Myths and myth-makers : old tales and superstitions interpreted by comparative mythology / by John Fiske.

Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Myths and myth-makers : old tales and superstitions interpreted by comparative mythology / by John Fiske. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    of Achilleus, far from originating with Homer, far from being recorded by the author of the Ihad as by an ev - witn°ess, must have been known in its e-nt.d featu^^^^^ in Aiyana-vaedjo, at that remote epoch when the Indian, the Greek, and the Teuton were as yet one and the same For the story has been retained by the three races aSe! in all its prLcipal feWes ; though the Veda has left it in the sky where it originally belonged, while the Iliad and the Nibelungenhed have brought it down to earth, the one locating it in Asia Minor, and the other m Northwestern Europe* * For the precise extent to wMcli I would indorse the tlieory that the IliadLyth is'an account of the victory of light over darkness et me x efe o what I have said above on p. 134. I do not suppose tha the struggle letween li.ht and darkness was Homer's subject in the Had any more ^hlr t was Shakespeare's subject in Hamlet. Homer's subject was •the wrath of the Greek hero, as Shakespeare's subject was the vengeance of the Danish prince. Nevertheless, the story of Hamlet, when traced back to its Norse original, is unmistakably the story of the quarrel he- tween summer and winter ; and the moody prince is as much a solar hero as Odin himself. See Simrock, Die Quellen des Shakespea^, L 127-133. Of course Shakespeare knew nothing of thrs, as Homer knew nothing of the origin of his Achilleus. The two stones therefore are not to\e taken as sun-myths in their present form. They are the off- spring of other stories which were sun-myths ; they are stones wh ch Sm to the sun-myth type after the manner aW mustra^jn ttje paper on Light and Darkness. [Hence there rs ff^^^^'^! [n the inconsistency-which seems to puzzle Max MuUer (Science of Lansx'age 6th ed. Vol. II. p. 516, note 20)-of investing Pans with nrn^f^he c^^^^^^^ 'f the children of light. Supposing, as we must, that the primitive sense of the Iliad-myth had as entire y chsap- peared in the Homeric age, as the primitive sense oi the Hamlet-myt^i had disappeared in the times of Elizabeth, the ht 1 tl that such inconsistencies are not more numerous.] The physical theoiy of myths will he properly presented and comprehended, only when it is understood that we accept the physical derivation of such stories as the Iliad-myth in much the same way that we are bound to accept the phys- ical etymologies of such words as soul, consider, truth, convince, dehbcr- ate, and the like. The late Dr. Gibbs of Yale College, in his ' Philo- logical Studies, - a little book which I used to read with delight when