Resource: Sacred Texts Archive

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is probably the single most important online resource for the classes that I teach.

Some of the most valuable areas of Sacred Texts for students in the Myth-Folklore class are:
Students in the Indian Epics class will find these areas of interest:
The number of full-text books available at this website is simply amazing, so you can no doubt spend many hours happily browsing.

Search. Because of the systematic way that the pages at this site are arranged, you can do book-specific searches. So, for example, let's say you are interested in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by Francis Child. All the Child ballads are in this directory:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/

That means you can just add "site:www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/" to a Google Search to search just within the Child Ballads at this site. If you search for "knight" for example, here is what you get: search for "knight" in Child's Ballads at Sacred Texts. Here are just a few of the results:


You can also search for multiple books in the same category. For example, all the Celtic materials are in this directory:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/index.htm

To search, just add "site:www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/" to your Google search. So, for example, here is the result for banshee: search for "banshee" in the Celtic books at Sacred Texts.


The site is the brainchild of John Bruno who, very sadly, died of cancer in April 2012. You can read about this wonderful man and his life's work in this memorial page: Remembering John Bruno Hare (image from Facebook).


To support Sacred Texts Archive (I don't know what I would do without them!), I buy their CD/DVDs and also their coffee mugs. So, depending on the time of day, the odds are that I am drinking either tea or coffee from my Sacred Texts mug. :-)






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