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Modern Mythology, a non-fiction book by Andrew Lang |
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THE RIDDLE THEORY |
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_ THE RIDDLE THEORY What the Philological Theory Needs The great desideratum of the philological method is a proof that the 'Disease of Language,' ex hypothesi the most fertile source of myths, is a vera causa. Do simple poetical phrases, descriptive of heavenly phenomena, remain current in the popular mouth after the meanings of appellatives (Bright One, Dark One, &c.) have been forgotten, so that these appellatives become proper names--Apollo, Daphne, &c.? Mr. Max Muller seems to think some proof of this process as a vera causa may be derived from 'Folk Riddles.'
The Riddle Theory We now come, therefore, to the author's treatment of popular riddles (devinettes), so common among savages and peasants. Their construction is simple: anything in Nature you please is described by a poetical periphrasis, and you are asked what it is. Thus Geistiblindr asks, What is the Dark One Or we find, What is the gold spun from one window to another? The answers, the obvious answers, are (1) 'mist' and (2) 'sunshine.' In Mr. Max Muller's opinion these riddles 'could not but lead to what we call popular myths or legends.' Very probably; but this does not aid us to accept the philological method. The very essence of that method is the presumed absolute loss of the meaning of, e.g. 'the Dark One.' Before there can be a myth, ex hypothesi the words Dark One must have become hopelessly unintelligible, must have become a proper name. Thus suppose, for argument's sake only, that Cronos once meant Dark One, and was understood in that sense. People (as in the Norse riddle just cited) said, 'Cronos [i.e. the Dark One--meaning mist] swallows water and wood.' Then they forgot that Cronos was their old word for the Dark One, and was mist; but they kept up, and understood, all the rest of the phrase about what mist does. The expression now ran, 'Cronos [whatever that may be] swallows water and wood.' But water comes from mist, and water nourishes wood, therefore 'Cronos swallows his children.' Such would be the development of a myth on Mr. Max Muller's system. He would interpret 'Cronos swallows his children,' by finding, if he could, the original meaning of Cronos. Let us say that he did discover it to mean 'the Dark One.' Then he might think Cronos meant 'night;' 'mist' he would hardly guess. That is all very clear, but the point is this--in devinettes, or riddles, the meaning of 'the Dark One' is not lost:-- 'Thy riddle is easy Heidrick answers. What the philological method of mythology needs is to prove that such poetical statements about natural phenomena as the devinettes contain survived in the popular mouth, and were perfectly intelligible except just the one mot d'enigme--say, 'the Dark One.' That (call it Cronos='Dark One'), and that alone, became unintelligible in the changes of language, and so had to be accepted as a proper name, Cronos--a god who swallows things at large. Where is the proof of such endurance of intelligible phrases with just the one central necessary word obsolete and changed into a mysterious proper name? The world is full of proper names which have lost their meaning--Athene, Achilles, Artemis, and so on but we need proof that poetical sayings, or riddles, survive and are intelligible except one word, which, being unintelligible, becomes a proper name. Riddles, of course, prove nothing of this kind: Thy riddle is easy Yet Mr. Max Muller offers the suggestion that the obscurity of many of these names of mythical gods and heroes 'may be due . . . to the riddles to which they had given rise, and which would have ceased to be riddles if the names had been clear and intelligible, like those of Helios and Selene' (i. 92). People, he thinks, in making riddles 'would avoid the ordinary appellatives, and the use of little-known names in most mythologies would thus find an intelligible explanation.' Again, 'we can see how essential it was that in such mythological riddles the principal agents should not be called by their regular names.' This last remark, indeed, is obvious. To return to the Norse riddle of the Dark One that swallows wood and water. It would never do in a riddle to call the Dark One by his ordinary name, 'Mist.' You would not amuse a rural audience by asking 'What is the mist that swallows wood and water?' That would be even easier than Mr. Burnand's riddle for very hot weather:-- My first is a boot, my second is a jack.__ Conceivably Mr. Max Muller may mean that in riddles an almost obsolete word was used to designate the object. Perhaps, instead of 'the Dark One,' a peasant would say, 'What is the Rooky One?' But as soon as nobody knew what 'the Rooky One' meant, the riddle would cease to exist--Rooky One and all. You cannot imagine several generations asking each other-- What is the Rooky One that swallows? if nobody knew the answer. A man who kept boring people with a mere 'sell' would be scouted; and with the death of the answerless riddle the difficult word 'Rooky' would die. But Mr. Max Muller says, 'Riddles would cease to be riddles if the names had been clear and intelligible.' The reverse is the fact. In the riddles he gives there are seldom any 'names;' but the epithets and descriptions are as clear as words can be: Who are the mother and children in a house, all having bald heads?--The moon and stars. Language cannot be clearer. Yet the riddle has not 'ceased to be a riddle,' as Mr. Max Muller thinks it must do, though the words are 'clear and intelligible.' On the other hand, if the language is not clear and intelligible, the riddle would cease to exist. It would not amuse if nobody understood it. You might as well try to make yourself socially acceptable by putting conundrums in Etruscan as by asking riddles in words not clear and intelligible in themselves, though obscure in their reference. The difficulty of a riddle consists, not in the obscurity of words or names, but in the description of familiar things by terms, clear as terms, denoting their appearance and action. The mist is described as 'dark,' 'swallowing,' 'one that fears the wind,' and so forth. The words are pellucid. Thus 'ordinary appellatives' (i. 99) are not 'avoided' in riddles, though names (sun, mist) cannot be used in the question because they give the answer to the riddle. For all these reasons ancient riddles cannot explain the obscurity of mythological names. As soon as the name was too obscure, the riddle and the name would be forgotten, would die together. So we know as little as ever of the purely hypothetical process by which a riddle, or popular poetical saying, remains intelligible in a language, while the mot d'enigme, becoming unintelligible, turns into a proper name--say, Cronos. Yet the belief in this process as a vera causa is essential to our author's method. Here Mr. Max Muller warns us that his riddle theory is not meant to explain 'the obscurities of all mythological names. This is a stratagem that should be stopped from the very first.' It were more graceful to have said 'a misapprehension.' Another 'stratagem' I myself must guard against. I do not say that no unintelligible strings of obsolete words may continue to live in the popular mouth. Old hymns, ritual speeches, and charms may and do survive, though unintelligible. They are reckoned all the more potent, because all the more mysterious. But an unintelligible riddle or poetical saying does not survive, so we cannot thus account for mythology as a disease of language.
