Belatedly, thank you for this! I ended up with Harriet writing an essay, rather than revising (sorry.) Also Homer probably wouldn’t have been on her curriculum; I beg indulgence. Plantagenet Lullabies a) would be an amazing fic title b) sounds like the name of a neo-medieval/neo-folk band.
How much power, asks Harriet Vane, do the dead have over the living? She pauses, her pen poised over the paper. Too sweeping a question? She crosses it out. The power of the dead over the living, she writes, more confidently, is constantly evoked in The Odyssey. Stories of the dead are retold obsessively; Odysseus himself makes his journey as one believed dead. But the dead themselves, when they are summoned, have no particular wisdom. They bring no tidings to terrify or console. The only shade with the power of prophecy is he who was a prophet in life. Odysseus, telling the story in the hall of the Phaeacians, tells it as the sole survivor of his war-worn crew. Harriet pauses with her pen in the inkwell. It’s hardly the place for a digression within the essay, but she does wonder about that. She does wonder about Odysseus, returning alone to westward-facing Ithaca, without all the men who had departed under his charge. Ithaca’s rocky soil, he had said proudly, was still good for raising children. But he returned alone, to find swaggering suitors, a rather spiritless son, and careful Penelope, who said so little of what she was thinking. The bells chime the quarter, and Harriet shakes herself slightly. It would seem, she writes, that the only reward for daring the threshold of the Underworld is survival itself.
Fic prompt: Harriet Vane, revising at university; Peter Wimsey doing a run-down on chess, bridge, checkers, whist, canasta; Bel Rowley going to the dentist with Freddie tagging along; Lix Storm with writer’s block, working on her novel about Henry V; Plantagenet lullabies, any pairing…
Published
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