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Mythology, Legends & Folklore — page 5
413 public-domain mythology, legends & folklore books, summarised. Page 5 of 9.
Fornander collection of Hawaiian antiquities and folk-lore, Volume 2 (of 3)
Unknown
When legendary champions wage war across island channels and clever servants summon wind and rain, human pride routinely collides with the power of the gods.
Turkish fairy tales and folk tales
R. Nisbet (Robert Nisbet) Bain
In these traditional Anatolian and Roumanian tales, ordinary peasants, cunning fools, and bold princes venture into strange wildernesses where magic mirrors command armies and death lies waiting in forgotten coffers.
Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs
Lafcadio Hearn
An intimate, reflective collection of folk stories, ghostly legends, and personal essays that captures the subtle spiritual currents of traditional Japanese life.
Studies in Folk-Song and Popular Poetry
Alfred M. (Alfred Mason) Williams
A deep dive into the history and significance of folk songs and popular poetry, exploring their evolution, themes, and cultural impact.
Yiddish Tales
Helena Frank
Faithfully rendered from the Yiddish into English by Helena Frank, this historic collection opens a vibrant window into the joys, struggles, and everyday spiritual life of Eastern European Jewry across the turn of the twentieth century.
Legends of Texas
Unknown
Whispers of lost Spanish mines, phantom ghost dogs, and drowned gold drift across river bends and desert mountains, preserving the wild, untamed memory of frontier Texas.
In Both Worlds
William H. (William Henry) Holcombe
Deeply spiritual and sweeping in scope, this historical novel follows the biblical Lazarus through early bereavement, mystical trials across the ancient Mediterranean, death, visionary heavenly journeys, and decades of cruel Roman imprisonment before ultimate freedom.
Simla Village Tales
Alice Dracott
These vibrant, often startling accounts of Himalayan life capture the wisdom, wit, and occasional cruelty of village folklore. They preserve the voices of women whose stories might otherwise have vanished into the mountain mists.
Myths of the Iroquois. (1883 N 02 / 1880-1881 (pages 47-116))
Erminnie A. (Erminnie Adele) Smith
The spirits of the air and the wisdom of the earth remain alive in these ancient accounts of the Iroquois people. They offer a rare, direct bridge to a world where nature and humanity are one.
Legends of Saints & Sinners. Collected and Translated from the Irish
Unknown
The Irish countryside is a place where the veil between the mundane and the miraculous is thin, revealing a world where saints, demons, and the restless dead walk alongside the living. These stories capture the heartbeat of a people for whom the supernatural is as tangible as the soil beneath their feet.
Chushingura
Izumo Takeda
The code of the samurai is written in blood, and nowhere is its rigid, tragic beauty more famously codified than in this tale of forty-seven men who trade their lives for a single act of justice. It remains the definitive portrait of loyalty pushed to the absolute breaking point.
Fairy Tales, Their Origin and Meaning
John Thackray Bunce
Fairy tales are not merely idle nursery diversions, but are the fossilized remnants of ancient, shared human history, tracing back to the earliest imaginative expressions of our common Aryan ancestors.
Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales
R. Nisbet (Robert Nisbet) Bain
A collection of vibrant, centuries-old Ukrainian folk narratives, these stories capture the struggle between cunning humans and supernatural forces. They offer a vivid window into the heart of Cossack oral tradition.
Indian Ghost Stories: Second Edition
S. Mukerji
Ghostly apparitions, inexplicable phenomena, and the weight of ancestral warnings converge in this collection of tales from colonial India. These accounts bridge the gap between skepticism and the supernatural, presenting unsettling experiences that defy rational explanation.
Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest
Unknown
This collection of traditional narratives gathers the cosmologies, origin stories, and trickster cycles of indigenous cultures across the American Southwest and California. It offers a window into the rich, varied ways these peoples interpreted the natural world, the creation of humanity, and the moral boundaries…
The Maker of Rainbows, and Other Fairy-tales and Fables
Richard Le Gallienne
A strange old man transforms a child’s fallen tear into a dazzling rainbow, setting the tone for a collection where wonder continually breaks through the dull surface of everyday life.
