Customer Reviews

The Mythic Bestiary: The Illustrated Guide to the World's Most Fantastical Creatures

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Featuring over 100 color illustrations and line drawings, The Mythic Bestiary is an illustrated guide to fantastic creatures from worldwide folklore. Each entry features several pages that summarize the legends and history of a given mythic animal, told in an eminently readable prose style. What distinguishes The Mythic Bestiary is that equal time is given not only to well-known fantasy monsters like the dragon, minotaur, phoenix, and so forth, but also many more obscure creatures of worldwide legends, from the winged shedu & lammasu spirits of ancient Mesopotamia and Persia, to the tupilak devil-dolls of the arctic circle, to the cynocephali dog-headed people of medieval legend, and much more. A handy index rounds out this welcome reference book, highly recommended especially for fantasy authors and game master searching for an untapped lode of new ideas!

Stunning book on most of the awesome mythic beasts of folklore and legend.The historical significance and literary explanations are rather brief. Yet,it's still an excellent pictorial collection of beastly creatures of lore and epic tales.

A very interesting book, but this was a gift for my 7 yr old son and, unfortunately, it's not appropriate for young children. While I was prepared for some mild nudity in depictions of mermaids and sirens, I was not prepared to explain why succubi "visited men (particularly monks) at night, giving them impure thoughts and wet dreams." (p. 180) Still, with the appropriate audience, it's an interesting read that explains who all these creatures are the keep popping up in both classic and modern literature.

I bought this book more to help with ideas for new drawings. There were some beasts in here that I had completely forgotten about. I also noticed that there were a few missing. In all I am glad that I bought this book.

I just love this book. The book is exactly as it appears in the image, though unfortunately the viewer cannot see the splendid illustrations inside. The author of this title, Tony Allan, has written numerous books of similar kind and so is very well informed in studies of the mythological - this results in a GREAT wealth of (interesting) information and where necessary there are references to contemporary incarnations of some of the mythological creatures in the book, such as those in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and Rowling's "Harry Potter". I highly recommend this title to anyone with even the vaguest interest in mythology.
Hope this review is helpful =]
GorJess

I've been looking for a book that's detailed about mythological creatures and their lifestyles, yet the descriptions are not too wordy and boring to the point where you feel intimadated by the writing. The pictures are so beautiful and precise as if the artist actually saw one of these creatures themselves. I'd deffently recommend this book to anyone interested in mythology, or would like to teach someone about mythology.