Thomas Burnett Swann’s Day of the Minotaur has been on my radar for a while as an early work of queer(?) fantasy; I had thought it came to my attention in Jamie Williamson’s The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, but apparently Williamson doesn’t mention it. however I found it, it caught my eye because I, too, am fascinated by the Minoans (aon latha thèid aig luchd-leughaidh na Gàidhlig air an sgeulachd ficsein-shaidheans Mhinòthach agam a leughadh). Sean Guynes recently posted a review of it, and that finally prompted me to go down to the library and read it — a very good decision.
Day of the Minotaur, originally serialized in “slightly different” form as The Blue Monkeys in 1964-1965 and then as a novel in 1966 (which I am taking as the publication date for the “final” form of the book), is the story of Eunostos, the titular minotaur, the last of his kind among the Beasts — a diverse group of near-human and anthropomorphized animal peoples who reside in a secluded mountain valley on Crete, perhaps in the period leading up to the so-called Late Bronze Age “collapse” — the Mycenaean palace economies are still there, but this is clearly in the transitional period from the 15th century BCE on where Minoan culture had been mostly subsumed into Mycenaean culture; the Achaeans who feature here speak the same language as the Cretans, though the Cretans still have certain cultural differences and regard themselves as distinctly not Achaean. the novel is presented as a found document translated by an archaeologist, a historical account written by Eunostos covering the end of the time of the Beasts. while it is, in many ways, entirely different from Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon, and certainly the found document framing is not unique to Swann, I nonetheless suspect that the frame narrative of Tales may have been inspired by this book, both in the ambiguously-Aegean setting of Nevèrÿon and in that Delany’s ambiguous truth-claim (that the (fictional) “Culhar’ fragment” represents a “real” history but that the Nevèrÿon books are consciously not an attempt to convey that history) responds directly to Swann’s prologue’s assertion that Eunostos’s account represents “real” history that will force a reconsideration of ancient “mythological” narratives.
the novel begins with the arrival of an Achaean war-leader named Ajax at the Cretan palace where Thea (age 16, in setting terms a woman of marriageable age) and Icarus (age 15, in setting terms on the edge between childhood and manhood), the half-Dryad children of the Cretan king, have been sent to take shelter. enraged when Thea stabs him — nonfatally — with a hairpin as he is about to rape her, Ajax orders them to be left as human sacrifices to the minotaur. fortunately, Eunostos turns out to be friendly, if (by his own admission) rough around the edges, and they come to live with him. there follows a semi-pastoral section, as Eunostos, Thea, and Icarus adjust — each in distinct ways — to this new, shared life. Icarus embraces life among Beasts and his own bestial nature; Thea is ambivalent about it at best, and she attempts to domesticate (chapter IV is titled “Domestications and Domesticity”) Eunostos, encouraging him to wear clothes, disapproving of his sexually forward friends, and generally attempting to rearrange his life to mimic the palace life she is accustomed to. Eunostos, meanwhile, is torn between his growing romantic (and sexual) attraction to Thea and his frustration at her attempts to turn him into something and someone he is not and does not want to be.
parts of this pastoral section are, to be sure, a bit cutesy (though the target audience for the narrative is obviously adult, given its frank treatment of sexuality), but they are cutesy in the way that The Sword in the Stone is cutesy: a lighthearted tone and pastoral plot (they literally have a picnic) covering a complex engagement with the clashes between human and Beast social mores, particularly different models of both sexual and non-sexual propriety, and an intruding sense of historical change. the Beasts, it transpires, once lived on the coast and collaborated extensively with early human settlers on Crete before being displaced by slaving pirates and growing Cretan indifference or hostility. this is not the Shire, an idyllic realm kept in blissful ignorance for its own protection; it is the last refuge of a persecuted people, kept safe only by humans’ fear of Beasts’ strange, inhuman ways and appearances.
