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Wrote a blog post for Myths and Legends Day on the A to Z main blog. It's about how to find good books on legends and mythology 😊 And what to look for in a good source.

Read here
http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/2023/10/happy-myths-and-legends-day.html?m=1

#AtoZChallenge #mythology #legends #books #bookstodon #research

Happy Myths and Legends Day!

October 11th is Myths and Legends Day! Since the A to Z Challenge has a "Mythology and Folklore" category every year, we thought it would b...
www.a-to-zchallenge.com
#research #books #bookstodon #legends #atozchallenge #mythology
Jürgen Hubert
I did notice that 19th century German folklore collections ranged all over the place regarding their quality.
Ray McCarthy
Variable quality folklore collections probably true for most periods of time and countries since 19th C.
Also I hate so-called encyclopedias of myth, legend or folklore where the author seems to be making up a lot of stuff and no sources listed (late 20th C.). Should be sold as modern fiction.
Dr. Zalka Csenge Virág
oh yeah, the encyclopedias are often flawed, and they lack stories, which I dislike 😄 But currently I'm reading a rare good one, with stories and citations 😄
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Jürgen Hubert
To quote Terry Pratchett:

"where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* and extrapolated from associated sources.**

*Made it up.
**Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too."
Ray McCarthy
Example is Patricia Monaghan (d 2012), USA creator of "The Encyclopedia of Celtic Myth and Folklore" sometimes quoted and cited by Wikipedia. Seems bonkers.
Maybe less accurate than Robert Graves "The White Goddess" (mostly fiction)
"The Golden Bough" is less dubious and Campbell's "Hero Journey" is simply picking a few stories & ignoring most.
Check quality of citations that they are not as Pratchett explains!
Dr. Zalka Csenge Virág
yeah I have a bone to pick with all of those. Even though I like Graves' fiction books 😆
Ray McCarthy
Robert Graves, T.H. White, Rudyard Kipling (Puck of Pook's Hill, and sequel) and John Masefield all wrote great fiction inspired by Myth, Legend and folklore. Tennyson and Yeats for poetry.
Some of Shakespeare's plays.
mythologyandhistory
I love your list, but I want to add a "hot take"...

... how much one should believe of a source, & how to proceed in using it, depends (in my opinion only), on how one intends to use it.

If I'm planning to write a (semi)academic treatise on something, sure, I need to be careful af.

But if I'm writing e.g. a "pop-mythology" booklet, or a fun Mastodon post (hehe), I don't feel it is necessary or even useful to be too deep.

Or maybe I'm wrong!
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Dr. Zalka Csenge Virág
I wouldn't say deep, but I'd still want to be accurate, unless I'm doing a creative take 😄
mythologyandhistory
I agree that accuracy is wanted, but it's not always really possible (or so I've found).

Sometimes, I decided to go with the "most common opinion" in e.g. a Mastodon post, because I would need to write a lot of "allegedly"s & "possibly"s otherwise :P

I try to get more accurate if someone challenges the notion. It's actually a really neat way to have conversations here!
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