The East Face of Helicon was written during my tenure of a Senior Research
Fellowship at All Souls College. Most of the present work was too (until my
retirement date arrived), and I will once again voice my gratitude to that
excellent institution for its benign (but watchful) support. Of individuals, my
thanks are due especially to Calvert Watkins and John Penney, who willingly
read the chapters as I produced them and gave me the benefit of their expert
comments and criticisms. No sensible person would infer that they endorse
everything in the final version. I am further indebted for help on occasional
questions to Margaret Clunies Ross, Stephanie Jamison, Ann Matonis,
Michael Meier-Brügger, Alexis Sanderson, and Gerald Stone.
Calvert Watkins is of course himself the author of a big book with kindred
subject matter. It will be apparent how much I owe to it. Mine is different
enough in scope and timbre to avoid (I hope) the charge of flogging a dead
dragon. Neither he nor I will claim to have exhausted the subject. The field is
so large, and its boundaries so far from being set, that it is impossible to read
everything that might be relevant. I may well have overlooked ancient texts
and modern scholarly works that I would have thought important if I had
seen them. I have indeed found it impossible to accommodate everything that
I have read while imposing something like an orderly structure on the book.
What is presented here, accordingly, is to be regarded not as a compendium of
all the material that I and previous researchers have accumulated, but as a
selection representing a personal vision, or rather vista.
Vista is the better word, because the object of perception is not something
at a fixed distance like a line of hills on the horizon. Vistas have depth. As
I will explain in the Introduction, the elements of shared inheritance that
can be abstracted from the extant Indo-European literatures cannot all be
followed back to proto-Indo-European. Much the greater number lie in
the foreground or the middle distance, corresponding to pools of common
tradition that must have extended over wide areas of Europe or Eurasia in the
later Bronze or early Iron Age. Perhaps they reach further back, but we cannot
see; the mists come and go.
M.L.W.
Oxford
New Year, 2006
vi Preface