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Some NOTES about "The Book of Wonder Voyages"
Wonder Voyages are found in the earliest of all literatures the Egyptian. In a papyrus at the Hermitage collection at Petrograd there is an account of a shipwrecked sailor who visited an isle which was inhabited by huge serpents big enough to carry the sailor in his mouth. This has been given by M. Maspero in his Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne, Paris, 1882; and by Prof. Flinders Petrie in the first series of his Egyptian Tales, pp. 81-96. The Odyssey itself may be regarded as the grandest specimen of this genre of literature, which is even represented among the books of the Bible by the story of Jonah. Among the Jatakas again there are one or two which would seem to show that the Indian imagination also took its flight among islands that never were on sea. The Wonder Voyage had become a convention of Greek Literature by the time that Lucian adopted it as the work of his satirical Vera Historia, which itself became the type of a whole series of philosophic Wonder Voyages which culminated in Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire Comique de la Lune, and Swift's Gulliver. These in their turn were parodied by the redoubtable Baron Munchausen. Mr. Rider Haggard has practically revived the genre in the nineteenth-century form of novels of adventure.
At the root of the whole idea of a Wonder Voyage is the scepticism with regard to travelers' tales and sailors' yarns which is current among all peoples. Curiously enough, the book of Marco Polo, which was regarded by his contemporaries as mainly a Wonder Voyage, has proved to be quite a sane and critical account of Mid and Eastern Asia. Yet "Sir John Mandeville" was evidently poking fun at him in his own book which must also be affiliated to the family of Wonder Voyages. Altogether there is a huge mass of literature which may be included under this term, and in the middle of last century quite a whole series of dumpy duodecimos, running to thirty volumes, was published in Paris under the title of Voyages extraordinaires. The present collection can therefore claim to touch only upon the fringe of a great subject, and can profess to give only a few specimens from different quarters of the world.
In most of the Wonder Voyages represented in this volume there are traces of the influence of the last voyage of man. In the Greek, in the Celtic, and in the Norse voyages there is a clear reference, as will be seen from the Notes, to the other world as the bourne from which our travelers do return: in fact, we have here the free play of the Folk-mind on man's last home. The travelers cross the bar and sail out into the Unknown; their peculiarity is that they return and recross it. Careful study of these tales, therefore, has a somewhat higher interest than that of ordinary Folk tales, for they are connected with the hopes and fears which surround man's last moments.
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Contents:
PREFACE
The Argonauts
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The Voyage of Maelduin
Hasan Of Bassorah
The Journeyings of Thorkill and of Eric the Far-Traveled
Notes
