About Mythology Blog

Mythology Blog is a growing collection of mythological stories from twenty cultural traditions, retold as stories rather than catalogued as data. Every page is written and edited by one person, working from primary sources and reputable scholarship, in a specific editorial voice designed to make ancient material feel human to a modern reader.

What this site is

The site holds over 1,500 stories across 20 traditions: Arabic, Buddhist & Jain, Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Finnish, Greek, Indian, Indian Tribal, Japanese, Korean, Native American, Norse, Persian, Polynesian, Roman, Tamil, Thai & Southeast Asian, and West African. Alongside the stories are 60 in-depth character and concept guides that provide the broader context - who the gods are, what the concepts mean, how the traditions transmitted them.

Every story is written to the same editorial standard. Each page opens with an "At a Glance" fact-card showing central figures, setting, the turn, the outcome, and the legacy. The longer prose beneath drops the reader into the action, retells the story in the voice of its own tradition, and avoids the "themes-of" filler and moralising commentary that make many mythology books unreadable.

Who writes and edits

Every article on the site is written and edited by Praveen Kumar. The project is a one-person operation. There is no staff, no anonymous authors, no ghost writing. Errors are mine; so are the choices about voice, scope, and framing. If a story feels off, I am the person to write to.

How stories are researched

Each retelling begins with the tradition's primary sources where those exist: the Iliad and Odyssey for Homeric material, Hesiod's Theogony for early Greek cosmology, the two Icelandic Eddas for Norse, the Mahabharata and Ramayana for the great Indian epics, the Silappatikaram for the Tamil epic tradition, the Pali canon for the Jataka tales, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh for Persian heroic tradition, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki for Japanese cosmological narrative, the Kebra Nagast for Ethiopian material, and so on across the twenty traditions.

Where primary sources are oral and living rather than textual - as in most Adivasi, Native American, Polynesian, and West African traditions - retellings are grounded in the work of scholars, ethnographers, and community-authored materials that preserve those traditions in printed or accessible form. Attribution follows the tradition's own preferences where those are clear.

Modern scholarship (translations, comparative studies, academic analysis) is used to check facts, resolve conflicting versions, and understand context. The intent is that every retelling reads like fiction but stands up as a careful summary of the tradition's actual content.

How conflicting versions are handled

Mythologies are not single texts. Almost every story has multiple versions - regional variants, later elaborations, competing traditions, scholarly reconstructions. Each retelling here follows one specific version, chosen for its centrality or its narrative strength, and (where the differences matter) notes the existence of alternatives. This is a matter of editorial choice, and the choice is stated on the page rather than hidden behind a claim of neutrality.

Mythology vs. living tradition

This is important. Many of the traditions covered here are not dead literature; they are actively practiced religion for millions of people. Hindu material is scripture to more than a billion Hindus. Buddhist and Jain traditions are active faiths. Shinto is alive in Japan. Native American traditions are living for the nations that hold them. Yoruba tradition is a living religion across West Africa and the diaspora. Ethiopian Christianity is one of the world's oldest continuous Christian traditions.

Stories from these traditions are handled with the specific care their status requires. They are described as their own communities describe them, present tense is used for living practice, tribe- and school-specific attribution is preferred over generic labels, and the sensitivity of particular material is acknowledged where relevant. The site's use of the word "mythology" is not a claim that these traditions are false or superseded. It reflects the common English word for the body of story a tradition preserves, and it is used across religious and secular material with the same neutrality.

Corrections policy

With 1,500 stories written by one person, mistakes are inevitable. If you find one - a misnamed god, a wrong city, a misattributed source, a story framed in a way that misrepresents a living tradition - please tell me through the contact page. Corrections are made promptly. Corrections from members of the traditions covered here are especially welcome; you know things I cannot.

Why the site exists

Mythology Blog started as a project to read to a child. Existing books were either too sanitized for older stories or too academic to enjoy as bedtime reading. What began as an informal effort to write the stories out in a readable voice grew, over time, into a serious project to cover the range of mythological traditions the world's languages have preserved.

The site exists because these stories deserve to be told well. They are among the oldest continuous acts of human imagination. They are still, in most cases, being lived by the traditions that preserve them. Reading them should feel like reading, not like being lectured at.

Contact

Corrections, suggestions, and questions are welcome through the contact page. Serious feedback from members of the cultural traditions covered here is especially valued; the corpus is too large for one person to get everything right, and outside expertise makes the site better.

— Praveen Kumar