San Antonio College Library

"Legend and Belief is a descriptive and analytical study of the legend, the most prolific and characteristic form of folklore in contemporary Western civilization. Not that the legend does not have ancient roots; like the tale, the joke, the ballad, the proverb, or mummery, it was part of an archaic, preindustrial tradition. But the legends - as old as conversation and debate about problems of the human condition - has been able to survive the technological...

Here is a rich compendium of hundreds of legends, stories, beliefs, and magic collected from oral sources in preindustrial Scandinavia. In this rural society, the people lived close to nature and believed themselves an integral part of it. This volume focuses on beliefs that illustrate the central aspects of a traditional worldview, rather than on prose narratives considered for their literary value.

The region once known as Pimeria Alta--now southern Arizona and northern Sonora--has for more than three centuries been a melting pot for the beliefs of native Tohono O'odham and immigrant Yaquis and those of colonizing Spaniards and Mexicans. The author reveals some of the supernaturally sanctioned relationships that tie people to places within religious meanings of locations and showing how bonds between people and places have in turn created relationships...

"Teeming with creatures, both real and imagined, this encyclopedic study in cultural history illuminates the hidden web of connections between the Victorian fascination with fairies and their lore and the dominant preoccupations of Victorian culture at large. Carole Silver here draws on sources ranging from the anthropological, folkloric, and occult to the legal, historical, and medical. She is the first to anatomize a world peopled by strange beings...