Project Gutenberg's The World's Desire, by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

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Title: The World's Desire

Author: H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

Release Date: April 3, 2006 [EBook #2763]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD'S DESIRE ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny; Emma Dudding

THE WORLD'S DESIRE

by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

To

W. B. RICHMOND, A.R.A.

PREFACE

The period in which the story of _The World's Desire_ is cast, was a
period when, as Miss Braddon remarks of the age of the Plantagenets,
"anything might happen." Recent discoveries, mainly by Dr. Schliemann
and Mr. Flinders Petrie, have shown that there really was much
intercourse between Heroic Greece, the Greece of the Achaeans, and the
Egypt of the Ramessids. This connection, rumoured of in Greek legends,
is attested by Egyptian relics found in the graves of Mycenae, and by
very ancient Levantine pottery, found in contemporary sites in Egypt.
Homer himself shows us Odysseus telling a feigned, but obviously not
improbable, tale of an Achaean raid on Egypt. Meanwhile the sojourn of
the Israelites, with their Exodus from the land of bondage, though not
yet found to be recorded on the Egyptian monuments, was probably part of
the great contemporary stir among the peoples. These events, which are
only known through Hebrew texts, must have worn a very different aspect
in the eyes of Egyptians, and of pre-historic Achaean observers, hostile
in faith to the Children of Israel. The topic has since been treated in
fiction by Dr. Ebers, in his _Joshua_. In such a twilight age, fancy has
free play, but it is a curious fact that, in this romance, modern fancy
has accidentally coincided with that of ancient Greece.

Most of the novel was written, and the apparently "un-Greek" marvels
attributed to Helen had been put on paper, when a part of Furtwaengler's
recent great lexicon of Mythology appeared, with the article on Helen.
The authors of _The World's Desire_ read it with a feeling akin to
amazement. Their wildest inventions about the Daughter of the Swan, it
seemed, had parallels in the obscurer legend