Good interpretation must begin with accuracy.

As someone who grew up reading and loving all sorts of fantasy stories and fiction, I still have a special fondness for the Greek myths. But one of the things I’ve begun to notice over the years is how dramatically misinterpreted they often are.

Consider Narcissus, the youth who was so beautiful that everyone fell in love with him just by seeing him. Then one day he was led to see his own reflection in the water and he was enthralled to death, literally. So narcissists are people who are self-absorbed and sexually exploitative. But in the story, Narcissus rejected all suitors, and he only fell in love with the image because he didn’t realize it was his own. So it was the truly dangerous beauty of Narcissus, not his self-obsession, that proved so ruinous. A true narcissist, then, isn’t someone who is in love with himself, but someone who is hopelessly love-engendering in other people and yet avoids romance with them.

Or take Oedipus, the abandoned child who returns to his homeland as an adult and then blinds himself after discovering he has slain his father the king and married his own mother the queen. Freud famously used this to illustrate how all boys have latent sexual desire for their mother. But the whole point of the myth is that Oedipus only desired his mother when he didn’t know that’s who she was. His self-mutilation upon the discovery proves the naturalness of incest taboos, not the latent desire to violate them. Freud got it exactly backwards.

Perhaps I’m just a stickler for the details, but it seems to me that the first part of properly interpreting any story is at least knowing the facts and keeping them straight.