But Myrdin transfroms her - into a lady goddess, a boy warrior, and a spy. Without Gwyna, Myrddin will not be able to work the most glorious transformation of all - and turn the leader of a raggle-tagglear-band into King Arthur, the greatest hero of all time.

    S. Eliot as one of the chief sources for his great poem "The Waste Land," Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance remains a landmark of anthropological and mythological scholarship. In this book she explores the origins of the Grail legend, arguing that it dates back to a primitive vegetation cult and only later was shaped by Celtic and Christian lore.To prove her thesis, Weston unites folkloric and Christian elements by using printed texts to prove the parallels existing between each and every feature of the legend of the Holy Grail and the recorded symbolism of the ancient mystery cults. Specifically, she finds the origin of the Grail legend in a Gnostic text that served as a link between such cults and later Celtic and Christian elaborations of the myth.With erudition and critical acumen, the author provides illuminating insights into diverse aspects of the legend: the task of the hero; the freeing of the waters; medieval and modern forms of nature ritual; the symbols of the cult (cup, lance, sword, stone, etc.); the symbolism of the fisher king; the significance of such deities as Tammuz, Adonis, Mithra, and Attis; the meaning of the adventure of the Perilous Chapel in Grail romances; and much more.Awarded the Crawshay Prize in 1920, this scholarly yet highly readable study will interest any student of the Arthurian legends, mythology, ancient religion, and Eliot's poetry.

    When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment. THE CONSOLATION was extremely popular throughout medieval Europe and his ideas were influential on the thought of Chaucer and Dante.

    Aesop was reputedly a tongue-tied slave who miraculously received the power of speech; from his legendary storytelling came the collections of prose and verse fables scattered throughout Greek and Roman literature. First published in English by Caxton in 1484, the fables and their morals continue to charm modern readers: who does not know the story of the tortoise and the hare, or the boy who cried wolf?

    With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales - the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen - becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost - until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manu­scripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive.Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.

    He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever had done and ever would do again. This poet saw the coming darkness of the century, and saw the struggle we would have in our relationship to the divine. The poet was Rainer Maria Rilke, and these love poems to God make up his Book of Hours.

    

    A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.

    MacDonald was a major Christian writer of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. He influenced nearly everyone who was a major twentieth century writer (including Lewis Carroll, WH Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walter de la Mare, and CS Lewis. Not only was he a pioneer in the fantasy fiction genre, laying the path for people like Tolkien to write Lord of the Rings, but also a major Christian thinker, which influenced Lewis profoundly. Lewis, in fact, wrote that MacDonald was his 'master', and said 'I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.' These words will challenge and uplift you, and illuminate the faith which underpins all of CS Lewis's popular and enduring writing.

    The German text is en face. The six hymns comprise a deeply affecting poem that speaks across the centuries with unquestioned radiance."Appropriate for general readers and for scholars interested in the art of translation." — Choice

    He first found his true voice in the epigrams and odes he wrote when transfigured by his love for the wife of a rich banker. He later embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious sequence of hymns exploring cosmology and history, from mythological times to the discovery of America and his own era. The ’Canticles of Night’, by contrast, include enigmatic fragments in an unprecedented style, which anticipates the Symbolists and Surrealists. Together the works collected here show Hölderlin’s use of Classical and Christian imagery and his exploration of cosmology and history in an attempt to find meaning in an uncertain world.

    Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.--Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.

    In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant to our own time.Beginning with a political analysis of contemporary society — in particular, the French Revolution and its failure to implement universal freedom — Schiller observes that people cannot transcend their circumstances without education. He conceives of art as the vehicle of education, one that can liberate individuals from the constraints and excesses of either pure nature or pure mind. Through aesthetic experience, he asserts, people can reconcile the inner antagonism between sense and intellect, nature and reason.Schiller’s proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual is an enduringly influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy’s clearest, most vital expression.

    The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.

    The doomed narrator, forever dressed in black, fights his destiny. Only lovely Nyneve believes the lad can be good, traps manipulator Merlin, gives boy white pup Gull, takes them to his mother's castle.