Since its original publication in 1942, Edith Hamilton's Mythology has sold millions of copies throughout the world and established itself as a perennial bestseller. For nearly 80 years, readers have chosen Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes above all other books to discover the enchanting world of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology -- from Odysseus's adventure-filled journey to Odin's effort to postpone the final day of doom. This deluxe, hardcover edition is illustrated throughout with specially commissioned, original artwork and beautifully illustrated lineages, making it a true collector's item.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!--Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale

The national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships returns with a fascinating, eye-opening take on the remarkable women at the heart of classical stories Greek mythology from Helen of Troy to Pandora and the Amazons to Medea.

The tellers of Greek myths--historically men--have routinely sidelined the female characters. When they do take a larger role, women are often portrayed as monstrous, vengeful or just plain evil--like Pandora, the woman of eternal scorn and damnation whose curiosity is tasked with causing all the world's suffering and wickedness when she opened that forbidden box. But, as Natalie Haynes reveals, in ancient Greek myths there was no box. It was a jar . . . which is far more likely to tip over.

In Pandora's Jar, the broadcaster, writer, stand-up comedian, and passionate classicist turns the tables, putting the women of the Greek myths on an equal footing with the men. With wit, humor, and savvy, Haynes revolutionizes our understanding of epic poems, stories, and plays, resurrecting them from a woman's perspective and tracing the origins of their mythic female characters. She looks at women such as Jocasta, Oedipus' mother-turned-lover-and-wife (turned Freudian sticking point), at once the cleverest person in the story and yet often unnoticed. She considers Helen of Troy, whose marriage to Paris caused the Trojan war--a somewhat uneven response to her decision to leave her husband for another man. She demonstrates how the vilified Medea was like an ancient Beyonce--getting her revenge on the man who hurt and betrayed her, if by extreme measures. And she turns her eye to Medusa, the original monstered woman, whose stare turned men to stone, but who wasn't always a monster, and had her hair turned to snakes as punishment for being raped.

Pandora's Jar brings nuance and care to the millennia-old myths and legends and asks the question: Why are we so quick to villainize these women in the first place--and so eager to accept the stories we've been told?

A CBC BOOKS BEST NONFICTION OF 2020
AN ENTROPY MAGAZINE BEST NONFICTION 2020/21
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BOOK OF THE DAY (07/23/2022)

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?

If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.

Historically we have associated the disabled body image and disabled life with an unhappy ending - Sue Carter, Toronto Star

Leduc persuasively illustrates the power of stories to affect reality in this painstakingly researched and provocative study that invites us to consider our favorite folktales from another angle. - Sara Shreve, Library Journal

She [Leduc] argues that template is how society continues to treat the disabled: rather than making the world accessible for everyone, the disabled are often asked to adapt to inaccessible environments. - Ryan Porter, Quill & Quire

Read this smart, tenacious book. - The Washington Post

A brilliant young critic named Amanda Leduc explores this pernicious power of language in her new book, Disfigured ... Leduc follows the bread crumbs back into her original experience with fairy tales - and then explores their residual effects ... Read this smart, tenacious book. - The Washington Post

Leduc investigates the intersection between disability and her beloved fairy tales, questioning the constructs of these stories and where her place is, as a disabled woman, among those narratives. - The Globe and Mail

It gave me goosebumps as I read, to see so many of my unexpressed, half-formed thoughts in print. My highlighter got a good workout. - BookRiot

Disfigured is not just an eye-opener when it comes to the Disney princess crew and the Marvel universe - this thin volume provides the tools to change how readers engage with other kinds of popular media, from horror films to fashion magazines to outdated sitcom jokes. - Quill & Quire

It's an essential read for anyone who loves fairy tales. - Buzzfeed Books

Leduc makes one thing clear and beautifully so - fairy tales are fundamentally fantastic, but that doesn't mean that they are beyond reproach in their depiction of real issues and identities. - Shrapnel Magazine

As Leduc takes us through these fairy tales and the space they occupy in the narratives that we construct, she slowly unfolds a call-to-action: the claiming of space for disability in storytelling. - The Globe and Mail

A provocative beginning to a thoughtful and wide-ranging book, one which explores some of the most primal stories readers have encountered and prompts them to ponder the subtext situated there all along. - LitHub

a poignant and informative account of how the stories we tell shape our collective understanding of one another. - BookMarks

What happens when we allow disabled writers to tell stories of disability within fairytales and in magical and supernatural settings? It is a reimagining of the fairytale canon we need. Leduc dares to dream of a world that most stories envision is unattainable. - Bitch Media

J.R.R. Tolkien stated that he wrote his mythology to be enjoyed by readers - and yet, that was only the beginning. But are there more to Tolkien's words beyond the fairy tale?

