Excerpt from The R m yan of V lm ki: Translated Into English Verse Such, reduced to its bare simplicity, is the fundamental idea of the Remayan, a war of two hostile races differing in origin, civilization, and worship. But. As is the case in all primitive epopees, around this idea as a nucleus have gathered elements of every kind drawn from the very vitals of Indian tradition, and worked up by the ancient poet to embody his lofty epic conception. The epopea received and incorporated the traditions, the ideas, the beliefs, the myths, the symbols of that civilization in the midst of which it arose, and by the weaving in and arranging of all these vast elements it became the complete and faithful expression of a whole ancient period; and in fact the epopea is nothing but a system which represents poetically those ideas of a people which the philosophical systems expound theo retinally. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.