Легенды и предания Европы.

Before you are the fascinating legends and tales of medieval Europe, telling about kings and knights, fairies and beautiful ladies, heroes and robbers, minstrels and vampires who became the fundamental plots of many works of European literature and entered the golden fund of world culture. The great warrior Cid Campeador and the villain Bluebeard, the gentle Ondine and the brave Lady Godiva, the singer of love Tannhäuser and the bloody Count Dracula, the prankster Till Eulenspiegel and the werewolf knight Bisclavre - these and many other heroes will appear before you in wonderful fairy-tale stories. But legends and traditions are not just pure fiction and the fruit of popular imagination. All these heroes had real prototypes (one or several at once), and it is all the more interesting and mysterious to consider them in a historical context. After all, according to historians, Vlad Tepes, aka Count Dracula, was a crusader and an exemplary Christian; Bluebeard - Marshal of France Gilles de Rais - fought in the Hundred Years' War under the banner of Joan of Arc; and the ancient aristocratic family of the de Lusignans, from which the king of Jerusalem came, actually considers the fairy Melusine, a half-woman, half-dragon, to be its ancestor. Incredible interweaving of truth and fiction, facts and artistic exaggerations, the impossible and the reliable - all this in an excellent literary presentation. .