Andrew Lang eBooks

Custom and Myth. E-book. Formato PDF Andrew Lang Ma   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

In the essays styled The Myth of Cronus,' 'a Far Travelled Tale,' and Cupid and Psyche.' Why, then, do distinguished scholars and mythologists reach such different goals Clearly because their method is so precarious. They all analyse the names in myths 1 but, where one scholar decides that the name is originally Sanskrit, another holds that it is purely Greek, and a third, perhaps, is all for an Accadian etymology, or a Semitic derivation. Again, even when scholars agree as to the original root from which a name springs, they differ as much as ever as to the meaning of the name in its present place. The inference is that the analysis of names, on which the whole edifice of philological comparative mythology.

Homer: And the Epic. E-book. Formato PDF Andrew Lang   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

This method, we argue here, is erroneous. It has its origin in the arguments of Wolf against the possible exist ence Of a long continuous early Greek epic. These argu ments led men to look for the traces Of joins in the poems, and to find them, to hunt for the resulting discrepancies, and to discover them. But Wolf's a priori arguments, we try to show, are no longer valid. It is not impossible that a long early Greek poem might have been composed, and might survive. This being so, we plead for wider and more generous views of the Iliad and Odyssey, for a study of poetry as poetry, not as a dubious clause in a Bill, or a doubtful statement by an historian.