First published in 1855, Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable became one of the great popular gateways into classical mythology.
There is a sprawling retelling of Greek and Roman myths alongside material drawn from Norse, Eastern and other traditions. Bulfinch wrote for the general reader, gathering stories that had become embedded throughout Western literature, painting and poetry and making their references intelligible without flattening them into a dictionary of gods and monsters.
Prometheus and Pandora, Apollo and Daphne, Midas, Cupid and Psyche, Phaëton, Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Orpheus, the Trojan cycle and dozens more appear here as continuous stories rather than isolated summaries. The book is particularly good at preserving the odd logic of myth: metamorphosis as punishment and escape, gods behaving with alarming pettiness, humans negotiating badly with fate, and the natural world forever threatening to disclose that it was once somebody else.
Bulfinch dedicated the work to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, calling it an attempt to “popularise mythology” — which is essentially what the book became: not quite scholarship, not quite anthology, but a durable piece of nineteenth-century myth-making about myth itself.
Harper & Row, New York. Perennial Classics edition. Afterword and supplementary material copyright 1966. Hardback. Light general shelf wear and age-toning to pages, with some minor handling wear. Internally clean and firmly bound. Very good vintage condition.
