Chinese mythology merely fantastic types of the bestiary sort. Sometimes the dragon is considered part of this category, related to it, or the ruler of all the swimming and crawling folk. This may include the giant marine turtle or tortoise Ao, the Bashe snake reputed to swallow elephants, a nine-headed snake monster reminiscent of the hydra known as Xiangliu, and the White Serpent from the novel "Legend of the White Snake". Various birds are found in Chinese mythology, some of them obviously based on real birds, other ones obviously not, and some in-between. The Crane is an example of a real type
Investigations into Germanic Mythology concluding in part that it was not more widely received because it was not fully available in one of the three international languages of scholarship: English, German or French. A German translation was being prepared in 1889 by literary historian, Phillip B. Schweitzer, who died in a skiing accident shortly thereafter. A French translation planned by a group of scholars in Lund in 1891 was never completely realized. Rydberg himself knew that his mythology would be regarded as "folly" to the German philologists, who, as adherents to the school of nature-mythology, regarded him as a heretic, in regard to his