Under the head of “Hero Myths of the British Race” have been included outlines of the stories of Beowulf, Cuchulain, Hereward the Wake, and Robin Hood. The section on Northern Mythology has been enlarged by a retelling of the epic of the “Nibelungen Lied,” together with a summary of Wagner’s version of the legend in his series of music-dramas. Scrupulous care has been taken to follow the original text of Bulfinch, but attention should be called to some additional sections which have been inserted to add to the rounded completeness of the work, and which the publishers believe would meet with the sanction of the author himself, as in no way intruding upon his original plan but simply carrying it out in more complete detail. In this complete edition of his mythological and legendary lore “The Age of Fable,” “The Age of Chivalry,” and “Legends of Charlemagne” are included.
“Age of Fable,” First Edition, 1855 “The Age of Chivalry,” 1858 “The Boy Inventor,” 1860 “Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages,” 1863 “Poetry of the Age of Fable,” 1863 “Oregon and Eldorado, or Romance of the Rivers,”1860. The plan he followed in this work, to give it the greatest possible usefulness, is set forth in the Author’s Preface. His leisure time he used for further pursuit of the classical studies which he had begun at Harvard, and his chief pleasure in life lay in writing out the results of his reading, in simple, condensed form for young or busy readers. For a long time later in life he was employed as an accountant in the Boston Merchants’ Bank. He finished his scholastic training at Harvard College, and after taking his degree was for a period a teacher in his home city. His boyhood was spent in that city, and he prepared for college in the Boston schools. Thomas Bulfinch was a native of Boston, Mass., where he was born in 1796.
Yet to the majority of this great circle of readers and students the name Bulfinch in itself has no significance. Many readers of the present edition will probably recall coming in contact with the work as children, and, it may be added, will no doubt discover from a fresh perusal the source of numerous bits of knowledge that have remained stored in their minds since those early years. “The Age of Fable” has come to be ranked with older books like “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The Arabian Nights,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and five or six other productions of world-wide renown as a work with which every one must claim some acquaintance before his education can be called really complete. No new edition of Bulfinch’s classic work can be considered complete without some notice of the American scholar to whose wide erudition and painstaking care it stands as a perpetual monument.
Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
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