Egil's Saga tells the story of the long and brutal life of tenth-century warrior-poet and farmer Egil Skallagrimsson: a morally ambiguous character who was at once the composer of intricately beautiful poetry, and a physical grotesque capable of...

Gathered by the renowned Irish poet, playwright, and essayist William Butler Yeats, the sixty-five tales and poems in this delightful collection uniquely capture the rich heritage of the Celtic imagination. Filled with legends of village ghosts, fairies,...

A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures--as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict...

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries. This volume brings together all eleven of his shorter fairy stories as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination". The subjects are those of...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary book that reveals how the themes and symbols of ancient narratives continue to bring meaning to birth, death, love, and war.“Campbell has become the rarest of intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who...

"Gilgamesh is the great epic of Mesopotamia, one of the oldest works in Western literature, contemporary with the oldest parts of the Bible. It is the story of a legendary king who achieves heroic victories with the help of the wild man Enkidu; but when...

'Many people are not in the least disturbed at the harm that befalls them, provided they can see their enemies’ downfall first’ In a series of pithy, amusing vignettes, Aesop created a vivid cast of characters to demonstrate different aspects of human...

Filled with princesses and witches, dybbuks and wonder-working rebbes, the two hundred tales that make up this delightful compendium were gathered during the 1920s and 1930s by ethnographers in the small towns and villages of Eastern Europe. Collected...

Beautifully illustrated, here is the most comprehensive collection of classic Russian tales available in English.This comprehensive collection introduces readers to universal fairy-tale figures and to such uniquely Russian characters such as Koshchey the...

'On the bank of the river he saw a tall tree: from roots to crown one half was aflame and the other green with leaves'Drawing on myth, folklore and history, the stories of the Mabinogion passed from generations of storytellers before they were written...

N. K. Sandars's landmark translation of one of the first and greatest works of Western literatureA Penguin ClassicGilgamesh, King of Uruk, and his companion Enkidu are the only heroes to have survived from the ancient literature of Babylon, immortalized...