Bulfinch - Bulfinchs Mythology

2004 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Foreword copyright 2004 by Alberto Manguel
Biographical note copyright 1993 by Random House, Inc.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS IN PUBLICATION DATA
Bulfinch, Thomas, 17961867
[Mythology]
Bulfinchs mythology/Thomas Bulfinch
p.cm.
This ed. previously pub. in 1993 and 1998.
The three works, popularly known as Bulfinchs mythology,
were originally published separately.
Contents: The age of fableThe age of chivalryLegends of Charlemagne.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64001-1
1. Mythology 2. Romances, English. 3. FolkloreEurope.
4. Charlemagne, Emperor, 742-814Romances. I. Title.
BL311.B85 1998
398.2dc21 98-24149

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1_r1

T HOMAS Bulfinch was born on July 15, 1796, in Newton, Massachusetts. He was descended from a distinguished New England family; his grandfather was a well-known surgeon, and his father, Charles Bulfinch, was one of the foremost architects of his day, responsible for many Boston monuments, including the State House on Beacon Hill, as well as an important public official and city planner. Thomas, who was one of eleven children, pursued a more sheltered career. He received the education of a member of the Boston eliteBoston Latin, Phillips Exeter, Harvard (where his classmates included the historian William Prescott)but after he graduated in 1814 his life showed little sense of strong direction. He taught briefly at Boston Latin, assisted at a store owned by his elder brother, and worked desultorily and without much success in a number of different businesses in Washington, D.C., and Boston.

In 1837 Bulfinch began working as a clerk in the Merchants Bank of Boston; he stayed on in that capacity until his death. The position was not a demanding one, and Bulfinch evidently had ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. He was secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History for a number of years, and published books reflecting the range of his interests, including Hebrew Lyrical History (1853); The Boy Inventor (1860), a tribute to a precocious student of his who died young; Shakespeare Adapted for Reading Classes (1865); and Oregon and Eldorado (1866), an account of an expedition to the Pacific Northwest his father had been involved in planning. The only works of his which have retained their readership are the three volumesThe Age of Fable (1855), The Age of Chivalry (1858), and Legends of Charlemagne (1863)eventually reprinted under the title Bulfinchs Mythology.

The thoroughness with which Bulfinch combed through his sources made his mythological books standard reference works for a long time, while the skill with which he wove the separate versions into coherent tales endeared them to a wide audience. They continue to be read for the vigor of their storytelling even when superseded by twentieth-century approaches. Bulfinch was concerned not only with recapitulating the ancient myths and legends but also with demonstrating their relationship to literature and art, and his copious cross-references to poetry and painting make his Mythology an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century. Without knowledge of mythology, he wrote, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood or appreciated. He added: We trust our young readers will find it a source of entertainment, and his trust seems to have been justified, judging from the many generations who have found his books an enthralling and loving introduction to the worlds of classical and medieval myth and legend.

T HE gods and heroes of Greece nourish our daily lives. In common parlance (his Achilles heel), pop songs (Bananaramas And Venus was her name), newspaper headlines (NATOs Odyssey), epithets of cult figures (the Adonis of fashion), psychological and political jargon (to be narcissistic, to undertake a Herculean task), euphemisms (Poseidons kingdom), astronomy (the names of the heavenly bodies), shop signs and brands (Apollo Travel, Trojan)in all these areas, mythology colors our naming of the world. We may not know who the Gorgon was, but we understand the expression Shes a gorgon; the exact unfolding of Oedipuss tragedy may escape us, but Freuds labeling of the Oedipus complex describes for us the next-door neighbors mommys boy; we may ignore the curse that followed the braggart king, but we like to think of bankers as having the Midas touch. Somehow these myths cling to our language and thought even today, in spite of the ever increasing lack of prestige of the intellectual act. Many of our schools may no longer require a study of the ancient world, but our collective imagination refuses to relinquish the presence of that which our ancestral imagination dreamed up for us. Just outside the walls we as a society have erected to guard ourselves against complexity and ambiguity, the old stories of revenge and love, of marvelous births and terrible deaths, of metamorphoses and foundations, of curses and quests, continue to haunt us, and seep through the cracks of our stubborn pragmatism.

Mythology is not merely a collection of popular tales bred from an ancient poets fantasy, the complex interweaving of the undertakings of gods and heroes that feeds the collective imagination. Nor is it the simplistic translation of humankinds early experience of natural events. Mythology is the coherent attempt at rendering, through poetic logic, the observation of a correspondence between the events of nature and those of the society we live in. The eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico described this forceful system of thought not as an excrescence of reason, but as a profound and necessary manifestation of primitive societies. Mythology is a form of social thinking.

The male divinities imported by the invaders were gradually admitted to the realm of the single female godhead and, through various stages, multiplied and metamorphosed into the diversified community of gods and goddesses who eventually took up residence on Mount Olympus. When Homer told their stories in the ninth century B. C. , he gave his fellow Greeks (and all generations that followed them) a poetic version of the outcome of these lengthy, complex relationships that sprang from, and in turn defined, a European vision of the world.

Five centuries later, Socrates (in words lent to him by Plato in the tenth book of the Republic

Plato, however, did not dismiss myths entirely. Though he mocked those who attempted to give scientific accounts of the myths (Phaedrus), rendering them believable, it is obvious that his thought and speech were nourished and illustrated by the rich mythology of his culture. In fact, though those who weave mythology into their fantasies are excluded from the government of Platos Republic, myths are the imaginative basis on which he is obliged to build his utopia.