Mordvinian Mythology Still in the very natural and laudable pursuit of facts which will support the hypothesis of a disease of language, Mr. Max Muller turns to Mordvinian mythology. 'We have the accounts of real scholars' about Mordvinian prayers, charms, and proverbs (i. 235). The Mordvinians, Ugrian tribes, have the usual departmental Nature-gods--as Chkai, god of the sun (chi=sun). He 'lives in the sun, or is the sun' (i. 236). His wife is the Earth or earth goddess, Vediava. They have a large family, given to incest. The morals of the Mordvinian gods are as lax as those of Mordvinian mortals. (Compare the myths and morals of Samos, and the Samian Hera.) Athwart the decent god Chkai comes the evil god Chaitan--obviously Shaitan, a Mahommedan contamination. There are plenty of minor gods, and spirits good and bad. Dawn was a Mordvinian girl; in Australia she was a lubra addicted to lubricity. How does this help philological mythology? Mr. Max Muller is pleased to find solar and other elemental gods among the Mordvinians. But the discovery in no way aids his special theory. Nobody has ever denied that gods who are the sun or live in the sun are familiar, and are the centres of myths among most races. I give examples in C. and M. (pp. 104, 133, New Zealand and North America) and in M. R. R. (i. 124-135, America, Africa, Australia, Aztec, Hervey Islands, Samoa, and so on). Such Nature-myths--of sun, sky, earth--are perhaps universal; but they do not arise from disease of language. These myths deal with natural phenomena plainly and explicitly. The same is the case among the Mordvinians. 'The few names preserved to us are clearly the names of the agents behind the salient phenomena of Nature, in some cases quite intelligible, in others easily restored to their original meaning.' The meanings of the names not being forgotten, but obvious, there is no disease of language. All this does not illustrate the case of Greek divine names by resemblance, but by difference. Real scholars know what Mordvinian divine names mean. They do not know what many Greek divine names mean--as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute about Demeter. No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods exist. We are only fighting against the philological effort to get at the elemental phenomena which may be behind Hera, Artemis, Athene, Apollo, by means of contending etymological conjectures. We only oppose the philological attempt to account for all the features in a god's myth as manifestations of the elemental qualities denoted by a name which may mean at pleasure dawn, storm, clear air, thunder, wind, twilight, water, or what you will. Granting Chkai to be the sun, does that explain why he punishes people who bake bread on Friday? (237.) Our opponent does not seem to understand the portee of our objections. The same remarks apply to the statement of Finnish mythology here given, and familiar in the Kalewala. Departmental divine beings of natural phenomena we find everywhere, or nearly everywhere, in company, of course, with other elements of belief--totemism, worship of spirits, perhaps with monotheism in the background. That is as much our opinion as Mr. Max Muller's. What we are opposing is the theory of disease of language, and the attempt to explain, by philological conjectures, gods and heroes whose obscure names are the only sources of information. Helios is the sun-god; he is, or lives in, the sun. Apollo may have been the sun-god too, but we still distrust the attempts to prove this by contending guesses at the origin of his name. Moreover, if all Greek gods could be certainly explained, by undisputed etymologies, as originally elemental, we still object to such logic as that which turns Saranyu into 'grey dawn.' We still object to the competing interpretations by which almost every detail of very composite myths is explained as a poetical description of some elemental process or phenomenon. Apollo may once have been the sun, but why did he make love as a dog?
Lettish Mythology These remarks apply equally well to our author's dissertation on Lettish mythology (ii. 430 et seq.). The meaning of statements about the sun and sky 'is not to be mistaken in the mythology of the Letts.' So here is no disease of language. The meaning is not to be mistaken. Sun and moon and so on are spoken of by their natural unmistakable names, or in equally unmistakable poetical periphrases, as in riddles. The daughter of the sun hung a red cloak on a great oak-tree. This 'can hardly have been meant for anything but the red of the evening or the setting sun, sometimes called her red cloak' (ii. 439). Exactly so, and the Australians of Encounter Bay also think that the sun is a woman. 'She has a lover among the dead, who has given her a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising.' {135} This tale was told to Mr. Meyer in 1846, before Mr. Max Muller's Dawn had become 'inevitable,' as he says. The Lettish and Australian myths are folk-poetry; they have nothing to do with a disease of language or forgotten meanings of words which become proper names. All this is surely distinct. We proclaim the abundance of poetical Nature-myths; we 'disable' the hypothesis that they arise from a disease of language.
The Chances of Fancy One remark has to be added. Mannhardt regarded many or most of the philological solutions of gods into dawn or sun, or thunder or cloud, as empty jeux d'esprit. And justly, for there is no name named among men which a philologist cannot easily prove to be a synonym or metaphorical term for wind or weather, dawn or sun. Whatever attribute any word connotes, it can be shown to connote some attribute of dawn or sun. Here parody comes in, and gives a not overstrained copy of the method, applying it to Mr. Gladstone, Dr. Nansen, or whom you please. And though a jest is not a refutation, a parody may plainly show the absolutely capricious character of the philological method. _ |
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