The God Beneath the Sea is a children's novel based on Greek mythology, written by Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen, illustrated by Charles Keeping, and published by Longman in 1970.

[1] The novel begins with newborn Hephaestus (the titular god beneath the sea) cast from Mount Olympus by his mother Hera.

The novel continues with myths of the Olympians and the age of gods and mortals, and concludes with Hephaestus returning to Olympus, having been cast down for a second time after reproaching Zeus.

In Part I, "The Making of the Gods", Thetis and Eurynome tell Hephaestus stories of the Titans and Olympians, in hopes of quelling his restless nature.

They begin with the myths of the Titans emerging from Chaos, then tell of the birth of the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires, and the overthrowal of Uranus by his son Cronus.

They tell of Cronus' ascension to the throne with his queen Rhea, and his descent to madness after the Furies torment him nightly with prophecies that he, like his father, would be overthrown by his son.

Thetis and Eurynome give him a hammer, anvil and forge to vent his fury and discover he is a gifted smith.

The narrative then shifts from Hephaestus and the goddesses to recount concurrent events amongst the Olympians, including the arrival at Olympus of Apollo, Artemis, Athene and Hermes.

"[5] Part III, "Gods and Men", begins with the tale of Lycaon turned to a wolf by Zeus after treating him with disrespect.

Prometheus shouts a warning to Deucalion, who makes a sea vessel to survive the storm with his wife, Pyrrha.

Ascalaphus, a gardener in the underworld, remembers that Pandora ate seven pomegranate seeds in Hades, and Demeter turns him into a screech-owl.

Zeus punishes Hera by hanging her in the sky, and sets Poseidon and Apollo the vain task of building the doomed city of Troy.

Blishen and Garfield began work on The God Beneath the Sea after discovering that Greek mythology had had similar impacts on them as primary school children.

"[8] One of the main difficulties they encountered was selecting a sequence of myths from "the enormous expanse" of Greek mythology[8] to form a single story that would increase the power of the work.

They felt it necessary to address "meaningful violence" and "the strongest of human passions" in the novel, because these were "the preoccupations with which our children are, we know, at the moment filled.

"[9] Blishen and Garfield used four source texts: E. V. Rieu's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Metamorphoses, and Robert Graves' The Greek Myths.

"[13] Keeping called his completed illustrations for The God Beneath the Sea "a set of drawings much to my disgust not all awfully good.

"[13] At the time of the book's publication, Keeping was looking forward to working with the authors on the sequel The Golden Shadow, as he hoped "to redeem some of the mistakes of the first one.

"[16] Robert Nye felt the authors had "fallen into the trap of making everything impossibly vivid [...] thereby losing many of the subtleties that matter.

"[18] Alan Garner in the New Statesman criticized the novel's prose as "overblown Victoriana, 'fine' writing at its worst, cliché-ridden to the point of satire, falsely poetic, groaning with imagery and, among such a grandiloquent mess, intrusively colloquial at times.

"[19] Rosemary Manning wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that the writing is "lush, meandering and self-indulgent," and "larded with ... lazy adjectives ... and weighed down under laborious similes.

"[21] A review in The Spectator called it "a remarkable book" that "should evoke a response from anyone clogged within the classics, wanting to see the poetry afresh.

"[22] Ted Hughes reviewed the book positively, noting the authors' attempt to "crack the Victorian plaster" of "moralizing dullness... concentrated on the Ancient Greeks".

For Hughes, the novel made the myths "vividly new"; the authors "stripped away the pseudo-classical draperies and produced an intense, highly coloured, primitive atmosphere.

For Manning, the novel's opening, "an excellent device ...to allow the book to start dramatically", and subsequent moments of pace and tension, are ruined by chronic over-writing.

[18] History Today claimed the choice to retell the myths as a continuous narrative resulted in "a brilliant poetic fantasy";[21] Hughes said of the novel's series of stories, "[t]heir zest sweeps you along.

"[24] The Spectator claimed "the narrative is handled with dramatic, and comic, awareness of the epic voyage into our creative origins.

[25] A 2001 article in The Guardian named The God Beneath the Sea the ninth best children's book of all time, calling it "[v]isceral, overpowering, defiantly undomesticated" and "the best ever rendering of the Greek myths in modern English.

"[26] In contrast to the writing's mixed reception, critics were unanimous in acknowledging the power of Charles Keeping's illustrations.