The Canon

To Save the Future, Hold Tight the Past

To reach a new future, we must first understand the present; to understand the present, we must first understand the past. This history is and always has been told as a collection of stories, conveyed in chants about bonfires or whispered as tales to children with the lights turn down. Wound as threads into a single yarn, such stories are both fantastic and true, fearsome and beautiful, a narrative Aurelia seeks to maintain, singing into unknown night and on towards a distant dawn.

Maintaining Beauty

From J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”:

“The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.

“It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things…yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal embodiment in his imagination.

“If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below', the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen.”

Pillar I: The Literary Arts

THE CURRENT MISSION: To provide free access to the Western literary canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be. Eventually, Aurelia seeks to do the same for every folk around the world, that we might restore the love of home and heritage necessary to inspire a renaissance of thought in a stagnating 21st Century.

Pillar II: The Visual Arts

THE CURRENT MISSION: To provide free access to the Western artistic canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be. Eventually, Aurelia seeks to do the same for every folk around the world, that we might restore the love of home and heritage necessary to inspire a renaissance of thought in a stagnating 21st Century.

(Development to start upon completion of Pillar I)

Pillar III: The Performative Arts

THE CURRENT MISSION: To provide free access to the Western musical canon for any curious soul, curating works from the public domain so that a clear picture might emerge as to what we were, are, and might one day be. Eventually, Aurelia seeks to do the same for every folk around the world, that we might restore the love of home and heritage necessary to inspire a renaissance of thought in a stagnating 21st Century.

(Development to start upon completion of Pillar II)

Our Works

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European Literature

  • The Theogeny

    The Iliad

    The Odyssey

  • The Aeneid

    The Metamorphosis

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  • Beowulf

    Canterbury Tales

    Paradise Lost

  • Song of Roland

  • Lay of El Cid

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  • The Lusiads

  • Nibelungenlied

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World Literature

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  • Song of Roland

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