Thomas A. Copeland

The poem begins with the beloved god Balder, thought to be invulnerable, dead at the hands of the inoffensive blind god Hoder, in a game. Loki, whose deceit brought about this catastrophe, is promptly punished with exile, and Odin, Balder's father,...

In his final adventure on Mars, Eric John Stark acquires a relic of an ancient Martian hero, a gem or lens which is believed to be the key to the strength of Kushat, the city that guards the Gates of Death in the frozen north. A brief inspection of...

While hunting, the boy Anchises stumbles upon Venus's forest retreat and is so kindly entertained by the goddess that he becomes the proud father of Aeneas, the hero of Vergil's Aeneid. The poem is an epyllion like Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and...

Heir to a noble Scottish house in the mid 18th century, the Master is a charming, clever, and resourceful villain whose daring but ill-advised schemes first alienate his patrimony and at last cost him his life. His younger brother, sweet-tempered and...

As Vergil had surpassed Homer by adapting the epic form to celebrate the origin of the author’s nation, Milton developed it yet further to recount the origin of the human race itself and, in particular, the origin of and the remedy for evil; this is...

A mermaid contrives to have herself "rescued from drowning" and adopted by a respectable family on the English coast. Her motive, which she conceals for quite a while, is to win the heart of a handsome but irresponsible young man whom she glimpsed...

A young soldier born among Tartars but sired by the mighty Persian lord Rustum, serves in the Tartar army, seeking his great father. To this end, he persuades his general to call a truce and arrange for him to challenge the Persians to single combat....

In this third installment of the adventures of John Carter on Mars, our hero labors under sentence of death (for having returned from the land of the dead) in a heroic struggle to recover the beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium. He scours the...