Hey does anyone know a good website or any place that I can find existence lore and fact about mythical creatures I’ve googled a few things but nothing that really goes into detail.
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A quick look yields this odd duck: http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/m/page/List+of+Mythical+Creatures
It’s an ugly website that can be frustrating to navigate, but it’s thorough from what I can tell and will hopefully help.
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This site is not quite as ugly and divides initially by region. http://www.pantheon.org/
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I feel very odd suggesting this, but perhaps try your local library, if you’ve one conveniently located? Depending on where, of course, they often have nice large tomes full of cryptids or mythological lore. If you want depth, perhaps pick a region (Greece, Persia, Egypt, China, etc.) and look through books specifically covering the bestiaries and lore of that region.
Online, there’s also the Myth Encyclopedia, and then Ancient.eu (a personal favourite of mine) if you want a more scholarly resource. And here’s an in-depth resource for Greek creatures (which tends to be easier to find in English, anything Greek or Roman that is), with translated source material, even.
And if you want a more, er, whimsical resource, there’s always Ancient Origins (Take with copious amounts of salt. But I mean, of course we’re talking about legendary creatures anyhow and they do have a lot of information, even if you might want fact check it…or really, fact checking everything is a good practice if you’re concerned about accuracy to the original tales…)
You could also try checking on Wikipedia by culture—here’s Mesopotamian, for instance—and then use the names of individual beasts as a jumping-off point to find articles, or google for more specific information. Picking a specific beast and then searching for information about that specific animal, maybe with the name of the culture it belongs to, usually helps with finding more detailed information.
I love research, can you tell. XD
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Or you can just get a degree in mythology (apparently):
Folklore and Mythology, Electronic Texts:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
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Thanks every one I really appreciate it I’ll check them all out.
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To expand on this - often there will be footnotes that have source articles named in the Wiki articles. Once you get one or two of those, you can usually glean a couple of further source materials from those, and so on … reverse engineering other’s research is often the best way to get started on your own valid research base.
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Yep I second that it’s definitely worth checking out the local library. Sometimes there’s some surprisingly good books. Some are better than others though. (My most local library is a bit sparse, but there’s a few books there that are ok). Wandered into a different library find a quiet place to study a few days ago, and they had this really cool display of books on Ancient Egyptian from the 16-1800’s with pretty pictures and writing on the mythology which was kind of distracting… (They also had pop up books and comics in the same display from some weird reason. Something for everyone I guess.) Anyway, if I wanted to find something specific that I couldn’t track down on the internet, I’d definitely try there.
In addition to the other links already suggested, these ones have quite a few mythological creatures/people listed, although perhaps not as in depth as you’re looking for http://mythology.net/
The Occult: Occultopedia - Strange and Mysterious Creatures: A to K index
https://parttimemonster.com/monster-monday-index/
The other place to try would be fairy tales and individual myths searching under a particular creature you want to look for. (Sometimes you have to fish through story collections to find them).
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