BLURB

REVIEW

BLURB
The Age of Fable; The Age of Chivalry; and Legends of Charlemagne.
The first one deals mainly with Greek and Roman mythology, but it also contains a short section on the Norse gods and a dab of Easter Mythology; the second retells the stories of King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Mabinogeon; and the third one goes over the romances of the Middle Ages.

Thomas Bulfinch, an art-loving bank clerk, had a very clear purpose when he started to write his books: he set out to supply the general reader with an approachable, enticing account of those ancient fables that were so often quoted or alluded to in literature. Snippets from poems by authors such as Milton and Spenser, and specially contemporaries Byron, Shelley, and Longfellow (to whom the volume is dedicated) are used throughout to illustrate the strong connection between myth and English poetry.

Because of such limitations, it may seem easy to dismiss his work as biased, quaint and incomplete; however, time has turned what once was a book on the classics into a classic itself. Nowadays, when we read Bulfinch, we get not only a look into ancient mythology, but a delightful glimpse of 19th Century writing and mentality, too; and his narrowness in approach is more than compensated by the resulting self-consistency.

A wonderful introduction to a variety of myths - a must read from everyone from 8 to 80!!!'

So good I actually cried at the end!