For decades, interpreters have guessed at the underlying messages contained within Tolkien's mythology. Yet until now, no one has pulled together a comprehensive interpretation of the deeper, hidden messages within the greatest mythological tales ever told.

In 'Mount Doom, ' Paul List and Ali Ghaffari show how Tolkien began with the most significant true myth, the Creation story from the book of Genesis, adapted it to the creation of an individual human being, brought in a prophecy about the greatest threat to humanity - idolatry and slavery as a result of over-reliance on digital machinery and artificial intelligence.

Tolkien's mythology is his warning to humanity and his hope for the revival of Western civilization. This complete reinterpretation of the Lord of the Rings mythology will forever change how the world understands J.R.R. Tolkien and his life's work.

Are you intrigued by Norse religion and fascinating Nordic runes?

Now You Can Immerse Yourself in the Worlds of Viking Warriors, Runes, Rituals, Norse Gods, Magical Heroes and Nordic Folklore By Neil Legend!

Norse mythology refers to the Scandinavian mythological framework upheld during and around the time of the Viking Age (c. 790- c. 1100 CE).

The world of Norse mythology is endlessly fascinating. It is not all raiding and looting as we are often led to believe. It is much more than just the enduring battles that the Gods of the Norsemen faced and has profoundly impacted modern culture.

Top 3 Reasons To Read This Norse Mythology Book Today:

✔️ You Will Go On A Journey To The Lives Of The Vikings

✔️ You Will Examine How The Viking Practices And Beliefs Carried On Into Modern Society

✔️ You Will Encounter Familiar Words That Are Now Part Of The English Language

Within the pages of this addictive book, you will also:

✅ Learn About Norse Religion

✅ Examine How Runes Translate into Sagas

✅ Discover the Norse Ceremonies

Don't Hesitate! Scroll Up, Click Add To Cart NOW & Start Exploring The Norse Paganism Worlds!

CHamoru Legends retells twelve CHamoru legends and features personal reflections from author Teresita Lourdes Perez, unique illustrations of each legend by Guam artists, and versions of the legends in the CHamoru language by Maria Ana Tenorio Rivera. The book includes CHamoru classics like the story of the siblings who created the universe; the two lovers who were pushed to the edge of a cliff because their union was forbidden; and the tale of the son who leapt an island away to escape his jealous father.

CHamoru Legends is the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze Medal recipient for Best Regional Fiction for Australia/New Zealand/Pacific Rim.

It is a reversible book featuring the legends in English on one side and in CHamoru on the other. Through multiple layers of interpretation, the book weaves together strips of wisdom and cultural lessons like the leaves used to shape the CHamoru guåfak, or mat, upon which the earliest CHamoru storytellers sat sharing their versions of these timeless tales.

This is a golden treasury of over one hundred English folktales captured in the form they were first collected in past centuries. Read these classic tales as they would have been told when storytelling was a living art - when the audience believed in boggarts and hobgoblins, local witches and will-o'-the-wisps, ghosts and giants, cunning foxes and royal frogs. Find Jack the Giantkiller, Tom Tit Tot and other quintessentially English favourites, alongside interesting borrowings, such as an English version of the Grimms' Little Snow White - as well as bedtime frighteners, including Captain Murderer, as told to Charles Dickens by his childhood nurse.

Neil Philip has provided a full introduction and source notes on each story that illustrate each tale's journey from mouth to page, and what has happened to them on the way. These tales rank among the finest English short stories of all time in their richness of metaphor and plot and their great verbal dash and daring.

I love Caroline Lawrence and so should you. - Natalie Haynes

Huge fun! - Tom Holland

Get to know the ancient Greek gods and goddesses...and find out why their stories are still so enthralling today.

Discover how to identify each god, demigod, hero or monster from the ancient Greek world through their attributes and symbols, learn about their most famous stories from ancient sources and myths, and find out how these characters were viewed and worshipped in classical times.

