Wyoming State Law Library

Composed by a poet and priest in Middle Babylonia around 1200 BCE, the Epic of Gilgamesh foreshadowed later stories that would become as fundamental as any in human history, the Odyssey and the Bible. But in 600 BCE, the clay tablets that bore the story were lost--buried beneath ashes and ruins when the library of King Ashurbanipal was sacked in a raid. This book begins with the rediscovery of the epic and its decipherment in 1872 by George Smith,...

It is 922 A.D. The refined Arab courtier Ibn Fadlan is accompanying a party of Viking warriors back to the north. Fadlan belatedly discovers that his job is to combat the terrors in the night that come to slaughter the Vikings-but just how he will do it, Fadlan has no idea ...

Composed about 1000 CE, Beowulf is the longest known poem written in Old English. Considered one of the great epics, the Anglo-Saxon saga relates the heroic deeds of the warrior Beowulf, who kills the man-eating monster Grendel

"Gillian Cross's fine retelling of Homer's epic story captures all the heroism and savagery of war and shows why the 'Iliad' has been called the first tragedy and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization"--Front jacket flap.

The translation of Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien was an early work, very distinctive in its mode, completed in 1926: he returned to it later to make hasty corrections, but seems never to have considered its publication. This edition is twofold, for there exists an illuminating commentary on the text of the poem by the translator himself, in the written form of a series of lectures given at Oxford in the 1930s; and from these lectures a substantial selection...

Presents an English translation of the oldest existing epic poem in French, telling the tale of the massacre in 778 of Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles in northern Spain, and includes an introduction and notes.

Presents seventeenth-century British poet John Milton's classic epic poems "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained, " along with a scholarly introduction, a Milton chronology, and a selected bibliography.