Books published by Benediction Classics

This volume, one of the most complete available, loved by Tolkien and Lewis, will be indispensable to scholars of medieval Icelandic and English culture and history.

ONE OF THE FEW COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED EDITIONS OF PLUTARCH'S LIVES--all fifty biographies, and eighteen comparisons."To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days." Plutarch"I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent than in the extent of my power or possessions." Plutarch "Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech." Plutarch "To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future." Plutarch "It is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risk everything." Plutarch Plutarch's Lives is a brilliant collection of biographies by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. By comparing a famous Roman with a famous Greek, Plutarch intended to provide model patterns of behaviour and to encourage mutual respect between Greeks and Romans. There are fifty biographies of famous soldiers, legislators, orators, and statesmen, and an additional eighteen comparisons. The form of Plutarch's Lives was new; he outlined the birth, youth, achievements, and death of his characters, followed by a formal comparison. The Lives display formidable learning and research. Plutarch is essentially a moralist whose aim is to edify the reader; destiny follows from character, which he illustrates by anecdotes. Plutarch (AD 46 -119 ) was a philosopher, teacher, and biographer, whose writing strongly influenced the evolution of the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century, especially the work of Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare. He lived mostly in Greece, where he was a local magistrate, though he was a Roman citizen who knew the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian.

W. C. Hazlitt says of Montaigne--"he was without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals" and "the first modern man." He has been universally admired in his time and since. In his essays, Montaigne "has the courage to say as an author what he feels as a man", and as such is the forerunner to modern literary non-fiction, and he remains the most accessible and relevant renaissance author. This edition contains Montaigne''s complete essays, and a collection of letters.

The Nibelungenlied, comparable to the Illiad in scope, is one of the great epic poems of world literature. An unknown poet powerfully combines ancient legends of a mythical world of dragons, magic rings, invisibility cloaks, treachery, and wholesale bloodshed that inspired Wagner's Ring cycle and numerous authors since. This edition, in the original meter contains translators notes.

The largely self-educated H. G. Wells was a man of wide interests and considerable intellect, which he employs in "A Short History of the World". This edition contains all 208 original illustrations, and in addition Wells' reflections on his first two visits to the Soviet Union, including meetings with Gorky and Lenin.

"Winesburg, Ohio", Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece, is a set of interconnected short stories set in a small Ohio town. This edition also contains "The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems". Anderson has influenced generations of American writers from Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck to John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates.