The Online Books Page

presents

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion

by James George Frazer

The Golden Bough is the best-known work of James George Frazer. It went through a number of editions. The first edition came out in 2 volumes in 1890, and the second came out in 3 volumes in 1900. The most extensive edition was the third, which was published in 12 volumes (including the index) by Macmillan between 1906 and 1915. This was later followed by a one-volume abridgement, edited by Frazer and his wife, which came out in 1922 and omitted some of the more controversial claims from earlier editions.

All of these editions are now in the public domain in the US, and are available online. (Frazer also wrote a supplementary volume to the third edition, titled Aftermath, which was published in 1936, and may still be under copyright. There are also some later editions revised or abridged by others that are still under copyright.)

Below, we describe and link to the free online volumes of the third edition, from scans served by Google, Hathi Trust, and the Internet Archive. (The Google and Hathi copies might not be readable in full outside the United States.)

This is a "meta-book", which stitches together separate files elsewhere on the Web as they appeared in a previously published book. It is subject to removal if someone produces an integrated edition. If that happens, The Online Books Page will point to the integrated version.