institutions, their mythology.^6 From 1853 onwards Kuhn, Theodor Benfey,
and others began to identify parallel poetic phrases in different branches of
the Indo-European tradition, especially in Greek and Indic: phrases com-
posed of words that corresponded etymologically in the different languages,
and expressing concepts such as would not have had a place in ordinary
everyday speech but only in an elevated formal type of discourse, in poetry
or high rhetoric. The inference was that the Indo-Europeans had had
poetry and a poetic language, some relics of which survived long enough
in traditional usage to be still recognizable in texts available to us.^7 In 1860
there appeared the first attempt to reconstruct Indo-European forms of
versification by comparing Greek and Vedic metres.^8
The comparative mythology that took flight at this period, associated
especially with Kuhn and Müller, stalled within fifty years and made a forced
landing. This was partly because some of its most striking conclusions were
based on equations of names that turned out to be untenable as more exact
linguistic rules were established by the so-called Neo-grammarians, and
partly because of its practitioners’ propensity for explaining almost every
myth or mythical personage as an allegory of the sun, moon, storm, or some
other natural phenomenon. There continued to be sober surveys of the
evidence for Indo-European culture, and numerous attempts, based on
ecological appraisals and data from prehistoric archaeology, to determine
the whereabouts of the Urheimat, the original homeland. But it was in the
linguistic field that the clearest progress was being made. The Neo-
grammarians, whose leading figure was Karl Brugmann, achieved what
seemed to be a fairly complete and definitive account of the Indo-European
languages and their evolution from the parent tongue. Then in the first two
decades of the twentieth century further horizons opened up through the
discovery of two hitherto unknown branches of the Indo-European family,
represented by Tocharian and Hittite.
(^6) Adalbert Kuhn, Zur ältesten Geschichte der indogermanischen Völker (Progr. Berlin 1845),
expanded in Indische Studien 1 (1850), 321–63; id. (1859); Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deut-
schen Sprache (Leipzig 1848; 4th edn. 1880); various works of Friedrich Max Müller, from his
Essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) to his Science of Mythology (1897); Pictet (1859–63);
Michel Bréal, Hercule et Cacus (Paris 1860); Victor Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und Haustiere (Berlin
1870); August Fick, Die ehemalige Spracheinheit der Indogermanen Europas (Göttingen 1873);
Otto Schrader, Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte (Jena 1883), translated as Prehistoric
Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples (London 1890). Already in 1788 Sir William Jones (Asiatic
Researches, i. 422 f.) had found common elements in Greek, Roman, and Hindu religion and
postulated a historical connection.
(^7) For an account of the progress of this line of inquiry from Kuhn onwards see Schmitt
(1967), 6–60. The first to speak explicitly of ‘traces of Indo-Germanic poetry’ was Adolf Kaegi,
Der Rigveda. Die älteste Literatur der Inder (2nd edn., Leipzig 1881), 128 n. 12, cf. 158 n. 82.
(^8) See the section on metre in Chapter 1.
Introduction 3