On the other hand, as Theseus arrives to be imprisoned as one of the victims, his noble nature shining with the heroic glory of goodness touches the heart of Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Like other Greek myths that depict evil as monstrous, deformed, and hideous (the Gorgon’s Head, the Chimaera), “The Minotaur” also exposes evil’s repulsive, deadly nature. Hawthorne’s vivid picture of the labyrinthine, devious, and serpentine nature of evil in all its cunning guile captures the insidiousness of evil’s artful ways that always seek to ensnare and destroy. As Ariadne warns Theseus who has come to destroy the monster, “Were we to take a few steps from the doorway, we might wander about all our lifetime, and never find it again.” Evil lurks in secretive places as it lures its victims into the crooked ways of the maze. The Minotaur hides in the center of the labyrinth that none of the victims can escape.

In “The Minotaur” Hawthorne’s art of storytelling illuminates the ugliness of evil in all its unnatural and vicious forms through the image of the Minotaur, a monster part man and part bull that each year devours fourteen Athenian youth chosen by lottery as sacrificial victims to satisfy the malice of King Minos. Hawthorne’s lively, fresh retelling of six famous myths-“The Minotaur,” “The Pygmies,” “The Dragon’s Teeth,” “Circe’s Palace,” “The Pomegranate Seeds,” and “The Golden Fleece”-captures the essence of great stories that always possess, in Chesterton’s words, the combination of both the “strange” (the new) that evokes wonder and the “familiar” (the old) that expresses universality. In the Tanglewood Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne retells famous classical myths with imaginative charm that captures the universality and moral wisdom of the stories.

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