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Germany: Myths and Legends
Great anthology of the legends and lore of Germany.
380 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
4 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Lewis Spence
398 books52 followersJames Lewis Thomas Chalmers Spence was a Scottish journalist, poet, author, folklorist and student of the occult.
After graduating from Edinburgh University he pursued a career in journalism. He was an editor at The Scotsman 1899-1906, editor of The Edinburgh Magazine for a year, 1904–05, then an editor at The British Weekly, 1906-09. In this time his interest was sparked in the myth and folklore of Mexico and Central America, resulting in his popularisation of the Mayan Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Mayas (1908). He compiled A Dictionary of Mythology (1910 and numerous additional volumes).
Spence was an ardent Scottish nationalist, He was the founder of the Scottish National Movement which later merged to form the National Party of Scotland and which in turn merged to form the Scottish National Party. He unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat for Midlothian and Peebles Northern at a by-election in 1929.
He also wrote poetry in English and Scots. His Collected Poems were published in 1953. He investigated Scottish folklore and wrote about Brythonic rites and traditions in Mysteries of Celtic Britain (1905). In this book, Spence theorized that the original Britons were descendants of a people that migrated from Northwest Africa and were probably related to the Berbers and the Basques.
Spence's researches into the mythology and culture of the New World, together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and north-west Africa, led him almost inevitably to the question of Atlantis. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. These works, amongst which were The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and History of Atlantis (1927), continued the line of research inaugurated by Ignatius Donnelly and looked at the lost island as a Bronze Age civilization, that formed a cultural link with the New World, which he invoked through examples he found of striking parallels between the early civilizations of the Old and New Worlds.
Spence's erudition and the width of his reading, his industry and imagination were all impressive; yet the conclusions he reached, avoiding peer-reviewed journals, have been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship. His popularisations met stiff criticism in professional journals, but his continued appeal among theory hobbyists is summed up by a reviewer of The Problem of Atlantis (1924) in The Geographical Journal: "Mr. Spence is an industrious writer, and, even if he fails to convince, has done service in marshalling the evidence and has produced an entertaining volume which is well worth reading." Nevertheless, he seems to have had some influence upon the ideas of controversial author Immanuel Velikovsky, and as his books have come into the public domain, they have been successfully reprinted and some have been scanned for the Internet.
Spence's 1940 book Occult Causes of the Present War seems to have been the first book in the field of Nazi occultism.
Over his long career, he published more than forty books, many of which remain in print to this day.
After graduating from Edinburgh University he pursued a career in journalism. He was an editor at The Scotsman 1899-1906, editor of The Edinburgh Magazine for a year, 1904–05, then an editor at The British Weekly, 1906-09. In this time his interest was sparked in the myth and folklore of Mexico and Central America, resulting in his popularisation of the Mayan Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Mayas (1908). He compiled A Dictionary of Mythology (1910 and numerous additional volumes).
Spence was an ardent Scottish nationalist, He was the founder of the Scottish National Movement which later merged to form the National Party of Scotland and which in turn merged to form the Scottish National Party. He unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary seat for Midlothian and Peebles Northern at a by-election in 1929.
He also wrote poetry in English and Scots. His Collected Poems were published in 1953. He investigated Scottish folklore and wrote about Brythonic rites and traditions in Mysteries of Celtic Britain (1905). In this book, Spence theorized that the original Britons were descendants of a people that migrated from Northwest Africa and were probably related to the Berbers and the Basques.
Spence's researches into the mythology and culture of the New World, together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and north-west Africa, led him almost inevitably to the question of Atlantis. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. These works, amongst which were The Problem of Atlantis (1924) and History of Atlantis (1927), continued the line of research inaugurated by Ignatius Donnelly and looked at the lost island as a Bronze Age civilization, that formed a cultural link with the New World, which he invoked through examples he found of striking parallels between the early civilizations of the Old and New Worlds.
