“The oarfish is not only extremely long—I think they can be 20 feet long—but they have a very narrow, undulating body. They’re silvery, but they have a red crest all along their back. It really looks exactly like the sea monsters in ancient Greek vase paintings,” says Adrienne Mayor on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “It looks like an oarfish guarding the Golden Fleece. They live in very deep water, and they have fragile bodies. And if there’s an earthquake under the ocean, they’re damaged and they wash up on shore—that’s the only time most people see an oarfish, and it would look like a stereotypical dragon.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with folklorist, classicist, and historian of ancient science Adrienne Mayor about her new book, Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. In 53 alphabetically arranged essays about “legends of the earth,” or “geomyths,” Mayor’s compendium draws upon oral traditions from all over the world and upon “historical and scientific discoveries that shed light on the remarkable phenomena featured in the legendary stories”—phenomena such as tsunamis, meteor impacts, lethal lakes, perpetual fires, fish that rain from the sky, and sand dunes that sing.

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

Adrienne Mayor. The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

 

Adrienne Mayor. Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore. Illustrated by Michele M. Angel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

 

Adrienne Mayor. “Prometheus’ Toolbox: Human life as technology from Greek mythology to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2021: Technology.

 

Adrienne Mayor. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

 

Adrienne Mayor. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023.

 

Adrienne Mayor. Flying Snakes & Griffin Claws: and Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

 

Adrienne Mayor. Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Unconventional Warfare in the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

 

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

 

Pliny the Elder. Natural History: A Selection. Translated and introduced by John F. Healey. New York: Penguin Classics, 1991.

 

Pliny the Younger. Complete Letters. Translated by P.G. Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Plato. Timaeus. Translated by D. J. Zeyl. In Plato: Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.

 

Dorothy B. Vitaliano. Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973.

 

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated and introduced by Stephanie McCarter. New York: Penguin Books, 2023.

 

Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles.  Introduced by Bernard Knox. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.

 

Apollonius of Rhodes. Jason and the Golden Fleece. Translated by Richard Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

 

Jules Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated and introduced by David Coward. New York: Penguin Classics, 2018.

 

Edgar Allan Poe. “A Descent into the Maelström.” In The Portable Edgar Allan Poe. Edited and introduced by J. Gerald Kennedy. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

 

Olaus Magnus. Carta marina. ca. 1539. James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Guy de Maupassant. “Fear.” In Selected Stories. Translated by Marjorie Laurie and Brian Rhys. Introduced by Catriona Seth. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2021.

 

Richard Stothers. “Unidentified Flying Objects in Classical Antiquity,” The Classical Journal, October – November, 2007. JSTOR.

 

C.G. Jung. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

 

Immanuel Kant. “History and natural description of the most noteworthy occurrences of the earthquake that struck a large part of the Earth at the end of the year 1755 (1756).” In Natural Science. Edited by Eric Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

 

Alexander von Humboldt. Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Edited and translated by Jason Wilson. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.