So Many books

Question: I'm looking for a better source for mythological knowledge than Wikipedia. Something rich but also readable. Any ideas?

For some reason people always groan when I say this, but the absolute best thing you can do, always, is to read the source material. Nobody gets a culture's stories across the way they do in their original myths and poetry, and you'll often find yourself discovering cool details you had never heard of because they aren't included in general overviews on the subject.

We actually maintain links to the most relevant sources on each of our pantheon pages for ease of players looking to make new characters; the Aesir page has links to things like the Eddas and Beowulf, the Pesedjet page has links to the Book of Going Forth by Day and the Pyramid Texts, and so on and so forth. But if you'd rather read at your own pace or search out other subjects, a few of my internet favorites:

Sacred Texts is the biggest of them all; it's a huge archive of original sources for mythology and folklore, as well as scholarly books about them that have gone into the public domain. They are basically totally awesome and everyone should take advantage of all their awesome free stuff.

Ancient Texts is very similar, but attempts to bring together even more than Sacred Texts does, adding in translated and poetic texts from all over the world. You can sometimes find different translations here than are available on ST, or extra materials.

Theoi is Greek-specific, but it's one of the most fantastic archive sites on the web. You can look up specific gods and heroes to see excerpts from texts that talk about them, or just read the original stories in full. It also has a pretty rocking awesome gallery of Greek mythological art.

Worldcat is my best friend in the whole wide world. It's a library catalog that searches all the world's libraries and allows you to set your location so it can tell you what books are available near you. It's pretty invaluable for finding resources in public libraries as well as nearby universities (did you know colleges and universities will sometimes let you borrow books even if you don't go there, or give you a library card for free or as little as $20? It's like Christmas!). Especially if you're not sure where to look for something less direct than the sources above, plugging in "Norse Mythology" and seeing what's available down the street in your public library (or even online as an electronic resource) is awesome.

There are a ton more out there on the internet, but hopefully those'll give you a good place to start (if you're looking for more specific information, drop a line in the comments and I'll see if I know of anywhere to point you). Don't be too put off by the antiquated language in some; while it can be hard to get into something written a hundred (or thousand) years ago, I often find that the awesome quality of the stories soon drives any difficulty figuring out what the writer means right out of my head.