Legends of the World

by Richard Cavendish

Book Overview

Legends are stories that spring from the collective consciousness of a people -- no one writer ever invented the adventures of Robin Hood, the fanciful tales of the Buddha's childhood, or the exploits... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566198437
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Barnes Noble Books
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

As complete a book of Legends as I have seen

The cultural oral traditions that come from pre-literate cultures have become legends and myths to the modern world, yet looking at Lincoln , Washington and Kennedy we see that the process continues even while biographical re-editing of history has taken place. The Christian Bible has a tradition very like that of other legends and myth systems? For many years the Catholic church actually tried to control who read the Bible and also who was allowed to learn to read. That some people in actual life are bigger than life seems to be what legend tells us?

Sheesh, how can you NOT notice the similarities?

One of the single greatest frustrations with Bulfinch's Mythology lies in its blatantly insular, Westernized viewpoint. Though it is a masterful accounting of all the Greek, Roman, and Nordic myths and also dissects the legends of Charlemagne and King Arthur very satisfactorily, it is sheer arrogance to label this work as any kind of definitive study on the legends of the world, by the simple fact that it leaves out the collective mythologies of five other continents! It also very conspicuously avoids making any kind of broader mythic connection amongst the stories -recurring themes and motifs are not remarked upon.Richard Cavendish and a team of some fifty historians and authors pick up where Thomas Bulfinch left off, presenting an equally detailed look at the overviews of the enduring myths and fables of all of mankind's cultures. Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Tibetan, Mongolian, Egyptian, Christian, Islamic, Persian, Ottoman, Ethiopian, Moorish, Jewish, Germanic, Celtic, Welsh, Greek, Roman, Nordic, Russian, Teutonic, Slavic, Gypsy, African, American Indian, Incan, Mayan, Aztec, Polynesian, and Australian Aboriginal traditions are all given page space in this book, shedding a much brighter light on their common threads. Cavendish points out that myths and legends are necessarily different and, though their borders blur and frequently blend with one another, there is a distinction (a similar assertion is made by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty in Other People's Myths: The Cave of Echoes). Legend is, according to J.R.R. Tolkein, that intermediate step between factual history and myth. Cavendish (like Flaherty) laments the fact that the very word myth in today's vernacular implies a "falsehood." We commonly say something is a "myth" when we know it to be untrue (say, for example, a warning about not handling a toad lest you get warts.) With these conflicting definitions identified and the reader appropriately cautioned, the book plunges straight into the tales, making little or no distinction between that which is historically verifiable and that which is quite obviously sheer imaginative embellishment.Another distinct advantage to having a wider range of myths laid before us, is that it is far easier to pick out the common threads in the stories and belief systems. The image or archetype is much easier to pin down when it recurs in many cultures, particularly cultures that may never have been exposed to each other. An example that leaps immediately to mind is a worldview held by the Native American Iroquois, Seri, and Mandan tribes: that the world is in fact carried on the back of a turtle. More revealing, however, is the discovery that Indian (meaning people native to India, not North America) folklore also tells of a turtle that carries the world around on its shell.The recurring themes are all the more striking when they turn up in totally separated civilizations: the Greek myth of the imprisoned Titans may be familiar, yet there is a nearly