Henry the Minotaur – Name and Appearance
- CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR...Book One
Know Bull
When Lucy learns that her minotaur friend doesn’t have a name, and requests one, she calls him after a bull she knew from home. She’s not the most creative person in the two worlds but, equally, she chooses it because although the animal scared her, it also possessed a quiet strength that she admired. She thinks the name is “at once both informal and regal”.
I chose “Henry” for exactly the same reasons. To me it’s a name that’s relaxed but honourable, unstuffy but noble. There have been a lot of kings called Henry so Lucy is right – it’s a royal name. I liked how that contrasted with the unkempt beast she first meets in that Aedean forest. There’s another bestial/refined connection in that first name. One of Henry’s component inspirations is the X-Men’s Henry McCoy, a genius also known as the Beast.
Lucy thinks up the surname “Bulman” on the spot when pressed. As last names go it’s beautifully uncreative but I couldn’t resist that basic play on words – it’s Henry’s secret identity hidden in plain sight and, thanks to a magic spell, he’s able to appear human so he is literally hiding in plain sight.
Bull Headed?
Henry is not strictly a “minotaur” in the classical sense. The Greek archetype would have seen him with the body of a man but the head and tail of a bull. But Henry is, well, he’s a cross-breed. He’s also an archetypal warrior character so he is built like a tank:
He was six foot tall and thickset with the build of a heavyweight wrestler; huge arms, a hard round stomach and thighs as meaty as a pair of generous-sized Christmas hams. His back was slightly curved with a bony ridge running right down it, from between his wide shoulders right the way down to his rear. He boasted no tail, however. His hands and feet were quite human but with a hard, grey sheath of hoof from his knuckles to his wrists and on his soles.
There are a lot of anthropomorphic characters with a blended human/animal appearance in fantasy and sci-fi, so Henry reflects that. Or, because of how inspiration travels from Aedea to our world, they reflect him!
Red Bull? Blue Bull!
I regularly describe Henry as a “man-bull” in the books and, in fact, his two key component characters are a fictional man and bull duo – Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. I literally mashed the two together and voilà – a blue minotaur. I further reflected Bunyan in Henry’s signature weapon – an axe, double-headed to reflect Henry’s mixed heritage.
That said, during his creation I also had Sulley of Monsters Inc and the already mentioned blue-hued Beast of the X-Men swirling around in my mind. There really are a lot of blue-furred characters out there. It’s almost as though they were inspired from a single source…
What Does The Bull Say?
Lucy and Amber think Henry sounds Welsh. You can thank rugby legend Gareth Thomas for that. I had already been circling that accent because of the TV series Torchwood that we were watching during The Mythic’s drafting – notably via the Ianto Jones and Rhys Williams characters. But Gareth Thomas coming out sealed it. Henry is a burly gay minotaur with a rugby forward’s physique and here was an actual burly gay rugby player. I took it as a sign that the Welsh accent was a keeper.
Bonus Round
Henry likes to wear purple trousers torn off at the knee. Just like another big, angry hulk of a character… Believe me, nothing in these books is there by chance.
Want to learn more about Henry? Try reading about why I wanted to rehabilitate the minotaur myth and which Star Trek character inspired his personality.
