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Indo-European Poetry and Myth
The Indo-Europeans, speakers of the prehistoric parent language from which most European and some Asiatic languages are descended, most probably lived on the Eurasian steppes some five or six thousand years ago. Martin West investigates their traditional mythologies, religions, and poetries, and points to elements of common heritage. In The East Face of Helicon (1997), West showed the extent to which Homeric and other early Greek poetry was influenced by Near Eastern traditions, mainly non-Indo-European. His new book presents a foil to that work by identifying elements of more ancient, Indo-European heritage in the Greek material. Topics covered include the status of poets and poetry in Indo-European societies; meter, style, and diction; gods and other supernatural beings, from Father Sky and Mother Earth to the Sun-god and his beautiful daughter, the Thunder-god and other elemental deities, and earthly orders such as Nymphs and Elves; the forms of hymns, prayers, and
incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative.
incantations; conceptions about the world, its origin, mankind, death, and fate; the ideology of fame and of immortalization through poetry; the typology of the king and the hero; the hero as warrior, and the conventions of battle narrative.
539 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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1355 people want to read
About the author
M.L. West
58 books39 followersMartin Litchfield West was an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His many publications include Ancient Greek Music (OUP, 1992), The East Face of Helicon (OUP, 1997), and Indo-European Poetry and Myth (OUP, 2007).
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
November 9, 2009
Good heavens, is this a superb and invaluable book. Following a comparative philological method, classicist M. L. West examines parallel mythological motifs in far-flung Indo-European cultures and languages and carefully suggests various reconstructions of a prototypical Indo-European mythology from which these common motifs derived. Even viewed solely as a compendium of motifs in the vast Indo-European culturo-linguistic zone, this book is a contribution of the highest order. Coupled with this reconstructive analysis, this book sinks very deeply indeed into the old roots of gods and heroes and ancient ideas of the cosmos.
What emerges is an Indo-European mythology that was populated by gods who embody natural phenomena, and who are not much involved with the creation of the cosmos or the maintenance of a moral order. The primary concern of this mythology is the activity of the hero, who is of a masculine type, primarily concerned with adventure, conquest, the winning of wives and lands, and the overcoming of death by winning glorious renown. The goddess makes little contribution to this vision, which is focused on military adventurism rather than fertility.
This book paints an extraordinary and vivid portrait of the common cultural heritage of cultures spread from Ireland to Persia, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean -- an enormous and diverse area that shared a set of fundamental stories that are strikingly uniform in tone and style. It is hard to imagine a book that invites the reader to dig as deeply into the roots of mythology or to think as deeply about the nature of poetry. This is a remarkable achievement.
This book is NOT recommended for the beginner ... A basic understanding of philology and some familiarity with the main mythological traditions touched upon -- particularly Greek mythology, Zoroastrianism, and Vedic Hinduism -- is highly recommended.
What emerges is an Indo-European mythology that was populated by gods who embody natural phenomena, and who are not much involved with the creation of the cosmos or the maintenance of a moral order. The primary concern of this mythology is the activity of the hero, who is of a masculine type, primarily concerned with adventure, conquest, the winning of wives and lands, and the overcoming of death by winning glorious renown. The goddess makes little contribution to this vision, which is focused on military adventurism rather than fertility.
This book paints an extraordinary and vivid portrait of the common cultural heritage of cultures spread from Ireland to Persia, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean -- an enormous and diverse area that shared a set of fundamental stories that are strikingly uniform in tone and style. It is hard to imagine a book that invites the reader to dig as deeply into the roots of mythology or to think as deeply about the nature of poetry. This is a remarkable achievement.
This book is NOT recommended for the beginner ... A basic understanding of philology and some familiarity with the main mythological traditions touched upon -- particularly Greek mythology, Zoroastrianism, and Vedic Hinduism -- is highly recommended.
September 25, 2013
M.L. West has always been interested in how myths were shared across the Classical world. In the 1990s, he wrote a monograph titled The East Face of Helicon on how Greek epic drew heavily from the Near East. Thinking about what the Greek tradition kept from the Indo-European heritage common to many cultures of Europe and Asia led him to this much vaster project. Indo-European Poetry and Myth aims to synthesize and extend research on what aspects of the literature of antiquity – and even the Lithuanian and Latvian songs collected in the early modern era – go back to Indo-European times.
The opening two chapters cover Indo-European poetry, revealing common poetic metaphors and principles of versification from Ireland to India. The bulk of the work, however, consists of comparisons of the mythologies of the Indo-European peoples, which West treats exhaustively with each chapter divided into a myriad of subthemes. For example, chapter 5 “Sun and Daughter” consists of the following sections:
Because the subject is explored so exhaustively and the presentation is so dense, very few are going to read the whole thing. I have been keenly interested in Indo-European linguistics for years, but even I found myself skimming a few parts. However, there’s no denying that the book brings together in a single volume all the divergent research going on among specialists in the various languages.
But the great flaw of this text is that it is too much a collection of earlier work on the subject, and thus reflects much speculation that has been overturned by later research. For example, West links a number of Greek words to Sanskrit or Iranian words, but Beekes’ recent work shows these Greek words to be borrowings from the Pre-Greek substrate language and not inherited from Indo-European. (Indeed, Beekes has conclusively shown that Pre-Greek was non-Indo-European, but West at one point even incorporates into the text the obsolete idea that Greece was inhabited by another Indo-European people before the Greeks, the old “Pelasgian hypothesis”.)
