Myths and Legends: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings

The world of myths and legends gets the DK treatment as stories from many cultures are described and illustrated. This book can only be a smattering (or it would be 100,000 pages) but it is broken into regions on every occupied continent. Variations on the stories are covered, since some of them have more than one version. Creation myths are nearly everywhere, and there is a surprising number of great flood and underworld stories around the globe. Comparisons with stories covered in other places in the book are indexed at the bottom of most pages. The text can become difficult to read at times, as the font switches between large and small on the pages. But otherwise a good effort.