The first collection of Joseph Campbell s writings and lectures on the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, a central focus of his celebrated scholarship, edited and introduced by Arthurian scholar Evans Lansing Smith, PhD, the chair of Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Throughout his life, Joseph Campbell was deeply engaged in the study of the Grail Quests and Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. In this new volume of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, editor Evans Lansing Smith collects Campbell s writings and lectures on Arthurian legends, including his never-before-published master s thesis on Arthurian myth, A Study of the Dolorous Stroke. Campbell s writing captures the incredible stories of such figures as Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere as well as the larger patterns and meanings revealed in these myths. Merlin s death and Arthur receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, for example, are not just vibrant stories but also central to the mythologist s thinking. The Arthurian myths opened the world of comparative mythology to Campbell, turning his attention to the Near and Far Eastern roots of myth. Calling the Arthurian romances the world s first secular mythology, Campbell found metaphors in them for human stages of growth, development, and psychology. The myths exemplify the kind of love Campbell called amor, in which individuals become more fully themselves through connection. Campbell s infectious delight in his discoveries makes this volume essential for anyone intrigued by the stories we tell and the stories behind them.
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Myth . . . legend . . . or history so steeped in antiquity that we know it in our bones to be true? From Ur in the marshes of 16th-century B. C. Sumer to Troy in the Fenlands of England and the beginnings of London, Marchell Abrahams peels back the centuries to reveal the founding of our country by the Sumerian princess whom the British histories call Albyne. She takes us from the end of Roman kingship in Italy to the quelling of a savage civil war in 5th-century B. C. Britain by Brutus, descendant of King Leir, and his assumption, a thousand years after Albyne, of the High Kingship of an already ancient nation. This is British history.