The Legends of the Jews
Louis Ginzberg
An unspooling of ancient rabbinic imagination, this collection gathers centuries of folklore to rebuild the biblical wilderness as a realm of cosmic scale.
Ancient Egyptian legends
Margaret Alice Murray
Ancient myths reveal how early civilizations sought order, magic, and divine justice amidst the terrifying mysteries of life and death.
Romantic legends of Spain
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Ghostly organ music echoing through ruined aisles, a doomed lover grasping a dead hand, and a night-hunting nobleman transformed into a hunted stag carry readers into Spain’s darkest, most enchanted corners.
A Chinese Wonder Book
Norman Hinsdale Pitman
A tapestry of ancient magic, filial devotion, and cosmic justice where animals speak, emperors falter, and quiet virtue reshapes the world.
Arabian Wisdom: Selections and Translations from the Arabic
John Wortabet
A single word from a wise man carries the weight of a lifetime of experience. This collection brings together centuries of Arabic moral philosophy, offering timeless guidance on character, speech, and human nature.
Myths and Folk-tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars
Jeremiah Curtin
To enter these Eastern European folk tales is to step into a landscape where the ordinary world dissolves, replaced by iron-clawed climbs, golden-maned steeds, and beasts that speak with the voices of men.
Old Deccan Days
Unknown
This collection of traditional tales captures the vivid, often perilous imagination of Southern India, preserving the voices of oral storytellers. It offers a rare window into a world where magic and domestic struggle are inextricably linked.
Old Celtic Romances
P. W. (Patrick Weston) Joyce
The ancient legends of Ireland live again in these translations, capturing the magic, tragedy, and heroic scale of a mythic world where the supernatural and the human are forever intertwined.
Occoneechee, the Maid of the Mystic Lake
Robert Frank Jarrett
This blend of lyrical narrative and cultural preservation explores the ancient traditions of the Cherokee, centered on a quest for love amidst the rugged beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Christ Legends
Selma Lagerlöf
The life of Jesus and the figures surrounding him are reimagined through the lens of folk tradition, weaving divine wonder into the everyday experiences of those who witnessed his influence. These interconnected narratives explore themes of mercy, pride, and the quiet endurance of faith.
Korean Tales: Being a collection of stories translated from the Korean folk lore, together with introductory chapters descriptive of Korea
Horace Newton Allen
This collection of traditional narratives serves as a window into the cultural landscape of late 19th-century Korea, blending historical description with the enduring moral archetypes of folk storytelling.
Czech Folk Tales
Josef Baudiš
Beneath the surface of ordinary life, spirits and sorcerers wait to disrupt the world of men. These tales offer a window into a landscape where the boundary between human struggle and magical intervention is thin and easily crossed.
Nightmare Tales
H. P. (Helena Petrovna) Blavatsky
Nightmare Tales is a collection of gothic short stories that explore the intersection of the supernatural, the psychological, and the occult. It presents haunting visions of human obsession, where the boundaries between life, death, and musical genius are dangerously blurred.
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series
Unknown
Between the physical world and the unseen lies a thin, permeable veil, kept in place only by the stubborn persistence of local memory and the shared whispers of those who live on the margins of the Irish countryside.
The Rāmāyana, Volume 3. Yuddhakāndam
Valmiki
The final movement of a foundational epic, this volume captures the cataclysmic collision between a righteous prince and the demon king who stole his wife. It is a grand, harrowing study of devotion, duty, and the crushing weight of war.
Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth: Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series
Frank Sidgwick
Bound by solemn oaths, ancient enchantments, and mortal deceit, figures human and supernatural clash across timeless traditional songs.
Legends of Old Honolulu (Mythology): Collected and Translated from the Hawaiian
W. D. (William Drake) Westervelt
Centuries of traditional memory, natural wonder, and supernatural conflict converge to shape the sacred landscapes, valleys, and coastal shores of old Oahu.
