Isolde back to Mark and Tristan across the sea to Brittany, and ultimately into a marriage of convenience with a girl he never touches, who rightly becomes as suspicious as Mark. Conscience proves their undoing, since out of decency Tristan waits to seek Isolde's healing help until it's too late to save his life, and she dies of a broken heart when she arrives to find him dead. Their story is a tragedy where Helen and Paris's is not, primarily because they fight as hard as they can against a love that they know will doom them. But that knowledge gives them precisely zero help. The best you can do, apparently, is to live a tortured life of denial and hope that posterity thinks well of you.

Siegfried Meets Gutrune, Arthur Rackham

And that's only if your family is inclined to let it rest. Siegfried's wife Kriemhild enticed him away from Brunhilde with a love spell, but the ensuing love dodecahedron creates a situation where murder and mayhem are the only outcomes. Siegfried's friendship with Gunther, Kriemhild's brother, leads him to betray his initial (and real) love for Brunhilde by posing as Gunther in order to win her for his new brother-in-law; Brunhilde's outraged pride and rejected love make her arrange for Gunther to kill Siegfried, and then to throw herself on his funeral pyre; and Kriemhild, furious at her brother's treachery, has him slaughtered at the feast celebrating her second marriage and burns the great hall down around them all.

Brunnhilde on the Pyre, Arthur Rackham

The characters of the Nibelungenlied (or the Volsunga saga, whichever version you prefer) are neither heroic nor villainous. They do horrible things, but for reasons well within the code of their society. Kriemhild's terrible vengeance is something that her honor requires her to do; in the Volsunga saga, the gods decide that she did exactly the right thing and bring about a third (and apparently happy) marriage, this time to a Swedish king. Siegfried deserves more pity than condemnation; for most of the story, he operates under the brainwashing influence of the love spell, and can't even remember being in love with Brunhilde. As far as he knows, he's doing some iffy things in the service of his best friend and the woman he loves. Brunhilde, although vindictive as hell, also recognizes that she's gone too far (although arguably she's operating under the exact same rules as Kriemhild will later); her suicide reclaims for her a moment of true tragic dignity. Only Gunther comes off as a real lowlife, literally stabbing his best friend and brother-in-law in the back. The whole mess could have been avoided if the love spell had never entered the picture. Once it does, everyone involved is doomed. The rules of honor require them all to make the moves that will lead to their deaths.

Death of Tristan, Robert Engels

Which makes sense. Clearly we're uncomfortable with the idea that we can be brainwashed and never regain our true minds. But the horrific endings to so many love spell stories place the brunt of the fallout on the shoulders of the victims. Siegfried gets murdered; Tristan and Isolde both die; Helen sees herself become the byword for a faithless whore. Aphrodite never suffers for enchanting Helen. The queen of Ireland, who sends the love potion with Isolde, is punished not at all; nor is Kriemhild's mother, who puts the spell on Siegfried. In some "false bride" fairy tales, the villainous woman who tried to steal the bridegroom gets torn limb from limb by horses, or rolled down a hill in a barrel full of knives, or even just exiled or humiliated in front of the whole court. But in some (like Sweetheart Roland), there's again no punishment for the instigator of the mess.

The Death of Siegfried, Hermann Hendrich

It's incredibly unsatisfying to see relative innocents pay with their lives for the crime of another. But it reveals a realistic attitude towards life that legends and fairy tales (often unjustly) aren't seen as having. People escape justice all the time. Innocents suffer all the time. The punishment for making a mistake is often out of proportion to the mistake itself. These aren't giddy Disneyfied tales of happily-ever-after; these are tragedies of epic scope, designed to reveal dark truths about humanity and about life. Instead of spoon-feeding you a happy ending, the love spell stories and their awful endings force you to think about human nature: about love, about hate, about injustice.

It's heavy stuff. But it's what we have legends for. We tell those stories to remember what happens when we impose our will on someone else. And in telling them, hopefully we remember that that path rarely leads to dignity, or happiness, or anything we'd want for ourselves.

