Although Tiriel was the first of Blake's prophetic books (presumably written around 1789), it remained unpublished at Blake's death and was not presented to the public until William Rossetti published an edition in 1874. William Butler Yeats and E. J. Ellis published a rather inaccurate version in 1893, and Geoffrey Keynes produced a much more reliable reading in 1925, followed by several later printings by other Blake scholars.

Tiriel is not an illuminated manuscript, although Blake made a series of twelve drawings to illustrate the text. Tiriel demonstrates Blake's complex mythology while providing a criticism of the materialism of his own day. The mythological characters in this work--Tiriel, "King of the West"; Myratana, "Queen of the Western Plains"; and their numerous offspring--are not those who populate Blake's better-known illuminated texts.

Shown here is a sample page from the manuscript of Tiriel , revealing Blake's frequent revisions.