Audiobook · read by volunteers
Golden Bough (1922 Abridged Edition)
James Frazer (1854–1941)
Read by hefyd, Jim Eastman, Leon Mire, Måns Broo, Christie Nowak, Mira Cheskis, Sheila Morton, Tysto, Sarah Jennings, JoeD · 60 chapters · 42 h 43
About the book
Why do people around the world tell stories of dying and rising gods, sacred kings and ritual sacrifice? In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer sets out from a strange rule at a sacred grove in ancient Italy and travels through folklore, myth and custom from every continent in search of an answer. He examines magic, taboo, the worship of trees, the cycle of the seasons and the killing of the divine king, and he does it in prose of great elegance. This abridged edition of 1922 condenses his enormous study into a single sweeping narrative. A team of volunteer readers shares its sixty sections, a journey of more than forty hours through the imagination of the human race. It is a vast, strange and endlessly stimulating book, here in a version made for the general reader.
Introduction
James George Frazer was born in Glasgow in 1854 and died in 1941. A classicist by training, he spent most of his career in Cambridge, where he collected reports from missionaries, travellers and scholars about the beliefs and rituals of peoples around the world. The Golden Bough first appeared in 1890 in two volumes and grew through several editions into a work of twelve volumes. The abridged version heard here was prepared in 1922 and made the central argument accessible to a general public.
The book is a comparative study of magic and religion. Frazer proposed that human thought had passed through stages, from magic to religion to science, an idea that later anthropologists criticised. Many of his conclusions have been revised or rejected. Even so, the book had an immense influence on twentieth-century literature, and writers such as T. S. Eliot drew on it. It offers a rich collection of customs and stories, and a fascinating example of how scholars once tried to explain the whole of human belief.
This LibriVox recording lasts almost forty-three hours and is divided into 60 sections. It was read by a team of volunteers.
Frazer's prose is stately and clear, and his method is that of a collector who lays out example after example until a pattern seems to emerge. Even a listener who doubts his theories will find a wealth of curiosities, from rain-making rites to harvest customs, and the pleasure of hearing a great Edwardian mind at work. The long sections invite a leisurely listen over many days, perhaps one chapter in the evening, and a sense of the strangeness and variety of human belief.
Public domain
James Frazer died in 1941: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text