Friday, 20 May 2016

Warrior Women


The character of the Warrior Woman is back in main-stream entertainment with the women from Games of Thrones, Katniss from The Hunger Games, Wonder Woman and Xena, Warrior Princess.

The Xena reboot is expected later in the year, but without actresses, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor playing the roles of Xena and her best friend, Gabrielle. The replacement of the actresses is a sensitive topic with fans. Other shows, like the X-Files and the movie, Star Wars have brought back their original stars.

Xena has her origins in Greek mythology. In the beginning of the television show, Xena was a villain, who was intent on killing the god, Hercules. Over the length of the series, she endures a painful path to redemption, and makes the ultimate sacrifice for the 40,000 lives she took in battle.

The Amazons are the legendary warrior women from the history books. Did they really exist?

“Archaeology shows that these fierce women also smoked pot, got tattoos, killed—and loved—men.”  


Adrienne Mayor from the Princeton University Press has written a book, “The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World.”

From Adrienne, “The real Amazons were long believed to be purely imaginary. They were the mythical warrior women who were the archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Every Greek hero or champion, from Hercules to Theseus and Achilles, had to prove his mettle by fighting a powerful warrior queen.








Are the Amazons, reality or fantasy? Take a peek at the book trailer.


This week on Google +, I’ll be posting about Warrior Women. A little bit of Xena, Amazons, history and archaeology.  
Hope you can join me again. 
♥ Ashlyn 

*Xena image sourced from Entertainment Weekly
 ”The Amazon” book cover sourced from Amazon.com

1 comment:

  1. D.D thanks for your comment.
    When I was a young girl, there were few females of any significance to look up to. They were missing from the media and the history books. Fortunately, the times are changing. Women's contributions are being added to Wikipedia. Other history is being published in books. It was news to me, that women have been achieving great things since the dawn of time. Queens, druids, warlords, pirates, classical music composers, artists, poets, scientists, the first computer programmers etc. Reading gets more and more interesting!

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