Buxton selects eight myths—Prometheus, Medea, Daedalus and Icarus, the Amazons, Oedipus, the Judgment of Paris, Heracles, and Orpheus and Eurydice—and traces the changing meanings attached to them. Rather than offering another comprehensive handbook, the book shows how a small group of stories has repeatedly been reshaped in literature, art, opera, cinema, fashion, politics and psychology.

Larrington explores Yggdrasill, Valhöll, Odin, Thor, Loki and his children, berserkers, Sigurd, Ragnar, Vinland and Ragnarök as stories that have continued to mutate in response to modern concerns. Wagner, nationalism, Marvel superheroes, fantasy fiction, masculinity and environmental catastrophe all form part of this account of Norse myth’s unusually vigorous cultural afterlife.

A stand-alone companion volume. The hardback has a trim size similar to the Myths That Shape The Way We Think series at 24.1 x 16.3 cm (9.5 x 6.4 in), but the combination of scholarly commentary, retold stories, and original illustrations make The Slavic Myths a nice companion volume to access additional content that is not part of the original Myths series. (Of interest to series collectors, the dimensions of the paperback edition are actually very close to the official Myths hardback books if you want it to fit more neatly into your shelf.)

While Slavic cultures are far-ranging, comprised of East Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus), West Slavs (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland), and South Slavs (the countries of former Yugoslavia plus Bulgaria), they are connected by tales of adventure and magic with roots in a common lore. The vampire – often the only Serbo-Croatian word in any foreign-language dictionary – and the werewolf both emerge from Slavic belief. Includes 38 black-and-white illustrations.