Spence's erudition and the width of his reading, his industry and imagination were all impressive; yet the conclusions he reached, avoiding peer-reviewed journals, have been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship. His popularisations met stiff criticism in professional journals, but his continued appeal among theory hobbyists is summed up by a reviewer of The Problem of Atlantis (1924) in The Geographical Journal: "Mr. Spence is an industrious writer, and, even if he fails to convince, has done service in marshalling the evidence and has produced an entertaining volume which is well worth reading." Nevertheless, he seems to have had some influence upon the ideas of controversial author Immanuel Velikovsky, and as his books have come into the public domain, they have been successfully reprinted and some have been scanned for the Internet.
Spence's 1940 book Occult Causes of the Present War seems to have been the first book in the field of Nazi occultism.
Over his long career, he published more than forty books, many of which remain in print to this day.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 8, 2017
I picked this up in a thrift shop in New Orleans a couple years ago and began reading it this month, just after setting up a program that would take me to Ingelheim-am-Rhein, Germany every summer for the foreseeable future.
How wonderful, then, when I realized that this book isn't merely about "Germany" but about the "Rhine Valley" in particular, a region that is high on any travel "bucket list" that includes a visit to Germany.
What Spence has done here is to follow the Rhine from Dortmund almost all the way to the Swiss border, a stretch of river which is among the most densely be-castled in the world.
As it turns out, Germany's Black Forest isn't the only spring of fairy tales in the land. While an occasional dwarf or witch pops up in these tales, most of them deal with knights, maidens and the costs of chivalry. Every twist and turn of the river is immortalized in legend, perhaps no more so than in the legend of the Lorelei--a siren-like singer who lured boatmen too close to the cliffs of a hairpin turn in the river. Many of the castles tell tales, too.
Spence's book isn't written with the flair one might expect of fairy tales. It's more of a collection in the vein of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, leaving some details--fights, embraces, settings--to the mind of the reader. Still, it was a good guide--a jumping-off point for a creative writer like me.
I can't wait to take this with me to Germany next summer. (A download of the text is available on Amazon for 99 cents), where I will share these tales--and more--with my students and friends.
How wonderful, then, when I realized that this book isn't merely about "Germany" but about the "Rhine Valley" in particular, a region that is high on any travel "bucket list" that includes a visit to Germany.
What Spence has done here is to follow the Rhine from Dortmund almost all the way to the Swiss border, a stretch of river which is among the most densely be-castled in the world.
As it turns out, Germany's Black Forest isn't the only spring of fairy tales in the land. While an occasional dwarf or witch pops up in these tales, most of them deal with knights, maidens and the costs of chivalry. Every twist and turn of the river is immortalized in legend, perhaps no more so than in the legend of the Lorelei--a siren-like singer who lured boatmen too close to the cliffs of a hairpin turn in the river. Many of the castles tell tales, too.
Spence's book isn't written with the flair one might expect of fairy tales. It's more of a collection in the vein of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, leaving some details--fights, embraces, settings--to the mind of the reader. Still, it was a good guide--a jumping-off point for a creative writer like me.
I can't wait to take this with me to Germany next summer. (A download of the text is available on Amazon for 99 cents), where I will share these tales--and more--with my students and friends.
September 7, 2022
I've had this for so long...a companion volume to the Celtic one I bought when I was a kid. I read it for a while. It's dutiful. He keeps referencing everything back to the Celtic stuff, which he obviously knows better.
Spence is a good model for a slightly stuffy editor of folklore in the days when you could put out whole books it just by describing what happened in other books...anyway, there's a lot of very dry sounding German romances I will never have to read now...
Spence is a good model for a slightly stuffy editor of folklore in the days when you could put out whole books it just by describing what happened in other books...anyway, there's a lot of very dry sounding German romances I will never have to read now...
November 1, 2024
Originally titled 'Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine' and dating from the 1920s, this is an overview of many of the myths and legends associated with regions along the Rhine. It's at its most interesting when discussing the way the tales are linked and their history. The retelling of the tales are on the whole quite stodgy, and suffer badly from the cod-archaic language so typical of legend retellings of the period.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews