- Labyrinth - Medieval Studies - The big one for Medievalists on the web.
- The third section of the soc.history.medieval FAQ collects a number of links to medieval web references.
- More from Jenny Sposito, a Medieval Studies page.
- Paul J. Gans's Medieval Technology Pages lets you know some of when, where and how different inventions were developed prior to 1500's.
- Michael Adams defines many Feudal terms in a listing on the English server at Carnegie Mellon.
- Also on that English server, C. R. J. Currie presents an essay on Medieval carpentry
- In another Carnegie Mellon article, Robert Laures presents his essay entitled A Medieval Response to Municipal Pollution.
- Bonnie Duncan has collected a number of pieces on Medieval Women.
- Brief descriptions of some of the more adventurous medieval and renaissance women are found in Women as Swashbucklers an article by Lisa Evans intended to be used with the role playing game, GURPS.
- Joan's Witch Directory takes a historical look at witchcraft and witch-trials from the dark ages to the dawn of the twentieth century.
- Harvard's Medieval Studies department has a nice set of links
- Exemplaria, a medieval studies journal, in addition to subscription information provides pre-prints of a selection of articles from future issues.
- soc.history.medieval
Myths and Legends
Medieval refs
Early Fantasy & SF
- Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), The Light Princess and Lilith (1895) by George MacDonald. "Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not conciously made by individuals at all. But every now and thenthere occurs in the modern world a genius - a Kafka or a Novalis - who can make such a story. MacDonald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know." - C. S. Lewis
- "'Curiouser and Curiouser', said Alice." - Lewis Carrol. Alice's Adventures began in 1865.
- H. Rider Haggard imbued his adventure stories about Allan Quartermain with the experience he had in the South African civil service. Haggard's writing may strike the reader as belonging to an imperial apologist and misogynist, but they were a product of their time and remain classic adventure tales. Quartermain made his first appearance in King Solomon's Mines (1885) and would return in several sequels including Allan Quartermain (1887), Marie (1912), Child of Storm (1912), and Finished (1917). Other Haggard novels include She (1887), Nada the Lily (1892), Montezuma's Daughter (1893) and When the World Shook (1917).
- The Well at World's End (1896), A Dream of John Ball and a King's Lesson (1886-1887) by William Morris
"Scholars and historians of fantasy, such as my friend L. Sprague de Camp, agree that it was the English novelist, poet, and artisan William Morris (1834-96) who founded the genre of the heroic fantasy laid in imaginary Medieval lands or worlds where magic works." - Lin Carter - "These tales have been compared with the work of Jules Verne and there was a disposition on the part of literary journalists at one time to call me the English Jules Verne. As of mater of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the Frenchman and these fantasies. His work dealt with almost always with actual possibilities of the invention and discovery, and he made some remarkable forecasts.... He helped his reader to imagine it done and to realise what fun, excitement or mischief would ensue.... But these stories of mine collected here do not pretend to deal with possible things..." - H. G. Wells
- Ernest Bramah Smith's "Oriental fantasies" The Wallet of Kai Lung (1899) Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922) and The Mirror of Kong Ho are set in an invented, fantasy version of China - a device meant more as a means of commenting on English society of the time. In the first two of these selections, the narrator, Kai Lung, is used to string together a number of short stories that he tells while being brought in front of the magistrate for some difficulty or another. Lin Carter compares Bramah's wit and style to those of Jack Vance and James Branch Cabell.
- "Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instictive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal." - L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz (1900), the first of fourteen of his Oz tales.
- Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany. Irish Lord and master of fantasy, Dunsany began publishing in 1905 with The Gods of Pegana and kept churning out plays, poems, and short stories until his death in 1957.
- Charles Vess has collected a huge amount of Plunkett's tales, some of which may have only appeared in magazines, in Dunsany's Corner.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales of fantastic adventure fiction have made a huge impact on American culture. John Carter of Mars, the hero of his first novel A Princess of Mars (1912), is said to be an inspiration for the creation of Superman. His Tarzan stories have been made into numerous movies and TV programs. Even this past summer has seen a movie spoof of the character.
