Indo-European Poetry and Myth

SOURCES

In the search for Indo-European poetry and myth we have to draw on sources
of very various character and very various date, from hymns and ritual texts
of the second millennium  to songs and folk-tales recorded in the nine-
teenth century . It might be thought that nothing sound could possibly
be built from such diverse materials. But Indo-European linguists are in a
similar boat. They work on the one hand with Hittite and Vedic texts that
are over three thousand years old, on the other hand with Albanian or
Lithuanian, which were first recorded no more than five or six hundred
years ago. Yet from data of such unequal antiquity they are able to forge
unshakeable structures. The reason is simple. Although languages undergo
enormous changes over two or three millennia, and to the casual eye are
transformed out of recognition, they may also preserve many highly archaic
elements. Even modern English, which cannot compare with Lithuanian
as a conservator of ancient morphology, is full of Indo-European vocabulary;
it preserves unchanged, almost alone, the original sound [w]; it preserves
such old features as ablauting verbs (sing, sang, sung) and free-range
preverbs (not easy to get away from). Such things are identifiable as old
by surveying the whole system. Similar principles will apply in the present
investigation.
As in linguistic reconstruction, we seek to work back to prototypes by
comparing data from different branches of the Indo-European tradition. The
more widely separated and historically independent the branches, the further
back in time their concord should carry us. Within each branch we shall pay
greatest attention to the oldest available material, as that is where inherited
elements are most likely to appear, and where what seem like significant
elements are most likely to be inherited. In some cases, naturally, a genuinely
inherited motif may turn up only in a later source, but our emphasis must be
on the earlier ones.
The oldest extant texts in Indo-European languages are those in the
Anatolian languages Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic, starting in the seventeenth
century , and written either in cuneiform or in Luwian hieroglyphs.^33
The greatest number are in Hittite and date from the New Kingdom, c.1350–

1200. The majority are prescriptions for rituals; there are also state docu-
      ments of various kinds, royal annals, prayers, laws, treaties, correspondence,

(^33) The cuneiform texts are identified by reference to Emmanuel Laroche, Catalogue des
textes hittites (Paris 1971) (CTH); the hieroglyphic ones by reference to J. D. Hawkins and
others, Corpus of Hieroglyphic Luwian Inscriptions, i–ii (Berlin–New York 1999–2000) (CHLI).
12 Introduction