Antigone Mice

by Harry Derbyshire

In December 2017, my group of Classics friends from the JACT Greek Summer School decided that we were going to do a Secret Santa.  With no money available, a full yarn and scraps basket, and Antigone revision (my A-level set text) to procrastinate, I decided that my only real option was to knit three mice for my friend James: one Antigone, one Creon and one Ismene.  

I’ve been a keen knitter for almost as long as I can remember, and I’d attempted a few stuffed toys before: one cow and one tiny little pig.  The mice were flat knitted using Nicky Fijalkowska’s pattern in ‘Let’s Knit’ magazine.  That part was fairly straightforward. What was less straightforward was trying to work out how to represent such iconic tragic characters using scraps.  For Creon, I gained inspiration from the perhaps anachronistic gold diadem crowns, and used 10mm metallic gold ribbon, making sure his little woolly ears could poke through.  I also made him a green cloak with golden details to heighten his regal status. For Antigone, I opted for a grey rag tunic made out of some offcuts from a shirt my mother had made.  Ismene’s cloak was far more elaborate: I used a silky purple offcut and a glass bead as a brooch (no hand-wrought gold brooch to hand, I’m afraid).

Upon receiving them, James did comment that perhaps the Creon mouse was ‘too cute’ to be the tyrannical and despotic niece-killing tragic hero, but nonetheless the mice have now moved and settled into their new home in Edinburgh.   Making them wasn’t a laborious process, and in fact was a good way to think about the text I was studying in a different way: Ismene is more conservative than Antigone, so perhaps it is suited that her cloak more closely mirrors Creon, Ismene and Antigone often refer to themselves in the dual: so they are both grey, whereas Creon is white.  Ultimately, though, the mice are a woolly reminder that Classics can be made whimsical and enjoyed, even if it means zoomorphising tragic characters for a gift.