‘To the principle of Max Müller I can only assign a very limited value, if any value at all.’ [{56}]
‘Taken all in all, I consider the greater part of the results hitherto obtained in the field of Indo-Germanic comparative mythology to be, as yet, a failure, premature or incomplete, my own efforts in German Myths (1858) included. That I do not, however, “throw out the babe with the bath,” as the proverb goes, my essay on Lettish sun myths in Bastian-Hartmann’s Ethnological Journal will bear witness.’
Such is Mannhardt’s conclusion. Taken in connection with his still later essay on Demeter, it really leaves no room for doubt. There, I think, he does ‘throw out the child with the bath,’ throw the knife after the handle. I do not suppose that Mr. Max Müller ever did quote Mannhardt as one of his supporters, but such a claim, if really made, would obviously give room for criticism.
Mannhardt on Solar Myths
What the attitude of Mannhardt was, in 1877 and later, we have seen. He disbelieves in the philological system of explaining myths by etymological conjectures. He disbelieves in the habit of finding, in myths of terrestrial occurrences, reflections of celestial phenomena. But earlier, in his long essay Die lettischen Sonnenmythen (in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1875), he examines the Lettish popular songs about the Sun, the Sun’s daughters, the god-sons, and so forth. Here, of course, he is dealing with popular songs explicitly devoted to solar phenomena, in their poetical aspect. In the Lettish Sun-songs and Sun-myths of the peasants we see, he says, a myth-world ‘in process of becoming,’ in an early state of development, as in the Veda (p. 325). But, we may reply, in the Veda, myths are already full-grown, or even decadent. Already there are unbelievers in the myths. Thus we would say, in the Veda we have (1) myths of nature, formed in the remote past, and (2) poetical phrases about heavenly phenomena, which resemble the nature-poetry of the Letts, but which do not become full-grown myths. The Lett songs, also, have not developed into myths, of which (as in the Apollo and Daphne story, by Mr. Max Müller’s hypothesis) the original meaning is lost.
In the Lett songs we have a mass of nature-pictures—the boat and the apples of the Sun, the red cloak hung on the oak-tree, and so on; pictures by which it is sought to make elemental phenomena intelligible, by comparison with familiar things. Behind the phenomena are, in popular belief, personages—mythical personages—the Sun as ‘a magnified non-natural man,’ or woman; the Sun’s mother, daughters, and other heavenly people. Their conduct is ‘motived’ in a human way. Stories are told about them: the Sun kills the Moon, who revives.
All this is perfectly familiar everywhere. Savages, in their fables, account for solar, lunar, and similar elemental processes, on the theory that the heavenly bodies are, and act like, human beings. The Eskimo myth of the spots on the Moon, marks of ashes thrown by the Sun in a love-quarrel, is an excellent example. But in all this there is no ‘disease of language.’ These are frank nature-myths, ‘ætiological,’ giving a fabulous reason for facts of nature.
Mannhardt on Märchen.
But Mannhardt goes farther. He not only recognises, as everyone must do, the Sun, as explicitly named, when he plays his part in myth, or popular tale (Märchen). He thinks that even when the Sun is not named, his presence, and reference to him, and derivation of the incidents in Märchen from solar myth, may sometimes be detected with great probability (pp. 326, 327). But he adds, ‘not that every Märchen contains a reference to Nature; that I am far from asserting’ (p. 327).
Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Märchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths. The all-swallowing and all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Märchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault’s courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In many stories a girl has three balls—one of silver, one of gold, one of diamond—which she offers, in succession, as bribes. This is a perfectly natural invention. It is perilous to connect these balls, gifts of ascending value, with the solar apple of iron, silver, and gold (p. 103 and note 5). It is perilous, and it is quite unnecessary. Some one—Gubernatis, I think—has explained the naked sword of Aladdin, laid between him and the Sultan’s daughter in bed, as the silver sickle of the Moon. Really the sword has an obvious purpose and meaning, and is used as a symbol in proxy-marriages. The blood shed by Achilles in his latest victories is elsewhere explained as red clouds round the setting Sun, which is conspicuously childish. Mannhardt leans, at least, in this direction.