The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Published 1890 · 120,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The Golden Bough to read?
The Golden Bough scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Victorian scholarly prose with Latin and Greek quotation and extensive technical anthropological vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- Grand evolutionary claims about the stages of human thought are built from specific ritual descriptions.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Exceptionally dense with ethnographic detail, mythological summary, and comparative argument from hundreds of cultures.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Central argument advances through accumulation of ethnographic example rather than direct theoretical statement.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Ritual objects and mythological figures are read as condensed symbols of wider agricultural and cosmological concerns.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Victorian scholarly distance, with occasional dry asides about the varieties of human superstition.
- Resolution withholding: 16 out of 100
- The grand evolutionary argument is held back until sufficient evidence has been marshaled.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Encyclopedic scale with recursive thematic organization that loops back through the same mythological types in new cultural contexts.
How The Golden Bough is regarded
The Golden Bough holds a literary regard score of 48 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.