That would have meant either writing "King Lear," so to speak, down to the level of "Cinderella"-the vice versa procedure being obviously not possible-or else telling in my own way stories which were in no sense mine and had been told by great writers in ways they thought suited their subjects. In point of fact, Chaucer is more like Galsworthy and the ballads like Kipling than Homer is like Lucian or Aeschylus like Ovid.įaced with this problem, I determined at the outset to dismiss any idea of unifying the tales. The English collection would be bigger, but it would not contain more dissimilar material.
Twelve hundred years separate the first writers through whom the myths have come down to us from the last, and there are stories as unlike each other as "Cinderella" and "King Lear." To bring them all together in one volume is really somewhat comparable to doing the same for the stories of English literature from Chaucer to the ballads, through Shakespeare and Marlowe and Swift and Defoe and Dryden and Pope and so on, ending with, say, Tennyson and Browning, or even, to make the comparison truer, Kipling and Galsworthy. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at Thank you for your support of the author's rights.Ī book on Mythology must draw from widely different sources.
Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property.
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