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"Myths and Legends from Around the World brings you some of the most influential stories ever told. Encompassing the vast range of human experience, they perhaps tell us all we need to know about ourselves.
The tales are drawn from many different literary and cultural traditions – from Scandinavia, the Americas, Japan, Africa, and Europe – and are re-told with the modern reader in mind. Within these pages you will find the passions, the sacrifices, the dilemmas, the tribulations, the humour, the deeds of heroism and evil, which make up the rich pattern of life.
You will meet true heroes (Beowulf, Roland) great chivalric lovers (Black Colin, Gawain), spiritual saviours (Countess Cathleen, Miao Shan), ...>>
"Defining 'magic' is a maddening task. Over the last century numerous philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and theologians have attempted to pin down its essential meaning, sometimes analysing it in such complex and abstruse depth that it all but loses its sense altogether. For this reason, many people often shy away from providing a detailed definition, assuming it is generally understood as the human control of supernatural forces.
'Magic' continues to pervade the popular imagination and idiom. People feel comfortable with its contemporary multiple meanings, unaware of the controversy, conflict, and debate its definition has caused over two and a half millennia. In common usage today 'magic' is uttered in reference to the supernatural, superstition, illusion, trickery, ...>>
