The great interest of the Ṛigveda is, in fact, historical rather than poetical. As in its original language we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Kelt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths, and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity. As the science of comparative philology could hardly have existed without the study of Sanskrit, so the comparative history of the religions of the world would have been impossible without the study of the Veda.
My translation, which follows the text of Max Müller's splendid
six-volume edition, is partly based on the work of the great
scholiast Sâyaṇa who was Prime Minister at the court of the King of
Vijayanagar—in what is now the Madras District of Bellary—in
the fourteenth century of our era. Sâyana’s Commentary has
been consulted and carefully considered for the general sense of
every verse and for the meaning of every word, and his
interpretation has been followed whenever it seemed rational, and consistent
with the context, and with other passages in which the same word
or words occur. With regard to Sâyaṇa’s qualifications as an
interpreter of the Veda there is, or was, a conflict of opinion among
European scholars. Professor Wilson—whose translation of the
Ṛigveda is rather a version of Sâyaṇa’s paraphrase—was firmly
persuaded that he had a “knowledge of his text far beyond the
pretensions of any European scholar, and must have been in
possession of all the interpretations which had been perpetuated
by traditional teaching from the earliest times.” Yet, as Dr. J.
Muir has pointed out, Professor Wilson in the notes to his
translation admits that he “occasionally failed to find in Sâyaṇa a
perfectly satisfactory guide,” that “the scholiast is evidently puzzled,”
and that his explanations are obscure. On the other hand
Professor Roth—the author of the Vedic portion of the great St.
Petersburg Lexicon—says in his preface to that work: “so far
as regards one of the branches of Vedic literature, the treatises
