Irritating Conduct of Mannhardt

Nothing irritates philological mythologists so much, nothing has injured them so much in the esteem of the public which ’goes into these things a little,’ as the statement that their competing etymologies and discrepant interpretations of mythical names are mutually destructive.  I have been told that this is ‘a mean argument.’  But if one chemical analyst found bismuth where another found iridium, and a third found argon, the public would begin to look on chemistry without enthusiasm; still more so if one chemist rarely found anything but inevitable bismuth or omnipresent iridium.  Now Mannhardt uses this ‘mean argument.’

Mannhardt on Demeter Erinnys

In a posthumous work, Mythologische Forschungen (1884), the work from which Mr. Max Muller cites the letter to Mullenhoff, Mannhardt discusses Demeter Erinnys.  She is the Arcadian goddess, who, in the form of a mare, became mother of Despoina and the horse Arion, by Poseidon. {51a} Her anger at the unhandsome behaviour of Poseidon caused Demeter to be called Erinnys—­’to be angry’ being [Greek] in Arcadian—­a folk-etymology, clearly.  Mannhardt first dives deep into the sources for this fable. {51b} Arion, he decides, is no mythological personification, but a poetical ideal (Bezeichnung) of the war-horse.  Legend is ransacked for proof of this.  Poseidon is the lord of wind and wave.  Now, there are waves of corn, under the wind, as well as waves of the sea.  When the Suabian rustic sees the wave running over the corn, he says, Da lauft das Pferd, and Greeks before Homer would say, in face of the billowing corn, [Greek], There run horses!  And Homer himself {51c} says that the horses of Erichthonius, children of Boreas, ran over cornfield and sea.  We ourselves speak of sea-waves as ‘white horses.’  So, to be brief, Mannhardt explains the myth of Demeter Erinnys becoming, as a mare, a mother by Poseidon as a horse, thus, ’Poseidon Hippies, or Poseidon in horse’s form, rushes through the growing grain and weds Demeter,’ and he cites peasant proverbs, such as Das Korn heirathet; das Korn feiert Hochzeit (p. 264).  ‘This is the germ of the Arcadian Saga.’

’The Arcadian myth of Demeter Erinnys is undeniably a blending of the epic tradition [of the ideal war-horse] with the local cult of Demeter. . . .  It is a probable hypothesis that the belief in the wedding of Demeter and Poseidon comes from the sight of the waves passing over the cornfield. . . .’ {52}

It is very neat!  But a certain myth of Loki in horse-form comes into memory, and makes me wonder how Mannhardt would have dealt with that too liberal narrative.

Loki, as a mare (he being a male god), became, by the horse of a giant, the father of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-footed steed.  Mr. W. A. Craigie supplies this note on Loki’s analogy with Poseidon, as a horse, in the waves of corn:—­