Proto-Indo-European mythology
Proto-Indo-European mythology is the body of myths and deities associated with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, speakers of the hypothesized Proto-Indo-European language. Although the mythological motifs are not directly attested – since Proto-Indo-European speakers lived in preliterate societies – scholars of comparative mythology have reconstructed details from inherited similarities found among Indo-European languages, based on the assumption that parts of the Proto-Indo-Europeans' original belief systems survived in the daughter traditions.
A
[edit]- There are people who, independently of the debate about Dumézil, have maintained that the scholarly work on the Indo-Europeans is simply a collection of myths.
- Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- If what I claimed above is true, that the research on Indo-Europeans has not given rise to myths in the sense of sheer fiction, one might still suppose that it has given rise to another kind of myth—namely, myth as normative narrative. In this sense of the word, myth involves a narrative about origins that gives individuals a feeling of belonging with others; that motivates certain actions; that legitimizes specific institutions; and that presents certain behaviors, feelings, and norms as natural, eternal, and necessary.
- Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Several people who have examined Indo-European scholarship have drawn parallels between research about the Proto-Indo-European world and myths, in the sense of narratives about origin. Indo-European research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the bourgeois class - a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of person, and affirmed certain feelings. Certainly, there have been some scholars who have not identified themselves with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but they are few.
- Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
K
[edit]- The all-inclusiveness of the Vedic is all too apparent and quite remarkable.
- N. D. Kazanas, "Indo-European deities and the Rgveda", Journal of Indo-European Studies, 29(3/4) (2001), pp. 257-294.
L
[edit]- All of these exercises in scholarship ( = myth + footnotes) suffer from the same problem . They attempt to reach so far back into prehistory that no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where archeology offers a plethora of data. In practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection. When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth. Prehistory here becomes "pre-" in a radical sense: a terrain of frustration and opportunity where historians-cum -mythographers can offer origin accounts- complete with heroes, adventures, great voyages, and a primordial paradise lost- all of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them . Ideology in narrative form.
- Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