- James Branch Cabell's Jurgen: a Comedy of Justice (1919) sets a Poictesme pawnbroker in a story involving Arthurian characters, the slavic demon Koshchei, God and the Devil.
- A. Merritt's adventure novels, including The Moon Pool, published in 1919, are full of elements of fantasy.
- James MacDonald's Library of the Fantastic is an archive of numerous public domain fantasy and horror tales including some by the above authors, as well as Chambers, Lord Byron, Polidori, and others.
Gothic Horror
- Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is one of the earliest Gothic novels and helped define the genre.
- More properly Gothic Romance than Gothic Horror, and definitely one of the seeds of modern fantasy, The History of the Caliph Vathek (1785) by William Beckford is a tale styled after those found in The Arabian Nights. Those stories had recently been translated into French and so the original version of Vathek was also written in French, although an English version was published before the French version was ready. "The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis... of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar... of primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terribleCyclopean halls of Eblis... are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters." - H. P. Lovecraft
- Frankenstein, the Art and Legends is primarily a page of advertisements, but also briefly traces the history of the name Frankenstein and Frankenstein-like characters such as Göthe's Faust.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1818). This tale was partly inspired by a proposal that Lord Byron made to her, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori in June of 1816 that they each write a ghost story. Percy Shelley's story never came of anything, Byron wrote a fragment of a novel which inspired Polidori to write The Vampyre (1819), with borrowings from Byron's plot.
- Washington Irving (1783-1859) wrote both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - the tale of Ichabod Crane & the Headless Horseman.
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
- Death and mania result from visions of The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen.
- Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be (1893) includes such pre-Lovecraftian short stories as "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". The Devil's Dictionary, My Favorite Murder
- Robert W. Chambers wrote The King in Yellow in 1895, developing the character of Hastur with some echoes of Bierce, which would be later adopted into H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and show up in unusual reflections in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover stories.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula, (1897). The Irish drama critic's tale of a Transylvanian vampire in London. Left out of the original book by Stoker's editors is the short story Dracula's Guest. Also by Stoker is The Lair of the White Worm.
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is the creator of The Necronomicon and the Cthulhu Mythos - a collection of tales about nasty alien creatures from the planet Yuggoth and beyond who landed on the Earth in ages gone by and became the source of nightmares and tales of demons. William Johns has collected Lovecraft's short-stories from 1922 and earlier in the H. P. Lovecraft Library. Lovecraft was also a correspondent and collaborator with authors Clark Ashton Smith (Zothique, Averoigne), Robert E. Howard (Conan), Robert Bloch (Psycho), and Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser).
- The Short Stories of Clark Ashton Smith began appearing in the Magazine "Weird Tales" in the 1930's after H. P. Lovecraft helped the artist have a go at genre fiction. The prodigious purple prose of the loquacious lexicographer finds certain echoes from the styles of Dunsany and Eddison and in turn inspired the likes of de Camp and Vance. The plurality of Smith's work is set in the far future, undead infested continent of Zothique, although many stories are also set in ancient Hyperborea, ante-diluvian Posidonis (Atlantis), and medieval Averoigne. As a member of the Lovecraft Circle, many of his tales form part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Polynesian
Australian Aboriginal
- The Kamilroi tell this tale of Baiame and Creation.
- David Jensen discusses The Universe of the Aborigine including Dreamtime - the period of creation, the sun and the moon.
- Frances Firebrace, an Aboriginal storyteller, recounts the tale of The Mother Snake, the Rainbow Serpent and relates it to modern ecological concerns.
- Here's a short article on the Didjeridu Myths and Legends; the Didjeridu is a musical instrument.
Caribbean
- This dictionary of Afro-Carribean Deities is primarily draws from those of Yoruba origin.
- Flavodoun presents his Haitian Vodoun Culture page. Among other things, it includes a listing of the deities and their families. Voodoun is native to Haiti, but draws on West African and Christian sources.
- Haiti Forum tells A Folk Tale of Haitian Mythology which tells a tale of creation and relates Haitian deities to those from other cultures.
Somali
- Excerpts from a book by Haji Muuse on Astrology, Somali Culture, and History includes some information on pre-Islamic, Somali belief systems.
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