Myth Reading Group
Thursday 15 February
12.00-1.30pm in Room 3.411
We are very pleased to announce that Jeremy Solnick continues our discussion of Trees & Forests with a session on ‘Sacred Groves’

J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), The Golden Bough, Tate Britain
The sacred grove is deeply embedded in our mindscape and used as a central theme in literature and the visual arts. From Turner’s painting to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the grove of trees in a forbidden place appears again and again. In this meeting of the myth reading group, we will discuss ‘Sacred Groves’ using as reference points three texts widely separated in time: the finding of the Golden Bough from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid in the translation by Seamus Heaney; part of the opening Chapter of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the opening verses of Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros.
References
Frazer, J. G., ‘The Arician Grove’ in The Golden Bough (New York & London: Macmillan, 1894), Chapter I, pp. 8-13 [available on Project Gutenberg]
Virgil, Aeneid: Book VI, trans. by Seamus Heaney (Faber: London, 2016) [ll. 171-203]
Walcott, D., Omeros (Faber: London, 1990) [Book I, pp. 3-5]