Bulfinch’s Mythology

Thomas Bulfinch set out to make the myths and legends of the past readable for ordinary people, stripping away the scholarly apparatus that kept them locked in Greek and Latin. This collection gathers his retellings of Greek and Roman mythology, the legends of King Arthur and his knights, and the medieval romances of Charlemagne, drawn from the three volumes he published in the 1850s and 1860s. He tells the stories in plain prose and threads them with lines from English poets, showing how deeply the old tales run through later literature. For generations it served as many readers’ first door into classical and medieval myth. Free to download as a PDF and EPUB.