World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics

Unfortunately, this is about as good as it gets if you want students to read myths (rather than reading ABOUT myths) and give them some cultural variety. The alternative for an instructor is putting together a prohibitively expensive reader, or requiring a whole list of books, or depending on students to read excerpts from books on library reserve (which they ordinarily won't do), or requiring other single-volume texts that are imperfect in their own ways. (Thury and DeVinney's "Introduction to Mythology," good as it is, is labyrinthine in its organization and would make my students leap off the nearest cliff; Roy Willis's "World Mythology" is all descriptions and summaries, with no narratives at all; David Leeming's "The World of Myth" is Eurocentric, as well as monolithic in its Jungian approach and uncritical of Goddess-centered trendiness.)

This collection leaves much to be desired, though, and so do Rosenberg's interpretations. I'm not sure what her specialty is, but in many cases she relies on poor sources. For the Celtic material, for instance, she draws from reprints of 19th and early 20th century books that are themselves inaccurate fairy-tale-style retellings of the actual texts. Her descriptions of Celtic belief are also grossly outdated: so far as we now know, the Celts were not sun worshippers and their major holidays were not at the solstices and equinoxes. Even the most cursory research would have led her to more accurate translations in scholarly journals, or she could have used the same sources that Gantz did for his much more accurate renditions of Irish myth in "Early Irish Myths and Sagas"--one of the many texts one would have to require in the multi-text syllabus.

Rosenberg is also enamored of the strain of thought that identifies every powerful goddess figure as a Great Goddess worshipped by the agricultural matriarchal societies of old, a type of society that no one has ever been able to show existed; these days even Neo-Pagans usually prefer the term "matrifocal," and most anthropologists and folklorists would argue even with that term. That leaves the question of whether Rosenberg's understanding of myth is late Victorian or New Agey or both, but it doesn't seem to be very scholarly.

Title: "World Mythology" (2nd edition)
Editor: Donna Rosesnberg
Format: Paperback
Number of Pages: 584
ISBN: 978-0844257679
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Date of Publication: January 11, 1994
4 stars: Mythology for beginners

I had to buy this for my college mythology class. It's a nice enough text, with many stories from many different cultures. Before each culture, we learn a little about the people and how their stories came about, which I thought helped me understand the stories more. My personal favorites were the Egyptian myths and the Greek myths, of which there were many. It also includes classics like 'King Arthur', 'Beowulf', and 'The Illiad'. It was interesting to note the similarities and differences between the cultures and their stories, many of which were being created at the same time years ago- but many miles apart.

As for the flaws this book has, there is one major one. While I'm sure the translators translated to the best of their ability, if I had to read "flooded their hearts" one more time, I think I would scream. Okay I get it, they're happy, filled with joy, ecstatic, delighted.... but really? "Flooded"? So maybe that was the literal translation, but couldn't the editors have changed it a few times so that the readers didn't die from the repetition?

Overall I would recommend this book, especially if you're interested in mythology. Just be aware that there are many different interpretations of myths, and the ones that are in this book may not be the most well known. Additionally I'm not sure if they cut out some parts because they knew this would be a school text. If you know the story of Osiris and Isis, you know that there was one piece of his body that a fish ate... that part of the myth isn't in this book-- I guess because they deemed it unappropriate? There is a newer edition out however, which may be better than this one. At the very least, I hope they don't use the word "flooded" so much in that one. ( )