From Aphrodite to to Dionysus, Helen of Troy to the Minotaur, bestselling author and classicist Caroline Lawrence brings together all the information you need to really get to know the gods and goddesses. Classical sources such as the Homeric epics, ancient art and archaeological finds inform each god's profile, while sections on mythical figures in contemporary culture show how these gods and their stories have stood the test of time. Classical illustrator Flora Kirk's stunning, colorful artworks accompany each profile, making this a beautiful, must-have companion guide to the myths.

'A carnival of a book, rigorously researched and jostling with life'
--Amy Jeffs, author of Storyland
Who were the Fairy Tellers?

In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'.

From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar.

Following these and other unlikely protagonists, we travel from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. In the process, we discover a fresh perspective on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.

Myths, legends, and folklore are more than incredible and magical stories and tales. They have a profound purpose in the human world. They explain how human beings perceived and tried to understand how our world operated. Myths give us insight into the working of the human mind from ancient times. Myths are timeless and offer guidance and solutions to many of our problems and misunderstandings.

Korean mythology and folklore is full of gods, goddesses, and deities, drawn from the rich heritage of the primary belief systems. Known as Shin, which means deity or spirit, they are supernatural beings endowed with the power to influence the human world. Shins are served by female shamans known as Mudang, especially during Gut or sacred rituals. Each god is given responsibility for a special area, although these vary depending on which version of the myth is being told.



The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Dartmoor in the most famous of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's books. Is Sir Charles the latest victim of the ancestral Curse of the Baskervilles, which summons a demonic hound to stalk the moor and exact vengeance for a past misdeed, or is there a more modern, more prosaic explanation for the sudden death? In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the modern, rational world, and the ancient, supernatural world collide in the novel which brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead.

This new edition of Conan Doyle's classic mystery is part of a series of new editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories published in Oxford World's Classics. Darryl Jones's Introduction explores the competing worlds of the supernatural and the scientific in the novel and in Arthur Conan Doyle's life, the novel's colonial background and origins, and the role of landscape, folklore, and folk horror in the novel.

Reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of chivalric whiteness

The Other Faces of Arthur reveals the role of Arthuriana in the racial logics of medieval Europe through an analysis of the construction of whiteness in the global North Atlantic: Scandinavia, Britain, Iberia, and North Africa. Taking a comparative approach that draws on language traditions not commonly studied together and places lesser-known Arthurian texts in conversation with each other, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia explores the important role of translation in the dissemination and analysis of Arthuriana, showing how these texts functioned within the settings that produced them.

Introducing the framework of the global North Atlantic within the field of global medieval studies, Otaño Gracia examines Arthurian texts written in Castilian, Catalan, Middle Welsh, and Old Norse, among other languages, in order to illustrate the various ways that the writers adapt the materials to serve their specific cultural and aesthetic purposes. Tracing how Arthuriana shifts and changes throughout the global North Atlantic, Otaño Gracia uncovers the hierarchies of power present in Arthurian texts and how they reflect, manipulate, and critique the power relations existing in the courts that circulated the texts. Arthuriana's obsession with chivalry, Otaño Gracia demonstrates, is fundamentally about whiteness; these texts deploy chivalric whiteness to naturalize relations of domination and normalize violence against racialized subjects.

The Other Faces of Arthur establishes Arthuriana as a pan-European project of racialization that ultimately serves to rationalize geocultural conquest and expansion.

Once Upon a Place explores narratives from modern film, famous fairy tales, and ancient mythology to define the five core locations that shape every story: the Cavern, the Deep, the Vessel, the Forest, and the Labyrinth.

Popularized by Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey features narrative stages along which a person matures and transforms. But where heroes transform is just as important as what they do to get there. Holly Bellebuono shows you how the location of each hero's journey step is intimately tied to the challenges faced, setting the tone for the entire adventure.

To illustrate each location, Bellebuono shares fifteen original adaptations--such as the tales of Persephone, Gilgamesh, Cerridwen, and Alice--to explore how the sense of place drives the adventure and outcome. From Innana's descent into the Cavern to Snow White entering the Forest, this book offers powerful wisdom about personal growth, life's purpose, and the origins of creativity.

