Page:The book of wonder voyages (1919).djvu/238

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The Book of Wonder Voyages

his own book which must also be affiliated to the family of Wonder Voyages. Altogether there is a huge mass of literature which may be included under this term, and in the middle of last century quite a whole series of dumpy duodecimos, running to thirty volumes, was published in Paris under the title of Voyages extraordinaires. The present collection can therefore claim to touch only upon the fringe of a great subject, and can profess to give only a few specimens from different quarters of the world.

In most of the Wonder Voyages represented in this volume there are traces of the influence of the last voyage of man. In the Greek, in the Celtic, and in the Norse voyages there is a clear reference, as will be seen from the Notes, to the other world as the bourne from which our travelers do return: in fact, we have here the free play of the Folk-mind on man's last home. The travelers cross the bar and sail out into the Unknown; their peculiarity is that they return and recross it. Careful study of these tales, therefore, has a somewhat higher interest than that of ordinary Folk tales, for they are connected with the hopes and fears which surround man's last moments.



Source.—From Kingsley's Heroes which in the main follows Apollonius Rhodius, whose floruit is 200 B.C., and whose Argonautica is one of the most readable of Greek poems. On the whole, Kingsley has condensed with great skill and given the main outlines of the action with clearness and grace.

Parallels.—In Roscher's Lexicon von griech. und rom. Mythologie, under the headings of "Argonauten," "Jason," "Medeia," Dr. Seeliger has summed up the results of German research on the Saga with full references to every passage in ancient literature where the Argonauts are referred to. Unfortunately he omits just those references which may be