Indo-European Poetry and Myth

We have seen that the practice of swinging was characteristic of these solar festivals, and that it was a feature of the Greek s ...

The plainest example of the Dawn goddess’s becoming attached to a single festival, and that in the spring, is that of the Anglo- ...

The Baltic and Slavonic evidence The Daughter of the Sun, Lithuanian Sáule ̇s dukrýte ̇, Latvian Saules meita (‘Sun’s girl’, pre ...

and Auseklis’ son. The Sons of God appear in particular rivalry with Me ̄nesis or with Auseklis. In one song (346) Auseklis, or ...

suggests a bright celestial, though this has no obvious relevance to the story that she mated with a bull and gave birth to the ...

In two early Laconian dedications to Helen her name is spelled with a digamma, fελνα.^115 This rules out attempts to connect it ...

are the Leukippides, daughters of Apollo or of Leukippos ‘Whitehorse’. They were called Phoibe ‘Shining’ and Hilaeira ‘Genial’ ( ...

them have no apparent relevance to the present context, as when in a Hittite narrative the Earth, ‘daughter of the Sun-god’, ask ...

Evening Star prepares her bed. The Moon married the Sun in the first spring- time, but wandered off and fell in love with the Mo ...

Several of the Latvian songs describe how, when the wedding of the Sun’s Daughter is celebrated, the Sun or the Sons of God deco ...

was a shrine of Helena Dendritis, Helen of the Tree. We recall that Erigone, ‘the Early-born’, hanged herself from a tree, and w ...

Finally, there is some Celtic evidence for the ritual abduction of the May Queen. In the Isle of Man there used to be a mock bat ...

6 Storm and Stream Sky and Earth, Sun, Dawn, Night: these make up the outer frame of the world we live in. We now come to the mo ...

specialist storm-gods have a distinctive character of their own; they are more like each other than they are like the god of the ...

Perkunas appears as a bellowing bull in Lithuanian riddles, but is otherwise pictured in human form. Simon Grunau in his Prussia ...

stage. In the ‘Hercynian’ mountains or forest in central Europe mentioned by classical writers we see the Celtic reflex of perkw ...

mistress of the wooded mountains, the personification of what appears in Gothic as fairguni. Perún In Slavonic lands the thunder ...

to the Smiter. This is not impossible, but it does not absolve us from the necessity of choosing between two incompatible analys ...

struck as ‘(sacred to) Zeus Keraunos’ (IG v(2). 288): this looks like a case where, as often happened, an old deity’s name survi ...

pictured as a bellowing bull who deposits his semen in the plants (RV 5. 83. 1; 6). But he is also a thunderer (5. 83. 2–9; 1 ...