서양 신화 이야기 / A Book of Myths (영문판, 삽화 포함)

진 랭 지음

아이보리잉크 2025년 04월 07일 출간

작품소개

책소개

* 이 도서는 영어만으로 구성되어 있습니다.
이 책은 고대 그리스와 북유럽 신화를 중심으로 한 다양한 전설과 신화들을 쉽게 풀어 쓴 이야기 모음집이다. 다양한 여성 인물들을 포함하여 전설 속 인물들의 운명과 희생, 용기와 사랑에 초점을 맞추어 서술하고 있으며, 각 이야기마다 도덕적 교훈과 인간 본성에 대한 통찰을 담고 있다. 오르페우스와 에우리디케, 판도라, 페르세포네, 아리아드네, 헤라클레스 등 잘 알려진 신화적 인물들의 이야기가 생생하고 서정적인 문체로 전개된다. 이 책은 신화를 처음 접하는 독자에게도 이해하기 쉬우며, 동시에 고전 문학의 매력을 느끼게 해주는 입문서 역할을 한다.

목차

표지
목차
PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA
PYGMALION
PHAETON
ENDYMION
ORPHEUS
APOLLO AND DAPHNE
PSYCHE
THE CALYDONIAN HUNT
ATALANTA
ARACHNE
IDAS AND MARPESSA
ARETHUSA
PERSEUS THE HERO
NIOBE
HYACINTHUS
KING MIDAS OF THE GOLDEN TOUCH
CEYX AND HALCYONE
ARISTÆUS THE BEE-KEEPER
PROSERPINE
LATONA AND THE RUSTICS
ECHO AND NARCISSUS
ICARUS
CLYTIE
THE CRANES OF IBYCUS
SYRINX
THE DEATH OF ADONIS
PAN
LORELEI
FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS
THE DEATH OF BALDUR
BEOWULF
ROLAND THE PALADIN
THE CHILDREN OF LÎR
DEIRDRÊ
브랜드 소개
copyrights
(참고) 분량: 약 10만자

책 속으로

PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA
Those who are interested in watching the mental development of a child must have noted that when the baby has learned to speak even a little, it begins to show its growing intelligence by asking questions. "What is this?" it would seem at first to ask with regard toog simple things that to it are still mysteries. Soon it arrives at the more far-reaching inquiries—"Why is this so?" "How did this happen?" And as the child’s mental growth continues, the painstaking and conscientious parent or guardian is many times faced by questions which lack of knowledge, or a sensitive honesty, prevents him from answering either with assurance or with ingenuity.
As with the child, so it has ever been with the human race. Man has always come into the world asking "How?" "Why?" "What?" and so the Hebrew, the Greek, the Maori, the Australian blackfellow, the Norseman—in a word, each race of mankind—has formed for itself an explanation of existence, an answer to the questions of the groping child-mind—"Who made the world?" "What is God?" "What made a God think of fire and air and water?" "Why am I, I?"
Into the explanation of creation and existence given by the Greeks come the stories of Prometheus and of Pandora. The world, as first it was, to the Greeks was such a world as the one of which we read in the Book of Genesis—"without form, and void." It was a sunless world in which land, air, and sea were mixed up together, and over which reigned a deity called Chaos. With him ruled the goddess of Night and their son was Erebus, god of Darkness. When the two beautiful children of Erebus, Light and Day, had flooded formless space with their radiance, Eros, the god of Love, was born, and Light and Day and Love, working together, turned discord into harmony and made the earth, the sea, and the sky into one perfect whole. A giant race, a race of Titans, in time populated this newly-made earth, and of these one of the mightiest was Prometheus. To him, and to his brother Epimethus, was entrusted by Eros the distribution of the gifts of faculties and of instincts to all the living creatures in the world, and the task of making a creature lower than the gods, something less great than the Titans, yet in knowledge and in understanding infinitely higher than the beasts and birds and fishes. At the hands of the Titan brothers, birds, beasts, and fishes had fared handsomely. They were Titanic in their generosity, and so prodigal had they been in their gifts that when they would fain have carried out the commands of Eros they found that nothing was left for the equipment of this being, to be called Man. Yet, nothing daunted, Prometheus took some clay from the ground at his feet, moistened it with water, and fashioned it into an image, in form like the gods. Into its nostrils Eros breathed the spirit of life, Pallas Athené endowed it with a soul, and the first man looked wonderingly round on the earth that was to be his heritage. Prometheus, proud of the beautiful thing of his own creation, would fain have given Man a worthy gift, but no gift remained for him. He was naked, unprotected, more helpless than any of the beasts of the field, more to be pitied than any of them in that he had a soul to suffer.
Surely Zeus, the All Powerful, ruler of Olympus, would have compassion on Man? But Prometheus looked to Zeus in vain; compassion he had none. Then, in infinite pity, Prometheus bethought himself of a power belonging to the gods alone and unshared by any living creature on the earth.
"We shall give Fire to the Man whom we have made," he said to Epimethus. To Epimethus this seemed an impossibility, but to Prometheus nothing was impossible. He bided his time and, unseen by the gods, he made his way into Olympus, lighted a hollow torch with a spark from the chariot of the Sun and hastened back to earth with this royal gift to Man. Assuredly no other gift could have brought him more completely the empire that has since been his. No longer did he tremble and cower in the darkness of caves when Zeus hurled his lightnings across the sky. No more did he dread the animals that hunted him and drove him in terror before them.
Armed with fire, the beasts became his vassals. With fire he forged weapons, defied the frost and cold, coined money, made implements for tillage, introduced the arts, and was able to destroy as well as to create.
From his throne on Olympus, Zeus looked down on the earth and saw, with wonder, airy columns of blue-grey smoke that curled upwards to the sky. He watched more closely, and realised with terrible wrath that the moving flowers of red and gold that he saw in that land that the Titans shared with men, came from fire, that had hitherto been the gods’ own sacred power. Speedily he assembled a council of the gods to mete out to Prometheus a punishment fit for the blasphemous daring of his crime. This council decided at length to create a thing that should for evermore charm the souls and hearts of men, and yet, for evermore, be man’s undoing.

작가정보

저자(글) 진 랭

진 랭(Jean Lang)은 20세기 초 활동한 영국의 작가로, 주로 고대 신화와 전설을 쉽게 풀어 쓰는 데에 집중했습니다. 그는 복잡하고 방대한 신화를 일반 독자들도 이해할 수 있도록 서정적이고 간결한 문체로 재구성하는 데에 뛰어난 재능을 보였다.