New on YouTube, a seven-hour audio reading of Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology by the American historian, philosopher, bookman, and lecturer John Fiske. He introduced Darwin to America, wrote a book on the early history of New England (Lovecraft had it in his personal library), and another which outlined “cosmic” philosophy, among many other accomplishments. This particular book on myth was written while Fiske was a philosophy lecturer and assistant librarian at Harvard, and it became a key source for Lovecraft’s knowledge of the early ethnography of folk-tale, fairy and myth…
HPL was much influenced by Fiske’s popular study, Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology” (Collected Essays: Science, page 318).
The reading is very likely to be by an AI voice, but how you tell that has changed since the days of the old robo-voices. It’s now a telltale of AI that the narrator pronounces a wide range of really complex ancient names correctly every time. The days of text-to-speech garble-de-gook appear to be gone! Usefully, for those who want to check the names as they hear them, the YouTube video displays the text of the book along with the narration.
Though you can also find the book it in a good clean scan on Archive.org. Or on Project Gutenberg in plain HTML, which is more easily searched.
Incidentally, readers of Tentaclii may also be interested in this amusing paragraph on Fiske from an old issue of the Skeptical Enquirer, which notes that Fiske also became an expert on eccentric ‘crank’ writers…
In his [late] essay “Some Cranks and their Crotchets” he relates that, when he was librarian at Harvard and trying to straighten out the card catalogue, he came across many books that seemed to be listed under the wrong categories. […] Fiske proposed to group these crank publications under “Insane Literature”. However, it was called to his attention that this appellation might hurt the feelings of certain living authors, so he decided to change the classification to “Eccentric Literature”. During the course of this reclassification project, Fiske became familiar with much of the eccentric literature of the day. In his case familiarity bred contempt. […] Fiske [in his essay] then proceeds to survey the cranks and crotchets of the nineteenth century.”
