Epic and Saga - Beowulf Et.Al.

Translator names not noted above: Eirikr Magnusson, William Morris, and Whitley Stokes.

Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf.

Volume XLIX features the earliest works of European literature, epic heroic poems of kings and dragon slayers that created the foundations of much of the literature and popular entertainment that came in the centuries after:

the Old English Beowulf, the best-known work of Anglo-Saxon tradition
The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving work from medieval France
The Destruction of D Derga's Hostel, from Old Irish mythology
The Story of the Volsungs, from the Icelandic sagas
Niblungs, from Germanic tradition.