just as the tensions between Thea and Eunostos, however, the Achaean army arrives, aided by the villainous Thriae (bee-people), to attempt to recover Thea and Icarus by force and to kill or enslave the remaining Beasts. the novel’s pastoral tone is irreparably shattered, and this, too, marks it as different from Tolkien. where the Shire ends with the book renewed (even if we know that eventually hobbits will vanish),[*] the Beasts are gone — off into the West (of course), taking both their Frazerian-Gravesian religion and their sophisticated engineering skills and scientific knowledge with them and leaving behind, as Guynes observes, an Achaean-dominated world that resembles the Greek heroic age of Homer but soundly rejecting all of the literary and cultural value that is attributed to the Iliad and Odyssey as foundational texts of “Western” culture. in this respect, the end of the novel, where Thea finally accepts her Beast heritage and asks Eunostos to marry her — rejecting as she does so both his self-conception as rough around the edges and his internalized perception of Beasts as somehow inherently inappropriate or inadequate company (sexual, romantic, or otherwise) for a human princess — is, despite its continued lightness of tone, quite grim: she and Icarus are accompanying the few remaining Beasts to the Isles of the Blest from which their long-ago ancestors came in what is de facto an exile, although it is officially framed by the Cretan king as a gesture of thanks for past services.
there is, of course, something nostalgic at work here, a longing for an Edenic valley where the biggest concerns are making sure there’s enough food in the picnic basket for the “Bears” — ever-hungry perhaps-descendants of Artemis who look, regardless of their actual age, like young girls with certain ursine features — and producing enough beer (and maybe wine if you’re feeling fancy) for drinking parties and/or orgies. this nostalgia is coupled, though with a demystification of the mythological past Swann is inspired by. the Beasts are simply the last remnants of other intelligent species that once shared the world with humans (traveling as far as “the Land of the Yellow Men”, which based on some references to things learned there I assume means China); the minotaur is not a terrifying monster but a pastoral poet and jeweler — though it seems that what Eunostos does is mostly design jewelry, while his antlike “Telchin” employees do the actual production (of course he could not himself be a laborer). the legends of the Greek heroic past turn out to be stories of senseless murder and effectively genocide — the Achaeans are not heroes but barbarians (an intentionally loaded term), and perhaps, in the end, less human than the Beasts. of Ajax, Thea — or Eunostos-writing-as-Thea, an unstated perspectival distance that complicates the first chapters of the novel — says:
To such a man, Thea thought, fighting is not an art but a livelihood; he is not a hero but a strong, stupid, reasonably brave animal [note: not B/beast] who fights because he is too lazy to plant crops or sail a ship.
it is, I think, possible to read the treatment of the Achaeans within the novel as an interrogation of the concept of the “hero” as a warrior — of the idea that fighting can be “an art” in the first place.
as a final thought re the “queer(?)” in my first paragraph, I will observe that while Eunostos’s relationship with Thea is ostensibly the “primary” relationship here, and the novel ends with the two of them agreeing to get married/be romantically and sexually involved, I think Eunostos’s relationship with Icarus is significantly more developed. while this relationship is framed in paternal or fraternal terms, I found Eunostos’s feelings for Icarus much more emotionally resonant than Eunostos’s attraction to Thea, which is until the end presented as largely one-sided. it is, I think, telling that the novel ends not with Thea but with Icarus (and his snake Perdix):
“No, no,” I pleaded. “You mustn’t kneel!” I lifted [Thea] from the earth and held her in my arms, and she kissed me with such a sweet and burning ardor that she might have been one of the naughty Dryads who have studied the secrets of love for three hundred years. I held her with fierce tenderness and without shame and knew that love is not, as some poets say, a raging brushfire, but a hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance.
“If only,” I cried, “if only Icarus had come too!”
And of course he had, with Perdix.
if this is how Swann started his trajectory as a novelist, I will be extremely interested to see where he went from here, both in his later treatments of the Beasts (he went on to write two other novels connected to Day of the Minotaur, though I believe they’re both set earlier in time) and in his other work.
[*] as a very tangential aside, it has suddenly — somehow for the first time — occurred to me to link hobbits / the Shire as antecedents of the rural England that Tolkien idealized with the archaeological-anthropological theory popularized in the 19th century that Britain and Ireland were inhabited prior to the arrival of Celtic-language-speaking peoples by a “primitive”, “small” (and typically “dark”) race who were displaced into underground dwellings (e.g., the fairy-mounds of Gaelic traditional literature) and slowly died out/vanished. this theory is no longer regarded as archaeologically/historically plausible, but it had a significant influence on pre-genre fantasy — Robert E. Howard’s Picts take it up very directly — and it strikes me that there are definite connections to the hobbits as a proto-English.
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