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Post by Adam on Mar 5, 2009 10:09:32 GMT -1
www.druidsindoeuropean.com/I was quite intrigued by the approach... I like comparative stuff... but seriously put off by the lulu.com self publishing and the fact that it claims to be available through amazon and barnes and noble and isn't (not that it would mean much if it was). And anything that offers the true significance of anything tends to trigger my perimeter defences these days. Anyone heard of this guy?
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Post by Tegernacus on Mar 5, 2009 10:13:45 GMT -1
Aryans, the meaning of the swastika, more vedic comparisons...? hmmm... not that that is a bad thing necessarily, but we know little about druids from 2000 years ago, let alone their indo-european roots (no evidence there was any) from before that. I'd want an impartial (or academic) review before I would touch it.
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Post by megli on Mar 5, 2009 11:43:00 GMT -1
Unlikely. This kind of thing - comparative I-E mythology and so on - is fascinating, but is methodologically extremely difficult and challenging, because to do it well you need very high level linguistic skills - far better than mine - in literally dozens of languages and literatures. There are two recent books which are OK: M L West's 'Indo-European poetry and Myth' (OUP, 2007), which is for all that quite weak on Celtic, and Calvert Watkins' older 'How to Kill a Dragon', which is great but which will be largely unreadable for the non-specialist. West is a good read though, I recommend him. (Horrible man though.) My own opinion would be that this book is unlikely to be much cop because of the nature of the evidence concerning druids. There's so little, the author must necessarily be comparing the unknown with the highly ambiguous. In order to make a book at all, he must be pursuing a heavily 'maximalist' reading of the evidence, that is, taking every scrap of material we have about the druids and pressing it into service, without due caution. This is easy to do - one could compare the giant wicker man sacrifices of the Gauls with Vedic ideas of the primordial sacrifice of Prajapati, the macrocosmic father, and say that the druids 'obviously' had a profound theology of the continuous re-creation of the world through sacrifice. But that wd just be wishful thinking, as there is no actual *evidence* either way. It might equally well be a barbarous custom of human sacrifice, just as Caesar, etc, described it, or else totally made up. In the absence of any writings from the druids themselves saying what they thought they were doing, we just cannot evaluate the kind of evidence we have, and thus cannot usefully compare it with anything from a continent and a half in space and a thousand years in time away from them. This kind of thing went out in Celtic Studies in 1950! My hopes are not high. www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ClassicalStudies/ClassicalLanguages/?view=usa&ci=9780195085952 |
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Post by arth_frown on Mar 5, 2009 18:09:58 GMT -1
I have to agree with Megli. It must be like squeezing one grape to make a pint.It does amaze me how authors can make a book out of it.
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Post by Adam on Mar 5, 2009 18:48:41 GMT -1
That pretty much concurs with my gut feeling.
Megli, I was interested by this line in your link "He finds the "signature" formula for the myth--the divine hero who slays the serpent or overcomes adversaries--occurs in the same linguistic form in a wide range of sources and over millennia"...
What do they mean by "same linguistic form" in this context? Is this as loose as the story appearing as a narrative, or as poetry, or does it imply something more consistent about the structure?
And why didn't anyone tell me that these subjects existed when I was making A level and degree choices at school? ;D
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Post by megli on Mar 5, 2009 20:37:30 GMT -1
That pretty much concurs with my gut feeling. Megli, I was interested by this line in your link "He finds the "signature" formula for the myth--the divine hero who slays the serpent or overcomes adversaries--occurs in the same linguistic form in a wide range of sources and over millennia"... What do they mean by "same linguistic form" in this context? Is this as loose as the story appearing as a narrative, or as poetry, or does it imply something more consistent about the structure? It's a study of Indo-European poetics, that it, the ways in which I-E peoples conceived of the role of poets and poetry, and the characteristic ways in which they structured such poetry on a micro-linguistic level: the themes, images, figures of speech, etc. Here's an example. In Hindu myth, the gods churn the sea to come up with the nectar of immortality, or amrita. Amrita is composed of two elements - a negative prefix a- (like in English apolitical, apathetic, acausal, amoral) and a root mrmeaning 'death' and related to our words mortal, mortality, mortuary and so on. Amrita therefore means 'deathless' or '[drink of] immortality'. (The -t- is an adjectival suffix.) In Greek, the gods drink a special subtance called ambrosia, like the custard. Now Greek, unlike Latin, has lost the I-E root mr for the noun 'death', prefering a new word thanatos, though the root survives in the adjective brotos, 'mortal', older mbrotos. So the word is no longer fully 'analysable' in Greek - because they had lost the mr root - but the word clearly reflects a very ancient shared I-E idea, common to both India and Greece: that the gods drink a magic fluid or food called 'no-death'. It's incredibly, beautifully neat, and things like that are fairly common. Watkins' book analyses them in great detail. |
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Post by Adam on Mar 6, 2009 11:07:17 GMT -1
I'm remembering a book someone gave me over 20 years ago... Allegro's Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (I recently had a most amusing spat with a christian who insisted that the book set out to prove that Christianity was a hippy tripping mushroom cult)... I think they thought the mushroom reference would amuse me and it probably did... but I remember why the whole concept blew me away in that this was the closest thing to psycho-archeology we had got... but the incredible linguistic knowledge of these (you) guys just leaves me in awe... "Here etymology has done more than discover the root meaning of a particular word: it has opened a window on prehistoric philosophical thought. The idea of the shepherd-king's role in the community did not begin with the invention of writing. The written word merely expresses a long-held conception" Allegro on tracing the roots of the word rule through reign, rex and to sumerian RIG meaning shepherd Is that just not incredibly cool? (I don't know how you would rate the book, but just that whole elegant, almost mathematical set of relationships that give some clue as the prehistoric world view of a people) |
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Post by megli on Mar 6, 2009 13:44:42 GMT -1
That's not one I knew, but I-E is full to bursting of things like that.
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