Games like Dungeons and Dragons have never appealed to me, and much as I like maps and strange lands, the works of Tolkien leave me cold. The tales drawn together in this book by Richard Barber are from a wide range of medieval sources, spanning the centuries from the dawn of Christianity to the age of the Plantagenets. All jokes aside: the fact that Graves is nigh-ubiquitously dismissed in modern-day classics as a pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist with some incredibly weird ideas about women and about the formation of mythology in general (as well as someone who appeared to genuinely believe he had communicated with the Roman emperor Claudius) is a goddamn relief, given the unfortunate prevalence of conspiracy theory-esque nonsense masquerading as genuine scholarship. My only complaint is that they should have left in Graves' original line references to the primary sources.

Secondly, the Editor’s Introduction is interesting, and serves to whet one’s appetite for the joys to come. A fascinating history of the creatures that populate myths and folklore, John Cherry’s Mythical Beasts is beautifully reimagined as a Folio edition illustrated with archive images and Neil Packer’s striking new motifs and binding design. Robert Graves does an excellent job of retelling both the main Greek myths and the more obscure ones. Myths and Legends of Russia released in 2009 is a highly sought after volume due to the particularly exquisite silhouette illustrations by Niroot Puttapipat.Similar to the Greek myths, there is a monochrome 3-volume set of this series also available, with the three volumes being titled ‘History and Romance’, ‘Heroes and Saints’, and ‘Marvels and Magic’. This is not a book for the faint-hearted as, well to me anyway, it is an excellent reference book that I will pick up from time to time and browse through it or look for further information. The groundbreaking debut novel of Hugo Award-winning author Becky Chambers, one of the most imaginative voices in contemporary science fiction, is a truly galactic limited edition.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.For what is really only a few dollars more you get these well-bound volumes with black and white illustrations. During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were the next two volumes produced, in 1996 and 1998, using the translation of Robert Fagles, which was the preeminent English translation of the 1990s. The question is largely rhetorical, I have other sources of Greek myths, just wondered if anyone else was disappointed by him. The first adventure in the Folio Society editions of ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ series, Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood features Jonathan Burton’s enchanting illustrations and a new introduction by Michael Morpurgo.