Myths & Fables

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Medusa (Laura Dreyfus Barney) by Alice Pike Barney

Myths & Fables

Hawaiian Legends Resembling Old Testament History

Hyde’s account, filtered through missionary eyes, draws parallels between Hawaiian origin stories and biblical narratives—not to elevate the former, but to domesticate them. Yet beneath the comparisons, the legends pulse with their own elemental power: floods, brothers in conflict, sacred taboos—echoes not of borrowed faith, but of a cosmology shaped by island, ocean, and fire.

The Three Gifts

In this sweeping fairy tale of enchantment, envy, and redemption, kindness is rewarded not just with beauty but with power, and cruelty is undone by its own ambition. The Three Gifts is a vivid parable where tears become pearls, love withstands sorcery, and truth—however long suppressed—breaks through like a flame in a midnight church.

Chinese Myths of the Waters

In Chinese Myths of the Waters, E.T.C. Werner plunges into a deep current of flood legends, river deities, and aquatic dragons, revealing a cosmology in which water is both life source and existential threat. These tales, shaped by millennia of hydrological struggle, echo with political allegory and the metaphysical tension between chaos and order.

The Stones of Five Colors and the Empress Jokwa

Yei Theodora Ozaki blends folklore, cosmology, and proto-feminist mythmaking into a lavish epic where celestial damage, magical warfare, and bureaucratic diplomacy unfold under the capable reign of a twenty-five-foot-tall Empress. More than a fairy tale, it reads like a mythopoetic blueprint—suggesting that the repair of a broken world requires not just courage, but color, craft, and the collaboration of gods.

Saint George of Merrie England

Part epic, part morality play, this swashbuckling fantasia traces the career of England’s patron saint as he slays dragons, resists seduction, escapes betrayal, and liberates kingdoms with a mix of courtly virtue and supernatural endurance. What emerges is a kaleidoscope of Christian imperial fantasy, where valor is never without spectacle, and virtue is repaid in thrones.

Ivan Tsarevich and the Fire-bird

This sweeping Russian folktale unfolds with a dreamlike inevitability, first shimmering with the light of golden apples and magic steeds, then darkening into fratricide, resurrection, and redemptive love. Its true power lies in the mythic rhythms it strikes: choices at crossroads, riddling wolves, and the perilous magnetism of beauty hard won.

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Colonial Life

A kaleidoscopic glimpse into early American life, this chapter shifts the lens from battlefields and charters to the rhythms of ordinary existence: muddy roads, mismatched bread, amateur diplomacy, and deer crashing through parlor mirrors. In the voices of Franklin, Byrd, and Knight, colonial America emerges not as a mythic Eden or a theater of heroic suffering, but as a sprawling, uneven experiment in self-reliance, satire, and stubborn improvisation.

Curiosities of Bats

A meticulous, meandering survey of bats—from medieval mistrust to anatomical marvels, vampire legends, and affectionate insectivores—this 19th-century piece stitches natural history with myth, showing how bats have flitted between folklore and science, often misunderstood, always fascinating.

Madame Jumel

Madame Jumel, as depicted in Superwomen by Albert Payson Terhune, is a figure of relentless ambition and social cunning, rising from obscurity to become one of the wealthiest women in America. Terhune casts her as a master of reinvention, whose marriages, fortunes, and flirtations with power reveal both the boldness and cost of a life lived on society’s edge.

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The Brewery of Egg Shells

W. B. Yeats recounts the eerie wisdom of Irish folk belief, where changelings and boiling egg-shells mark the porous boundary between the domestic and the uncanny. With dark humor and folkloric logic, the tale captures a mother’s desperate faith in the old ways—where even red-hot pokers and cradle-swapping spirits play by ancient rules.