Yaroslav the Wise: Did you mean...?

Alcohol played an integral part in Norse culture. People drank ale more than water because the brew had to be boiled as part of the process and so was safer to drink. The Norse of Scandinavia had four main types...

The Frog Princess is a Slavic folktale focusing on the importance of recognizing someone’s inner beauty, regardless of their outward appearance, as well as the possibility of redemption after failure. The tale has many variants...

The Coyote tales come from the Shasta people who originally inhabited the regions of modern-day northern California and southern Oregon. Coyote is a popular trickster figure among many Native peoples of North America...

Michael Sattler (l. 1490-1527) was a Roman Catholic monk who converted to the Anabaptist movement c. 1525 and contributed significantly to their Schleitheim Confession of faith. He is best known, however, for...

The Hidatsa Sun Dance Ritual (also known as Hidatsa Sun Dance) is a Native American story of the Hidatsa nation illustrating the practice of an individual initiating the Sun Dance for personal reasons, in this case, to...

Herodotus’ narrative on Lydia takes up almost one half of Book I of his Histories and the section dealing with King Croesus is among the best-known and often anthologized. The last section, in which he discusses Lydian women...

The Bear Man is a Pawnee legend exemplifying the Native American understanding of the natural world and serving as an origin tale for the Bear Dance, which was performed to awaken the bears in spring from their winter hibernation...

The Shield of Heracles (also known as The Shield of Herakles and, in the original, Aspis Herakleous) is a poem of 480 hexameter lines written by an unknown Greek poet in the style of Hesiod (lived 8th century...

Religion and superstition went hand in hand in Colonial America, and one’s belief in the first confirmed the validity of the second. The colonists' worldview was completely informed by religion and so everything...

Cratinus was a highly successful writer of Attic Old Comedy, but the very fragmentary nature of his surviving plays means that he is not as well remembered as Aristophanes (eleven of whose plays come down to us intact). Despite...