Lettish Mythology
These remarks apply equally well to our author’s dissertation on Lettish mythology (ii. 430 et seq.). The meaning of statements about the sun and sky ‘is not to be mistaken in the mythology of the Letts.’ So here is no disease of language. The meaning is not to be mistaken. Sun and moon and so on are spoken of by their natural unmistakable names, or in equally unmistakable poetical periphrases, as in riddles. The daughter of the sun hung a red cloak on a great oak-tree. This ‘can hardly have been meant for anything but the red of the evening or the setting sun, sometimes called her red cloak’ (ii. 439). Exactly so, and the Australians of Encounter Bay also think that the sun is a woman. ‘She has a lover among the dead, who has given her a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising.’ [{135}] This tale was told to Mr. Meyer in 1846, before Mr. Max Müller’s Dawn had become ‘inevitable,’ as he says.
The Lettish and Australian myths are folk-poetry; they have nothing to do with a disease of language or forgotten meanings of words which become proper names. All this is surely distinct. We proclaim the abundance of poetical Nature-myths; we ‘disable’ the hypothesis that they arise from a disease of language.