35 min
Episode Two: Literal Vampires? Lamia in Keats and Tim Powers Beyond the Labyrinth
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- Books
Tim Powers Photo by Roberta F. Used under a Creative Commons license and is unmodified from the original.
John Keats
“He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror.'” – Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard
In this episode we nose around in a loosely gathered suite of ideas arising from Tim Powers’ fantasy/horror/alternate history novel The Stress of Her Regard and one of the Romantic poems that inspired it, “Lamia” by John Keats. Powers’ novel is a strange one, but then so are the poetry and the events that inspired it.
Tim Powers:
“I look for a situation or historical character or place that looks likely to have elements that will make a good book. … And then I read extensively: biographies, journals, ideally contemporary travel guides, things like that, always looking for something that is too cool not to use. … I think ‘what was really going on there?’ I know what the history books say, but why did this guy really do that?” — From “Tim Powers: ‘I don’t have to make anything up,'” The Guardian.
Read more
What is a “lamia”?
Female demon, late 14c., from Latin lamia “witch, sorceress, vampire,” from Greek lamia “female vampire, man-eating monster,” literally “swallower, lecher,” from laimos “throat, gullet” (see larynx). Perhaps cognate with Latin lemures “spirits of the dead” (see lemur) and, like it, borrowed from a non-IE language. Used in early translations of the Bible for screech owls and sea monsters. In Middle English also sometimes, apparently, mermaids — from The Online Etymology Dictionary
Read more, including a definition from 1398: Also kynde erreþ in som beestes wondirliche j-schape, as it fareþ in a beest þat hatte lamia, …
“Lamia” by John Keats
Read it on Project Gutenberg.
Tim Powers Photo by Roberta F. Used under a Creative Commons license and is unmodified from the original.
John Keats
“He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror.'” – Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard
In this episode we nose around in a loosely gathered suite of ideas arising from Tim Powers’ fantasy/horror/alternate history novel The Stress of Her Regard and one of the Romantic poems that inspired it, “Lamia” by John Keats. Powers’ novel is a strange one, but then so are the poetry and the events that inspired it.
Tim Powers:
“I look for a situation or historical character or place that looks likely to have elements that will make a good book. … And then I read extensively: biographies, journals, ideally contemporary travel guides, things like that, always looking for something that is too cool not to use. … I think ‘what was really going on there?’ I know what the history books say, but why did this guy really do that?” — From “Tim Powers: ‘I don’t have to make anything up,'” The Guardian.
Read more
What is a “lamia”?
Female demon, late 14c., from Latin lamia “witch, sorceress, vampire,” from Greek lamia “female vampire, man-eating monster,” literally “swallower, lecher,” from laimos “throat, gullet” (see larynx). Perhaps cognate with Latin lemures “spirits of the dead” (see lemur) and, like it, borrowed from a non-IE language. Used in early translations of the Bible for screech owls and sea monsters. In Middle English also sometimes, apparently, mermaids — from The Online Etymology Dictionary
Read more, including a definition from 1398: Also kynde erreþ in som beestes wondirliche j-schape, as it fareþ in a beest þat hatte lamia, …
“Lamia” by John Keats
Read it on Project Gutenberg.
35 min