’Taken all in all, I consider the greater part of the results hitherto obtained in the field of Indo-Germanic comparative mythology to be, as yet, a failure, premature or incomplete, my own efforts in German Myths (1858) included.  That I do not, however, “throw out the babe with the bath,” as the proverb goes, my essay on Lettish sun myths in Bastian-Hartmann’s Ethnological Journal will bear witness.’

Such is Mannhardt’s conclusion.  Taken in connection with his still later essay on Demeter, it really leaves no room for doubt.  There, I think, he does ‘throw out the child with the bath,’ throw the knife after the handle.  I do not suppose that Mr. Max Muller ever did quote Mannhardt as one of his supporters, but such a claim, if really made, would obviously give room for criticism.

Mannhardt on Solar Myths

What the attitude of Mannhardt was, in 1877 and later, we have seen.  He disbelieves in the philological system of explaining myths by etymological conjectures.  He disbelieves in the habit of finding, in myths of terrestrial occurrences, reflections of celestial phenomena.  But earlier, in his long essay Die lettischen Sonnenmythen (in Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 1875), he examines the Lettish popular songs about the Sun, the Sun’s daughters, the god-sons, and so forth.  Here, of course, he is dealing with popular songs explicitly devoted to solar phenomena, in their poetical aspect.  In the Lettish Sun-songs and Sun-myths of the peasants we see, he says, a myth-world ‘in process of becoming,’ in an early state of development, as in the Veda (p. 325).  But, we may reply, in the Veda, myths are already full-grown, or even decadent.  Already there are unbelievers in the myths.  Thus we would say, in the Veda we have (1) myths of nature, formed in the remote past, and (2) poetical phrases about heavenly phenomena, which resemble the nature-poetry of the Letts, but which do not become full-grown myths.  The Lett songs, also, have not developed into myths, of which (as in the Apollo and Daphne story, by Mr. Max Muller’s hypothesis) the original meaning is lost.

In the Lett songs we have a mass of nature-pictures—­the boat and the apples of the Sun, the red cloak hung on the oak-tree, and so on; pictures by which it is sought to make elemental phenomena intelligible, by comparison with familiar things.  Behind the phenomena are, in popular belief, personages—­mythical personages—­the Sun as ’a magnified non-natural man,’ or woman; the Sun’s mother, daughters, and other heavenly people.  Their conduct is ‘motived’ in a human way.  Stories are told about them:  the Sun kills the Moon, who revives.

All this is perfectly familiar everywhere.  Savages, in their fables, account for solar, lunar, and similar elemental processes, on the theory that the heavenly bodies are, and act like, human beings.  The Eskimo myth of the spots on the Moon, marks of ashes thrown by the Sun in a love-quarrel, is an excellent example.  But in all this there is no ’disease of language.’  These are frank nature-myths, ‘aetiological,’ giving a fabulous reason for facts of nature.