The Coward's Weapon

Say I handed you a weapon. It was something completely unlike anything you'd seen before: a device that could take out an attacker before he even knew you were there. It could be wielded in complete stealth, with excellent accuracy, and it wasn't expensive to make.

I am speaking, of course, of the bow.

As long as there have been bows, there have been legends associated with them. It makes perfect sense: at heart, the bow is an impossibly miraculous weapon. It puts the rich man in armor on the same playing field as the peasant with good aim and access to a yew tree. It ensures a certain amount of protection for its wielder - a good archer can get rid of a lot of foes before they get close enough to hit him back. Legends can't ignore the bow; they're full of archers, most of them crack shots. But no one can quite make up their mind about what the weapon says about the wielder.

Mostly, anyway. There is one true cowardly archer: Paris of Troy. In a culture where courage is measured by risking life and limb in a chariot melee, the pretty boy who shoots arrows from behind his city walls is never going to get much respect. When Paris and Menelaus fight their duel over Helen, it's implicit that the bow is not an allowed weapon: real men fight face-to-face, not bow-to-shield. Paris's slaying of Achilles is hideously ironic - the greatest warrior of the age, a man who physically attacked a river and won, is killed with the weapon of a coward. It's deliciously karmic that the Greeks turn Paris's own weapon against him; his killer, Philoctetes, inherited from Heracles the bow and poisoned arrows he uses to take out Paris. But that very act takes some of the sting out of the taunting of Paris as a fraidy-cat archer. He may sleep around with another man's wife while his brothers die in the dust, but his archery was something not only to be feared, but to be emulated. Even when it's the coward's weapon, a good bow is worth having on your side.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, Warner Bros.

Things could only get better for the bow, and did they ever. From the moment Robin Hood shot his first arrow, the bow was enshrined in legend as the weapon of the underdog. So you can't afford a sword or chain mail or a war horse? No problem! You can go them one better. For a few hours of labor, you can make yourself an armor-piercing weapon that keeps you out of reach of a sword's edge or a horse's hooves. Rebels from William Tell to Katniss Everdeen embrace the bow's practical and symbolic value. Armed with bows, the oppressed masses are no longer defenseless. Singlehandedly, an archer can start a rebellion; get a group of Merry Men together, and you've got a full-scale coup on your hands. The sheer nature of the weapon - requiring forethought and planning - also seems to influence its wielders: legendary archers tend to be far more strategically minded than swordsmen.

Eventually, nobility is allowed to use the bow. One of the engagement challenges for the hand of Princess Yasodhara requires her suitors to string and bend a massive bow. Siddhartha, the future Buddha, calmly fires off an arrow as well, when no other suitor had even managed to string the weapon. Similarly, Odysseus is the only man who can use his own personal bow; his reclamation of kingdom and queen truly begins when he completes Penelope's impossible challenge. But the nobility is still weird about archery; both instances are the only times we see either hero use a bow, and they're relegated firmly to the arena of showmanship, with no practical side in evidence. Rama is rarely depicted without a bow, but Rama is in a strange fix: undeniably royal, he's also a prince in exile. He may be the only noble to escape without censure from the practical wartime use of a bow.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, Lionsgate

Most recently, the bow has become an oddly gendered weapon. In an unfortunate modern transposition, the "cowardly" archer has become "feminine." The two best-known archers in pop culture are Katniss and Legolas. One's a girl, one's played by Orlando Bloom. Women in stories set in or influenced by the Middle Ages have a choice of two weapons: the knife, for close work when her protection has failed, or the bow, to keep her out of danger but still enable her to please a modern audience by fighting. It's the same stigma that Paris dealt with: men don't fight from a distance, ergo men don't use bows. And the complexity of Katniss, currently the most visible archer around, means that while we admire her incredible aim and accuracy, we are always horrifyingly aware of what it costs her to use her skill to kill. She's not a good-versus-evil hero, and while her weapon represents rebellion, she's not one with it in the same way that Robin Hood is.

