“Bulfinch’s Mythology”, by Thomas Bulfinch, introduction by Stephanie Lynn Budin

 

704 pages, Canterbury Classics, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1626861695

Anyone who wants to know anything about Western mythology must consult two works at least: Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton (reviewed on August 4^th, 2022), and Bulfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch, the American Latinist and banker. The book is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three European eras: tales and myths of the Greeks and Romans; Arthurian legends; and Medieval romances. Throughout all of the tales, Bulfinch inserted his own commentary along with quotations from writings by his contemporaries that refer to the myth in question, a novelty for the Victorian era. While many of his comments and observations are often interesting and full of keen observations, Bulfinch often also brings Christianity into the stories to the point of ridiculousness, even tediousness; how Christ and his Church had anything to do with Zeus/Jupiter and his thunderbolts was never made clear and was obviously pointless.

But, assuming one can look past that particular pointlessness, Bulfinch’s Mythology is an excellent collection of the myths that the ancient Greeks and Romans, and later Medieval men and women, told to one another. Bulfinch himself stated that his work was meant for the general reader – “a classical dictionary for the parlour” – and not for the dedicated scholar; in the preface to The Age of Fable he writes that “[o]ur work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation” (perhaps this is why his Mythology ultimately displaced other, more scholarly works, such as Pantheon, Andrew Tooke’s 1698 translation of Pantheum Mysticum, which was François Pomey’s 1659 work in Latin).

Naturally, all is not well, for Bulfinch did do a lot of editing, and so many of the tales recounted are in fact abridgements of these classic myths; it would also appear that he pinched a great deal from Metamorphōsēs by Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (Ovid). Nor did everyone appreciate the “poetical citations” he added to the stories, these being those examples of how these myths were used in English literature by some 40 poets, all of which – save for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Stephen Greenleaf (Bullfinch’s brother) – were British. But all this rather misses the point: by combining classical learning with then-modern, 19^th Century literature, Bulfinch sought to give his modern-day readers a way to connect such distant information to their contemporary lives, granting his audience a pathway to “useful knowledge” that, in turn, would enhance the pleasure in reading other works.

And…it worked, as sales of his Mythology were brisk then as well as now. Imperfect and incomplete, Bulfinch’s work is still a necessary addition to anyone wanting to know more about the myths of ancient Europeans. I’m sure there are better, more complete collections to be found, but why not start with a classic and move on from there?