Deep dives into world mythology and folklore, without the dumbing down
Elias Blackwood Elias Blackwood · June 9, 2026
Dante’s Inferno is one of the most influential works in Western literature. It’s the first part of a three-part epic called the Divine Comedy. Written in the early 1300s by Italian poet Dante Alighieri, it remains surprisingly relevant and gripping today. The poem blends theology, politics, and personal emotion into a single narrative. Think of … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 12, 2026
The full inscription above the Gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno (Canto III) reads, in the most famous English translation: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” It’s the last line of a nine-line warning, spoken by the gate itself, declaring that Hell is eternal and that anyone who enters has lost any possibility of … Read more
Elias Blackwood · May 20, 2026
I remember sitting in a graduate seminar on classical literature — this was about 1999 — when a professor said something that has stayed with me for the better part of three decades: “The Greeks did not write tragedies to…
Elias Blackwood · March 25, 2026
The gods of any mythology aren’t arbitrary — they’re a direct map of what a society considered most powerful, most unpredictable, and most worth appeasing. Spend enough time with any pantheon and you’ll understand more about the culture that created it than almost any other source. What strikes me every time I dig into a … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 22, 2026
Legendary races and peoples — whether in ancient texts or richly constructed fantasy worlds — always reflect something real about how the culture that created them thought about difference, hierarchy, and belonging. That’s what makes studying them so rewarding: you’re always reading two things at once. In Chapter 15, as our narrator and Captain Cactus … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 19, 2026
In every culture I’ve studied, the question of who has access to special knowledge — who can perform rituals, speak to the gods, manipulate the forces of nature — is never purely theological. It’s always about social structure, legitimacy, and the control of meaning. Magic systems, in that sense, are political documents. What makes Grumbleton’s … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 15, 2026
Founding myths are among the most revealing documents a society produces — they tell you exactly what that society considered worth celebrating, what origins they wanted to claim, and what values they wanted to install at the root of their identity. No origin story is accidental. That lens becomes fascinating when you apply it to … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 12, 2026
Sacred sites and legendary places hold a special interest for me because they exist at the intersection of physical geography and cultural meaning — real locations transformed by story into something mythological. Everywhere humans have lived, they’ve done this, and the consistency of the impulse is remarkable. What fascinates me is how accidental beauty so … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 9, 2026
I’ve always treated great fantasy chronicles the same way I treat historical texts — as documents that reveal something true about the people and values that created them, even when the events themselves are fictional. The best legends work that way: the “accuracy” is never the point. What draws me to a chapter like this … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 2, 2026
Iconography and symbolism are where mythology gets genuinely dense — every object, animal, color, and gesture carries accumulated meaning that can take years to fully unpack. That layering is exactly what I find most compelling about diving deep into any mythological tradition. Purple, for instance, is never just a color in legendary and historical traditions … Read more