The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

To claim for the Homeric poems the same amount of Thracian elements that the Welshman claims for those of the cycle of King Arthur, would be to illustrate the obscurum per obscurius, inasmuch as the Welshman’s claim is of a somewhat impalpable nature. It cannot attach to the poems themselves, in any known form. They are all in Norman-French, or German, or English, or Italian—none in Welsh. Neither are they translations of a Welsh original now lost. Neither is their subject-matter Welsh to the amount of one-third. Yet, the germ of the fiction is, in some way or other, Welsh, and the claim of the Welshman is, up to a certain point, valid.

Mutatis mutandis, let us ask whether the Trojan cycle may not, in the same sense, be Slavonic—assuming the Thracians to have belonged to that stock?

I. a. When we find the name of a non-historical person coincide with that of an historical people or an historical locality, it is a fair inference, all the world over, to consider that form as an epônymus.

b. It is also fair to connect such legends as attach to the name with the people or the locality.

c. Now several names in the early Greek epic cycles are thus eponymic—thus localized in Thracian and other similar localities—Teucer, Æneas, Dardanus, &c.

II. Again—the national poetry of the existing Slavonic nations, more nearly approaches—longo intervallo, I admit—that of the Homeric Greeks than does that of any other families of mankind.

III. The metres do the same.

IV. The Sanskrit metres are in the same category with the Slavonic; so that—the European origin of the Sanskrit being admitted—the similarity must be of great antiquity.

These points cannot be enlarged on. They form, however, the basis of some claim for the existence of Slavonic elements in the old heroic poetry of Greece; which—it must be remembered—originated on the Helleno-Slavonic debatable land of Æolic Asia.

The propounder of an hypothesis has no right to lay down, peremptorily, the laws by which his doctrine is to be tested. At the same time, he may fairly claim that the objections to it should rest on the same broad grounds on which it is based. The Homeric poems are Greek; and the Orlando Furioso is Italian. Yet there are Welsh and other non-Italian elements in the latter, and, it is submitted, that there are Slavonic and non-Hellenic elements in the former. Their amount I do not profess to measure.