Fairy Tales from Spain
José Muñoz Escámez
A clever young man outsmarts a shape-shifting horse, a cabin boy inherits a diamond kingdom, and a Spanish sailor stumbles onto an island of dwarfs. Across nineteen vibrant tales, old Europe meets the far corners of the earth in a world of high stakes and quick wits.
Weird Tales from Northern Seas
Jonas Lie
Out on the black, storm-scoured waters of sub-arctic Norway, men battle freezing waves for a living, unaware that malignant sea-monsters and mountain spirits are watching from the dark to claim their lives.
The Mabinogion Vol. 3
Schreiber, Charlotte, Lady
A vast, untamed landscape of early Welsh legend where mortal princes trade places with underworld kings, giants wade across oceans, and men are transformed into beasts by spellcraft.
Babylonian and Assyrian Literature
Unknown
Carved into clay and preserved across millennia, these ancient Mesopotamian texts offer an unvarnished window into the fears, devotions, and triumphs of an empire.
Stray leaves from strange literature
Lafcadio Hearn
Across ancient sands, tropical oceans, and haunted streets, distant mythologies converge into eerie, beautiful visions of mortal longing and eternal decay.
Demoniality
Ludovico Maria Sinistrari
A seventeenth-century Franciscan friar proposes that spirits who visit human bedrooms are not fallen angels, but an entirely separate, physical species of rational beings born with air and fire in their veins.
The Singing Caravan: A Sufi Tale
Vansittart, Robert Gilbert Vansittart, Baron
Travelers, seekers, and weary souls pass through the vast desert, weaving their private heartbreaks, philosophical discoveries, and mortal limitations into a collective journey toward spiritual resolution.
El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections
José de Espronceda
A reckless libertine gambles with his own soul in a nightmarish, nocturnal pursuit of a phantom. This dark masterpiece defines the Spanish Romantic spirit through its defiance of death and its intoxicating, musical verse.
Love, Worship and Death: Some Renderings from the Greek Anthology
Rennell Rodd
The Greek spirit, in all its intimate and enduring grace, speaks through these verses as if the ancient world were merely a garden next door. Here is the heartbeat of a civilization, captured not in marble statues, but in the small, vivid songs of daily life.
The Christian Mythology
E. B. (Ethel Brigham) Leatherbee
Knowledge is power, but ignorance is the mother of devotion. This provocative starting point sets the tone for a rigorous, critical examination of the historical and mythological foundations of the Christian faith.
Scottish Ghost Stories
Elliott O'Donnell
The shadows of the Scottish Highlands hold secrets that defy logic, where ancient grudges and tragic ends refuse to stay buried. These accounts capture the chilling moment when the veil between the living and the dead wears thin.
Caucasian Legends
Abraam Abraamovich Gul'bat
These ancient tales bridge the divide between the historical and the miraculous, mapping a landscape where faith, geography, and destiny are inextricably woven into the rocky terrain of the Caucasus.
The Mountain that was 'God': Being a Little Book About the Great Peak Which the Indians Named 'Tacoma' but Which is Officially Called 'Rainier'
John H. (John Harvey) Williams
A tribute to the majesty of a great peak, this work explores the natural history, indigenous lore, and early mountaineering expeditions of the mountain known to its native inhabitants as Tacoma.
Te Tohunga: The ancient legends and traditions of the Maoris
W. (Wilhelm) Dittmer
This collection serves as a vessel for the foundational cosmogony and heroic cycles of the Maori people, transcribed through the lens of a turn-of-the-century observer. It functions as a bridge between the oral preservation of ancient myth and the static permanency of the printed page.
Told by the Northmen: Stories from the Eddas and Sagas
E. M. (Ethel Mary) Wilmot-Buxton
These sweeping legends of gods, giants, and heroes capture the elemental spirit of the North, where wisdom is bought with sacrifice and bravery is tested against the inevitable tide of fate.