‘We can but say “it may be so,"’ but who could explain all the complex Perseus-saga as a statement about elemental phenomena?  Or how can the Far-travelled Tale of the Lad and the Giant’s Daughter be interpreted to the same effect, above all in the countless examples where no Fleece of Gold occurs?  The Greek tale of Jason is made up of several Marchen, as is the Odyssey, by epic poets.  These Marchen have no necessary connection with each other; they are tagged on to each other, and localised in Greece and on the Euxine. {62a} A poetic popular view of the Sun may have lent the peculiar, and elsewhere absent, incident of the quest of the Fleece of Gold on the shores of the Black Sea.  The old epic poets may have borrowed from popular songs like the Lettish chants (p. 328).  A similar dubious adhesion may be given by us in the case of Castor and Polydeuces (Morning and Evening Stars?), and Helen (Dawn), {62b} and the Hesperides (p. 234).  The germs of the myths may be popular poetical views of elemental phenomena.  But to insist on elemental allegories through all the legends of the Dioskouroi, and of the Trojan war, would be to strain a hypothesis beyond the breaking-point.  Much, very much, is epic invention, unverkennbar das werk der Dichter (p. 328).

Mannhardt’s Approach to Mr. Max Muller

In this essay on Lettish Sun-songs (1875) Mannhardt comes nearest to Mr. Max Muller.  He cites passages from him with approval (cf. pp. 314, 322).  His explanations, by aid of Sun-songs, of certain features in Greek mythology are plausible, and may be correct.  But we turn to Mannhardt’s explicit later statement of his own position in 1877, and to his posthumous essays, published in 1884; and, on the whole, we find, in my opinion, much more difference from than agreement with the Oxford Professor, whose Dawn-Daphne and other equations Mannhardt dismisses, and to whose general results (in mythology) he assigns a value so restricted.  It is a popular delusion that the anthropological mythologists deny the existence of solar myths, or of nature-myths in general.  These are extremely common.  What we demur to is the explanation of divine and heroic myths at large as solar or elemental, when the original sense has been lost by the ancient narrators, and when the elemental explanation rests on conjectural and conflicting etymologies and interpretations of old proper names—­Athene, Hera, Artemis, and the rest.  Nevertheless, while Mannhardt, in his works on Tree-cult, and on Field and Wood Cult, and on the ‘Corn Demon,’ has wandered far from ’his old colours’—­while in his posthumous essays he is even more of a deserter, his essay on Lettish Sun-myths shows an undeniable tendency to return to Mr. Max Muller’s camp.  This was what made his friends so anxious.  It is probably wisest to form our opinion of his final attitude on his preface to his last book published in his life-time.  In that the old colours are not exactly his chosen banner; nor can the flag of the philological school be inscribed tandem triumphans.