Greek Myths for Children Free Online: Which Retelling to Read at Which Age
Greek myths are the one body of stories almost every later book assumes you know, and they are also genuinely unsuitable for small children in their original form. The Greeks were not writing for children. Kronos eats his sons. Medea kills hers. Every third story is an abduction. So the question is never "read the myths" — it is which retelling, at which age, and what it quietly leaves out.
Here is the free library's myth shelf, arranged by that question, plus the Norse and British material that sits alongside it.
Six or seven: Hawthorne, one story at a time
Nathaniel Hawthorne retold the myths for his own children in the 1850s and did something no one had: he softened the content without simplifying the prose. His narrator is a college student called Eustace Bright telling stories to children on a hillside, which gives him licence to change things and admit it.
Four of his individual tales are here as separate short books, which is the ideal format for a first encounter — one myth, one sitting.
- The Gorgon's Head — Perseus and Medusa, and the best of them. Start here.
- The Three Golden Apples — Hercules and the Hesperides, with Atlas as a comic character.
- The Paradise of Children — Pandora, and Hawthorne makes her a child rather than a woman, which changes the moral entirely and for the better.
- Tanglewood Tales — his second full collection: Theseus, the Minotaur, Circe, Jason, Proserpina. Longer chapters than the singles, so read it after them.
Hawthorne's edits are worth knowing about. He removes the sex, keeps most of the violence, and makes the gods less arbitrary than Homer's. That is a real distortion, and it is also why a six-year-old can hear these.
Eight to eleven: Kingsley, and the Iliad made readable
- The Heroes; Or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children — Charles Kingsley, 1856, and the other Victorian standard. Three long stories: Perseus, the Argonauts, and Theseus. Kingsley is harder going than Hawthorne — the prose is deliberately archaic and biblical in rhythm — but he does not sentimentalise, and children who take to it take to it hard. There is a second edition of the same book in the library if you prefer a different setting of the text.
- The Iliad for Boys and Girls — Alfred Church's prose retelling, and the honest answer to "how do I get a ten-year-old into Homer". It keeps the shape, the characters and most of the deaths, and drops the catalogues of ships and the extended similes. A child who reads this will recognise everything when they meet the real poem.
- A Book of Myths — Jean Lang, and the broadest of the children's collections here: Greek, Roman, Norse and Arthurian in one volume, thirty-odd short chapters. Good for grazing rather than reading through.
- The Story of the Greeks — Guerber, and not myth at all but the history the myths sit inside: Marathon, Thermopylae, Socrates. Read alongside, not instead. It answers the question children always ask, which is whether any of it happened.
Twelve and up: the real thing
- The Odyssey — the one to read first, always, because it is a story with a shape and a hero who wants to go home. Nothing in children's literature has replaced the Cyclops chapter.
- The Iliad — harder, greater, and much bleaker. It is about a man's rage and about the fact that everyone in it is going to die. Do not hand it to a child who liked The Odyssey and expect the same experience.
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books I–VII and Books VIII–XV — the single most important source for most of the myths as we tell them, and the reason so many of them end with somebody becoming a tree. Ovid is witty, fast, frequently cruel, and openly interested in exactly the material every children's version removes. Fifteen and up. There is also a blank verse translation if you would rather have the poetry than the prose.
The neighbouring mythologies
The Greek shelf is the one everyone asks for, but the Norse material is often the better read for a child of nine or ten — the stories are shorter, funnier and less morally tidy.
- The Children of Odin — Padraic Colum, and the best single mythology book on this whole page. Loki, Thor, the theft of Idun's apples, and a Ragnarök that Colum lets be genuinely final. Colum was a poet and it shows in every paragraph.
- Hero-Myths and Legends of the British Race — Beowulf, Cuchulain, Havelok, Robin Hood, Hereward. The Beowulf retelling is the reason to have it.
- Myths and Folk Tales of Ireland — Jeremiah Curtin, collecting from Irish speakers in the 1880s, so this is field-collected rather than retold, and reads very differently: repetitive, formulaic, and much closer to how the stories were actually said out loud.
- Myths and Folk-tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars — the same collector, further east.
- The Book of Nature Myths — Florence Holbrook, and the easiest reading level on this page: very short why-the-animal-is-like-that stories, mostly from Native American and classical sources, written for a child reading independently for the first time.
One answer, if you want one
For a six-year-old: The Gorgon's Head. For a nine-year-old: The Children of Odin. For an eleven-year-old: The Iliad for Boys and Girls, then The Odyssey itself a year later. Skip Ovid until they are old enough to find him funny.
The wider folklore shelf is covered in fairy tales from around the world, and everything catalogued as myth or legend is browsable under fairy tales.