Seven mythological retellings that put lesser-known goddesses first

Take a shelf of myth retellings and the same names keep surfacing: Odysseus, Achilles, Thor, Zeus, Athena, the figures everyone learns before they learn to love the story. The goddesses have had a thinner time of it. Yet the ones pushed to the edges of the canon — the Muse used up by other people's genius, the witch alone on her island, the queen whose demand sends a king into exile, the huntress on a mountain — carry the best weather in these old myths.

On Bookish Valhalla this corner of the shelf has gone from a curiosity to a genre of its own, and seven of the strongest examples deserve a proper introduction. Australian readers have reason to care twice over: our own skies hold the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, and the same cluster the Greeks handed to the seven sisters of the story.

The goddesses the classics left in the margins

Start with the forgotten ones, because the minor goddesses are where a culture keeps its practical knowledge. Hecate owns keys and thresholds, Idun owns the apples that keep the gods young, Maat holds the scales, Yemoja tends the river, Skadi sharpens the winter. Strip out Zeus and Athena and the pantheon is fireworks; strip out the working goddesses and you can see how a society actually organised itself.

That also explains why these retellings now cluster in the genre shelves: give a goddess a first-person voice and the tension of her myth becomes the engine of the plot. The Australian resonance is not accidental either. The Pleiades sit in the sky of Aboriginal Australian astronomy as the Seven Sisters, and they sit in Greek myth as well — a sisterhood forgotten too quickly in two traditions at once.

Read them one at a time rather than in a heroic binge, because these books ask for attention and the reading life between them is part of the pleasure. Some people refill their glass, walk the dog, or vanish into something low-stakes — a guide to no deposit bonuses for instant play is one way to kill an arvo before returning to a goddess with a grudge.

The classics retold by the women they sidelined

Sarah Beth Durst's Muse takes the strangest of these figures and gives her a crisis of purpose. In Greek myth the Muse is a function rather than a character: a voice the divine borrows and then breaks. Durst makes her a woman who has watched that arrangement for centuries and is tired of being a device for someone else's talent.

Madeline Miller's Circe refuses to let the witch of Aeaea remain a cautionary device. The Homeric Circe turns men into swine; Miller's is a goddess with a lineage, a father in the sun, a home on an island she does not want to leave, and a long argument with the idea that transformation is a punishment.

Both books do the same thing in miniature: rescuing a female figure from the role the myth assigned her. Helen of Troy is the obvious next candidate, a goddess whose story has mostly been told by the men who wanted her, which is why so many Helen novels read like property disputes. Hecate, goddess of thresholds and threefold crossroads, is even better — ancient, frightening, barely known, and still waiting for a novel with her at the centre.

The Ramayana from the wrong side of the throne

Vivek Shraya's The Kaikeyi tells the Ramayana from the point of view of the queen everyone has spent twenty-five centuries blaming. Kaikeyi of Kekeya makes the demand that sends Rama into exile for fourteen years; in Shraya's telling she is not a villain but a woman with a plan, a wounded sense of what she is owed, and access to the divine machinery of the story.

Shraya is a Toronto playwright of Hindustani classical dance heritage, and the epic around him is full of goddesses Western readers barely know: Sita, associated with the earth and the bridge, Parvati, Durga, the river goddesses, the apsaras who decide how the wars go. They are load-bearing structures in the story, not set dressing.

If you want the originals rather than a reimagining, the modern English translations of the Valmiki Ramayana and the Mahabharata reward exactly the close reading these retellings invite. On screen, Ramraj Bakrie's animated Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, made with the National Film Development Corporation of India, compresses the war into ninety minutes of strikingly bold visual storytelling and makes you want the text.

Celtic lake queens and Norse winter goddesses

Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon retells Arthurian legend from the women, and the women it finds are goddesses: Morgaine, the Lady of the Lake, whose name across the versions is Morgan le Fay, and the Nine Queens of the Lake who keep Avalon. It predates the label "fantasy" and still reads as a haunted hybrid of theology and gossip.

Evangeline Walton's The Island of the Mighty does something similar with the Welsh cycle, adapting the Mabinogion: Rhiannon, whose birds carry messages, and Branwen, the daughter used as a hostage in a feud between peoples. Both books are decades old, both are still worth hunting down, and both sit comfortably beside the newer Norse material.