Peter Jackson's film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy - and the accompanying Rings-related paraphernalia and publicity - has played a unique role in the disemmination of Tolkien's imaginative creation to the masses. Yet, for most readers and viewers, the underlying meaning of Middle-earth has remained obscure. Bradley Birzer has remedied that with this fresh study. In J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth, Birzer reveals the surprisingly specific religious symbolism that permeates Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium. He also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T.S. Eliot, Dante and C.S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us everyday, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.

In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, an army doctor home on sick leave, for the first time. Through Watson we learn a little about the eccentric figure who is his new room-mate at 221B Baker Street, before they encounter their first case: an American visitor to the city has been killed in an empty house off the Brixton Road, and the only clue the police have is the mysterious word 'Rache', scrawled in blood-red letters on the wall. As Holmes sets to work with his unique forensic methods, behind the murder a tangled skein of love, religion, and revenge gradually unwinds, taking us from the streets of London to the Utah Territory, and back again.

As Nicholas Daly's Introduction describes, out of this gripping tale grew the Holmes and Watson stories that would make Conan Doyle the best-paid author of his time. His creations have become household words, inspiring not only countless adaptations and imitations, but a Sherlock Holmes museum, Sherlock Holmes-themed pubs, and a whole array of Holmesian merchandise, from cushions to jigsaw puzzles. Here, though, we meet Holmes and Watson before they became famous, and we can see how their extraordinary impact on our popular culture derives from the late-Victorian world from which they emerge.

But what is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us about morality, sexuality, and society? The range of fairy tales stretches across great distances and time; their history is entangled with folklore and myth and their inspiration draws on ideas about nature and the supernatural, imagination and fantasy, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

Marina Warner has loved fairy tales over a long writing life and in Once Upon a Time, she explores a multitude of tales through the ages, their different manifestations on the page, the stage, and the screen. From the phenomenal rise of Victorian and Edwardian literature to contemporary children's stories, Warner unfolds a glittering array of examples, from classics such as Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and The Sleeping Beauty, the Grimm Brothers' Hansel and Gretel, and Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, to modern-day realizations including Walt Disney's Snow White and gothic interpretations such as Pan's Labyrinth.

In 10 succinct chapters, Marina Warner digs into a rich hoard of fairy tales in their brilliant and fantastical variations in order to define a genre and evaluate a literary form that keeps shifting through time and history. Her book makes a persuasive case for fairy tale as a crucial repository of human understanding and culture.

A transformative lens revealing the historical racial context that profoundly influenced European fairy tales.

In stories retold for generations, wondrous worlds and magnificent characters have defined the genre of European fairy tales with little recognition of yet another defining aspect--racism and racialized thinking. Engaging four classic fairy-tale collections, author Kimberly J. Lau connects close readings of the tales to the cultural discourses, scholarly debates, and imperial geopolitics that established and perpetuated ideas about racial difference and white superiority. Within the tales of Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, the Grimms, and Andrew and Nora Lang, Lau teases apart and historicizes the racialized themes and ideologies embedded within fairy tales spanning the early seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. She contends that the European fairy tale is definitively marked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by whiteness, and given the genre's documented colonization of diverse narrative traditions over time, this specter of race is all the more haunting. This trailblazing work demonstrates the continuous evolution of racialized thinking that has informed the publication and dissemination of fairy tales. Here, Lau provides a new framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth.

What do the world's ancient myths have to say for your life? This book will help you learn to converse with humanity's myths, scriptures, and sacred stories in the language that they are actually speaking: the language of the stars. Clear, systematic explanation accompanied by over fifty illustrations, diagrams and star charts shows the astonishing evidence that virtually all the world's ancient myths (including the stories in the Bible) are built upon a common, worldwide system of celestial metaphor -- and explains the system to you, allowing you to interpret their meaning for yourself, so that you can gain direct access to their profoud wisdom.

Explore recurring patterns which appear in myths around the world, and what they may be trying to tell us. Examine the evidence that these myths may have come from a long-forgotten ancient civilization (or civilizations) of incredible spiritual sophistication, predating the most ancient civilizations known to conventional history such as ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, ancient China, and the ancient Indus-Saraswati civilization. And plumb the depths of spiritual meaning encoded in these Star Myths, and how their celestial metaphors point us towards the presence of an invisible and infinite realm, and the reality of the concept of the Higher Self taught in many cultures where some of the connection to the ancient wisdom has still survived.

Brought to you by David Warner Mathisen, the author of The Undying Stars and of Star Myths of the World, and how to interpret them (Volumes One, Two and Three).