World Mythology

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 isn't exactly better than this one. At the very least, I had hoped they didn't use the word "flooded" so much in that one... But sadly not so. The new version is the same, with some additional stories included like: "Esfandyar", "Chi Li", "Jason and the Golden Fleece" among others. (If you need the newer version for class, you could still get away with buying the cheaper 2nd edition and then just copying certain stories from a fellow classmate's book. The newer is $43 with this one being around $13!)

(Originally reviewed for "Kathleen's Book Reviews")

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.)

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 texts 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; even neo-pagans 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.

I just recently purchased this for my daughter. The book was required for her college class and Amazon's price was about $30 less than the college bookstore.

I received my book a week before the class was over, luckily the local library was more reliable. Additionally they don't give refunds, maybe it's because they know there service sucks and would lose a lot of money......hmmmmm.

This collection of myths deserves less than one star! While there are a variety of myths, the versions are so awful that their true meaning is often missed. There are spelling, punctuation, and other mistakes throughout World Mythology. Even searching for the myths on the internet provides better versions that are not censored or over-edited. Take Beowulf for example, Ms. Rosenberg explains in its introduction that Anglo-Saxons used kennings in their works, which is true. However, they did not use kennings for every descriptive phrase. On the other hand, Ms. Rosenberg hyphenates so many words an all of the hyphens put together would equal the length of the large intestines stretched around a Swedish meatball! Which is ridiculous!!!! (Just like her interpretations.)