It's a weird full-circle situation, with the bow slipping off its rebellious pedestal into, if not ill repute, certainly a loss of luster. And it's hard to predict exactly where the bow will wind up next. But it will probably always be the weapon of revolution; its equalizing nature will never change. It will circle back around to pure uncomplicated heroism, and then around again as we remember what long-range weapons do to a gallant charge of heroes. It's a complicated weapon, and it'll probably always make us a little bit nervous.

In Defense of Menelaus

As a rule of thumb, I cheer for the underdog. Watching someone beat the odds is a marvelous thing. It gives you hope for yourself, for the future, for the world in general. The big guys don't always win, and the little guy who cares can actually stand up and show them what's what.

And I have never seen a more under underdog than Menelaus.

Helen and Paris, Howard David Johnson

Everyone knows how this goes. We saw a preview for it in Aphrodite and Hephaestus' disastrous marriage, but even the gods couldn't outdo the mortals on this one. Anyone planning to hook up with The Most Beautiful [fill-in-the-blank] Ever should take note: there will always be an upgrade. Menelaus is the guy Helen had to marry; Paris is the guy she wanted to marry. Or at least the guy she shacked up with for a decade and (according to Homer) had pretty awesome hate sex with. Menelaus is the guy with metaphorical egg on his face who has to fight his wife's boy toy, who quite possibly has non-metaphorical afterglow in his hair. Someone is losing here, big time.

Rubbing salt in that ten-year wound, no one can say a nice word about Menelaus' appearance. Helen's beauty goes without saying; Paris is called "godlike" by Homer, who otherwise has no time for the whiny little brat. The best Menelaus gets in terms of physical description is that he

The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (detail of Menelaus), Roman
copy of the painting by Timanthes

has red hair. Damned by faint praise if anyone ever was. If Paris is Helen's upgrade, it's hard not to imagine that Helen was Menelaus's. The younger brother of an ambitious king could expect very little in Bronze Age Greece, but marriage to Helen got Menelaus a kingdom, prestige, and an incredibly hot wife all in one stroke. All of a sudden it makes a bit more sense why he'd fight so devastating a war to get her back: she's the ticket to his future, and possibly his self-esteem too.

But that's not enough. This humiliation conga's just beginning. Menelaus is very clearly subordinate to his brother for the entirety of the war, despite having the most at stake. Hera and Athena are nominally on his side, but they have to remind themselves to help him out, while Aphrodite springs into action when Paris is in danger. And in every adaptation of the story since Homer, he's recharacterized as unsavory: neglectful, abusive, careless, vengeful, anything to make him seem unworthy of the prize that is Helen.

So why do I cheer for him? Because he's awesome, that's why.

Helen and Menelaus, 6th century Greek relief

Homer tells us right from the start that what Menelaus wants most of all is to defend Helen's honor. Don't forget, Homer's Helen isn't in love with Paris; the first time we see them together, she quite rightly bitches him out for his wimpiness, comparing him to Menelaus in devastating terms. No one listens, least of all Paris, but Helen is not happy in Troy. Who wants to protect her? Who wants to make her happy? Who wants to restore her good name? Menelaus. Her husband. After nine years of daily humiliation, his goal is still to please her. In a Big Manly Epic full of blood and death and talk of honor, that is just sweet.

But Menelaus isn't just all heart. He plans nighttime initiatives with Agamemnon. His most-used epithet is "master of the war-cry." Helen sings his praises as a fighter, and his battle with Paris more than proves her right. He never oversteps his boundaries as second-in-command, but when he needs to act, he brings it. He's a king you could be proud to follow, which in the Iliad is rare indeed.

Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus, Roman copy
of Greek statue

And lest we forget, he carries Patroclus's body back to the Greek lines, weaponless and endangered for the sake of his dead comrade's honor.

This. Guy. Rocks.

I dare you to find a more well-rounded man in all of Greek mythology. Menelaus has it all. Plus he wins. Plus Helen is happy to be reunited with him and their daughter. (Hey, they had a daughter? That means they must have slept together! Crazy times!)

And he never brags about how awesome he is. He just is. And it's a crying shame that he's constantly belittled in favor of a spoiled manwhore who hasn't a fraction of Menelaus's qualities, or the grace with which he carries them.