The Enchanted World ,Time-Life Series, 21 Volumes. complete, hardcovers, illustrated, 23.5 cms x 31.2 cms, condition; as new.
The Enchanted World was a series of twenty-one books published in the time period 1984-1987. Each book focused on different aspects of mythology, fairy tales or folklore, and all were released by Time-Life Books. Their overall editor was Ellen Phillips and their primary consultant was Tristram Potter Coffin, a Guggenheim Fellowship Award-winning University of Pennsylvania Professor Emeritus of English.
A unique part of the series was that its books were written as stories, taking place from an "in-universe" perspective, presenting its subjects as real people, places, and things. Related to such things having once been real, a common thread through several of them was its documentation of the alleged decline of magical things from "when the world was young" to the modern day. The subjects - dragons, dwarfs, giants - are presented as being potent and strong at the dawn of time, but magical creatures grow weaker and eventually disappear as humans spread and demystify the world, though there is always the promise that the magic will return once again.
The books' subject matter often overlap; for example, while King Arthur and his knights only have one book completely devoted to them, Fall of Camelot, they often appear in other books. Half of Legends of Valor is about them, and they appear in Wizards and Witches, Fairies and Elves, Dwarfs, Spells and Bindings and Giants and Ogres. Nonetheless, a series characteristic was that attention was also given to folklore tales, legends and fairy tales originating from other parts of the world (the until then fairly unknown ones from Eastern Europe in particular) besides the ones from Western Europe alone such as the Arthurian legends or the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, even though they remained over-represented in the series.
Christendom is often related to the decline. Though The Enchanted World describes it as humankind's greatest shield against those magics and beings of magic that would prove hostile to it, it proved detrimental even to good magic as people ceased to believe in the old gods in favor of Christ. According to the series, this was because Christianity was centered around a god of reason and that it promised a clearly defined universe of order and stability, a universe where there could be only one god. Magic could hardly thrive under such circumstances. It continued to exist either in opposition to Christianity or, more often, in connection to in-between places and in-between things. The series states that magic had always had a strong connection to things that were neither one thing nor another because as neither one thing nor another, such things could escape definition and be more than what they appeared.
