1000 Mythological Characters Briefly Described
By Edward Sylvester Ellis
- Release Date: 1916-06-19
- Genre: Social Science
Description
In this volume published in 1935, American writer Edward Sylvester Ellis provides a youth’s dictionary of Greek and Roman mythology, with brief descriptions of mythological characters in alphabetical order.
Reviews
Leaves A Lot To Be Desired
2By A.W. ReeseIt is obvious, reading this, that the author mainly focuses on Greco-Roman myth. That’s all well and good. The problem is that the title gave me the impression that the author would describe characters from all over the world in a decent amount of detail. He only describes the Greco-Roman characters in any amount of detail, and even then he gets some things wrong, like Hecate being an aspect of Persephone (they’re two separate characters; in fact, Hecate helped Demeter look for Persephone). Other characters barely get a sentence’s worth of mention. Hindu (or Hindoo, as he spells it) deities’ entries go like this: “Brahma - creator of the universe.” And that’s it. Celtic and Nordic deities’ entries also lack information, and some of the information is just flat-out wrong. Huginn and Muninn weren’t gods; they were simply the ravens of Odin, symbolizing thought and memory. If you read either of the Eddas, you’ll know that Snorri Sturluson never calls them gods. My advice: read the holy texts of whichever mythology you’re interested in, and not this. A book like this should give the same amount of attention to all of the mythologies it aims to cover, rather than only a couple of them.
