gave a pledge (ὅμηρος) to Hera. The modern philological school relies for explanations of untoward and other myths on similar confusions. Thus Daphne is said to have been originally not a girl of romance, but the dawn (Sanskrit, dahanâ : ahanâ) pursued by the rising sun. But as the original Aryan sense of Dahanâ or Ahanâ was lost, and as Daphne came to mean the laurel—the wood which burns easily—the fable arose that the tree had been a girl called Daphne.[1]
This system chiefly rests on comparison between the Sanskrit names in the Rig-Veda and the mythic names in Greek, German, Slavonic, and other Aryan legends. The attempt is made to prove that, in the common speech of the undivided Aryan race, many words for splendid or glowing natural phenomena existed, and that natural processes were described in a figurative style. As the various Aryan families separated, the sense of the old words and names became dim, the nomina developed into numina, the names into gods, the descriptions of elemental processes into myths. As this system has already been criticised by us elsewhere with minute attention, a reference to these reviews must suffice in this place. Briefly, it may be stated that the various masters of the school—Kuhn, Max Müller, Roth, Schwartz, and
- ↑ Max Müller, Nineteenth Century, December 1885; "Solar Myths," January 1886; Myths and Mythologists (A. L.). Whitney, Mannhardt, Bergaigne, and others dispute etymology. Or. and Ling. Studies, 1874, p. 160; Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld Kultus (Berlin, 1877), p. xx; Begaigne, La Religion Védique, iii. 293; nor does Curtius like it much, Principles of Greek Etymology, English trans., ii. 92–93.