John Gwynne's The Last of the Gods puts the Norse pantheon on the edge of extinction with a Roman invasion at the gates, letting figures such as Freyja, Frigg and Idun carry the fighting instead of cowering behind Thor. Gods as refugees with politics is a welcome change of pace from hammer and lightning.

Gwynne's Skírnir is a prequel in spirit: the long ride into the high fells to win Skadi, half-goddess of winter and of the wild hunt. She has the best arc of any modern Norse goddess because she insists on her own terms, and she is also Scáthach-Skadi in Fate/Grand Order, complete with summer outfit and fandom. The Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, freely available, are stranger than the sanitised versions.

Two ways in: first flights and deep dives

If the shelf feels daunting, start with the books that hand you a doorway: clear line, strong voice, least mythology homework.

• Muse by Sarah Beth Durst — the goddess of inspiration gets tired of being used.
• Circe by Madeline Miller — exile, witchcraft and an island that becomes a home.
• The Kaikeyi by Vivek Shraya — the Ramayana told by the queen who gets blamed for it.
• The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley — Arthurian legend from the women of the lake.

The second group sits closer to a reading group with footnotes: more mythology, more room to argue.

• The Last of the Gods by John Gwynne — the Norse gods at the end of the world.
• Skírnir by John Gwynne — the mountain ride that wins the winter goddess.
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi — YA fantasy built on the Yoruba orisha and a war that is also a family.
• The Island of the Mighty by Evangeline Walton — Rhiannon, Branwen and the Welsh cycle in plain English.

A note on editions: Walton's slim novel has been out of print in stretches, so check availability before you commit, and if you want the Mabinogion itself, the widely used modern English translation is the one most retellings work from. Adeyemi's book is the one to hand to a teenager in the family, and the one that starts arguments about which god owns what.

Where myth retellings borrow the thriller edge

The newest generation of these books sits closer to a thriller than a quest. Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone is the clearest case: a young adult novel in which the orisha of the Yoruba pantheon are living deities, the heroine is a god's child, and the threat is a massacre rather than a monster. Ritual magic, inherited trauma and a family that will not accept the loss of its members give it the pacing of a thriller while keeping the theology intact.

That crossover is worth following. If your taste runs to murder in a cloistered library rather than in a cave, our round-up of dark academia thrillers pairs well with the retellings, because so much modern myth fiction is set in universities, museums and excavation sites. A museum storeroom is a perfect hiding place for a curse; a lecture theatre is where the gods of the previous age get studied.

Korean television is doing something similar from the other direction. Alchemy of Souls puts a murder mystery inside an occult academy, mixing Western fantasy with a very Korean school hierarchy, and it makes a persuasive case that the rituals of the new world should come with paperwork and tuition fees. Anime does the same with older material: Fate/Grand Order has turned Norse and Celtic figures into playable servants, and Record of Ragnarok turns gods of several traditions into gladiators.

Short on time? Read the thriller-facing ones; they move. The more mythic books want a weekend and a notebook. Both kinds need one thing in common, which is a goddess who wants something.

Listening to these stories on an Australian afternoon

Audiobooks have quietly become the easiest way to meet these goddesses, because the right narrator carries the whole thing, and there is a growing set of productions built around conversations between friends rather than declamatory readings, which suits a first-person goddess with a sense of humour. Anyone who has ever wanted the Iliad delivered by someone telling it to you over a beer knows the appeal.

It also suits Australian routines. Melbourne trams, Sydney trains and the long drive between them give an hour or two of borrowed time, and a book about a goddess nursing a grudge is good company for the trip. Put it on at arvo, make a flat white, and let someone else do the sentences.

Where you buy matters too, if you want these novels to keep supporting smaller presses and indie booksellers. The affiliate links on this site run through Bookshop, Waterstones and IndieBound, and Australian readers can do the same for their own shops: Readings on Lygon Street in Melbourne, one of the QBD stores in Brisbane, or a second-hand dealer in Adelaide who has had the same battered copy of The Mists of Avalon for a decade.

Home-grown recognition follows too. The Aurealis Awards have long been where mythic and fantasy work is honoured on Australian soil, and when these retellings start collecting trophies here, the argument for forgotten goddesses stops being a niche pleasure and becomes a national one.