Myths, like fairy tales, are typically set in an enigmatic location with a nebulous orientation toward time. This draws the attention of the audience to the actions of the characters which signify the importance of the choices the characters make; it forces the focus on the moralizing aspects of the characters rather than on their surroundings and it relies on architypes to convey the anticipated actions. C.S. Lewis does something different in his approach to his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth from Apuleius. He makes the fictitious setting of TWHF as real, as believable, as historic as possible in order to establish the historicity of his version. He painstakingly describes the geography of the region surrounding Glome and even goes so far as to have Orual speak in terms of how far places were distanced by would-be units of measure;[10] "[Glome] is built about as far back from the river as a woman can walk in the third of an hour..."[11], for example.[12]
This grounding of the story in the "historically concrete" establishes the validity to the historicity of the story which is precisely what Lewis's intentions were: to make the argument that myths are the embodiment of or basis for historical figures and their actions evolving culturally to epic proportions. He was well aware of the concept of euhemerism which the more sophisticated Greeks had developed to explain epistemologically their pantheon. Championed by Euhemerus and promulgated circa 300 B.C.E., this embryonic conception posits the notion that many of the gods were historical mortal personalities who became deified.[13] Lewis wrote to Clyde Kilby that TWHF is "'A work of (supposed) historical imagination. A guess at what it might have been like in a little barbarous state on the boarders of the Hellenistic world with Greek culture just beginning to affect it'". Doris T. Myers makes the case that it is a synthesis of both historical fiction and modern fiction, thus giving credence to the day-in-the-lifeness historicity and its intermingling with Jungian psychological archetypes of the narrative to the work.
