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 battle between the Queen
of the May, with her maids of honour and male supporters, and the Queen of
Winter with her followers. If the May Queen was captured, her men had to
ransom her. Arthurian legend tells of an ambush and abduction of Guinevere
on the morning of 1 May, when according to custom she went into the woods
to gather birch branches and bring the Summer in, attended by ten knights
‘all rayed in grene for maiynge’. She was carried off by Mellyagaunce or
Melwas to his castle, and rescued by her lover Lancelot. A. H. Krappe has
plausibly argued that a parallel ritual lies behind the mythical abduction of
Helen.^141
CONCLUSIONThere was a time when the very existence of solar and celestial mythology was denied,
and when, as usual in the absence of knowledge and argument, it was ridiculed as
drawn from that bank with unlimited liability, the inner consciousness of German
professors.^142
Müller’s critics were right to castigate his excesses and those of the nature-
myth school generally. But the reaction against that approach sometimes
went too far. We have seen in this chapter that there was such a thing as solar
mythology in Indo-European tradition, and a body of festive ritual associated
with it. The poetic stories and imagery attaching to the Sun and to Dawn are
for the most part directly intelligible in terms of diurnal experience. With
figures such as the Daughter of the Sun and the Sons of Heaven, it is less
clear how much has a meteorological or astronomical basis and how much
is fanciful invention or the mythic reflection of seasonal rituals on earth.
What is apparent in this context is that ancient Indic myth and more recent
European folklore and custom are not to be studied exclusively as regional
specialisms, but to be seen as patches remaining from one great historical
tapestry for which ‘Indo-European’ is a singularly apt label.
(^141) J. Train, A Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man (Douglas 1845), ii. 118–20,
retold by Frazer (1911–36), iv. 258; Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, book xix; G. O. Jones
and William Owen (edd.), Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (Llundain 1789), 540; A. H. Krappe,
Rh. Mus. 80 (1931), 126 f.
(^142) Müller (1897), 165.
- Sun and Daughter 237