So, I can recommend this to readers with an interest in the subject, but be prepared to take everything with a grain of salt (or more). A second edition with a more critical approach would do much to remedy this infelicity.
The opening two chapters cover Indo-European poetry, revealing common poetic metaphors and principles of versification from Ireland to India. The bulk of the work, however, consists of comparisons of the mythologies of the Indo-European peoples, which West treats exhaustively with each chapter divided into a myriad of subthemes. For example, chapter 5 “Sun and Daughter” consists of the following sections:
The divine Sun. The Sun as a deity. Attributes; the all-seeing god. Oaths by the Sun.––The Sun’s motion conceptualized. The solar wheel. The solar steed(s). The solar boat. The dark side of the sun. How old is all this?––Further mythical motifs.––Cultic observance. Salutation of the rising and setting sun. A taboo.––Dawn (and Night). Attributes; imagery. Dawn’s lovers. The Dawn goddess and the spring festival.––The Daughter of the Sun. The Vedic evidence. The Baltic and Slavic evidence. The Greek evidence. Daughters of the Sun in other traditions. Astronomical interpretations. Ritual aspects.––Conclusion.
Because the subject is explored so exhaustively and the presentation is so dense, very few are going to read the whole thing. I have been keenly interested in Indo-European linguistics for years, but even I found myself skimming a few parts. However, there’s no denying that the book brings together in a single volume all the divergent research going on among specialists in the various languages.
But the great flaw of this text is that it is too much a collection of earlier work on the subject, and thus reflects much speculation that has been overturned by later research. For example, West links a number of Greek words to Sanskrit or Iranian words, but Beekes’ recent work shows these Greek words to be borrowings from the Pre-Greek substrate language and not inherited from Indo-European. (Indeed, Beekes has conclusively shown that Pre-Greek was non-Indo-European, but West at one point even incorporates into the text the obsolete idea that Greece was inhabited by another Indo-European people before the Greeks, the old “Pelasgian hypothesis”.)
So, I can recommend this to readers with an interest in the subject, but be prepared to take everything with a grain of salt (or more). A second edition with a more critical approach would do much to remedy this infelicity.
July 20, 2023
Feels more like a personal reference work documenting a few decades of casual research than a book synthesizing information in a meaningful way. Haphazard structure aside, West systematically refuses to look at the context of neighbouring non-IE societies to determine which features are genetically Indo-European and which are areal borrowings, rendering any pretence at reconstruction suspect. The result is a work that, for all its exhausting length, can never be much more than frustratingly shallow.
October 25, 2022
Downright comprehensive.
November 16, 2025
nevermind we're so back chat
January 20, 2026
Mission 2026: Binge reviewing all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review back when I read them
Martin L. West’s 'Indo-European Poetry and Myth' is one of those books that quietly but permanently alters how you understand both literature and history. It does not dazzle with rhetorical flourish or attempt to seduce the reader with grand metaphysical claims. Instead, it works through accumulation, patience, and precision, until a startling realisation takes shape: that vast stretches of what we call Western, South Asian, and even Eurasian imagination are not isolated achievements but variations of a deep, shared poetic inheritance. Returning to this book now, I am struck less by its erudition, formidable though that is, and more by its discipline. West does not speculate where evidence does not carry him. He reconstructs, cautiously and methodically, a lost world of song, ritual, and story whose echoes still vibrate through Homer, the Rig Veda, Old Norse poetry, and beyond.
This is not a book about mythology in the popular sense of gods and monsters alone. It is a book about form: how poetry remembers, how myth travels, and how language preserves memory long after cultures forget their origins. West’s central argument, that Indo-European-speaking cultures inherited not only linguistic structures but also poetic conventions, mythic themes, and ritual formulas from a common ancestor, is both bold and restrained. He does not claim to recover a complete proto-mythology. Instead, he shows recurring patterns: the dragon-slayer myth, the cosmic twin, the sacred drink, the poet-priest, the binding power of oaths, and the centrality of fame and remembrance. These motifs appear across cultures separated by centuries and geography, not as carbon copies but as recognisably related transformations.
What makes the book so compelling is West’s refusal to mystify this process. There is no romantic nostalgia for a lost golden age, no spiritualised longing for primordial unity. The proto-Indo-Europeans, as they emerge here, are not noble abstractions but human communities shaped by violence, hierarchy, ritual obligation, and the harsh demands of survival. Their poetry was functional before it was beautiful: it praised warriors, sanctified contracts, invoked gods for protection, and preserved lineage. Aesthetics grew out of necessity. Reading this now, I was reminded how often modern readers forget that poetry was once a technology of memory and power, not a private art.
West’s scholarship is formidable, but what impressed me most on rereading was his clarity. He moves effortlessly between Greek hexameter, Vedic hymns, Hittite ritual texts, Latin epic, and Old Irish verse without losing the reader. The comparisons are precise, often startling. A phrase in Homer suddenly illuminates a line in the Rig Veda. A Norse myth about Thor resonates uncannily with Indic storm-god imagery. These moments accumulate into something like intellectual vertigo. One begins to sense how thin the walls between traditions really are, how much has been inherited, reshaped, and half-forgotten rather than invented ex nihilo.
The chapters on poetic diction and formulaic language are especially revealing. West shows that certain epithets, metaphors, and narrative structures recur not because later poets copied earlier ones, but because they were drawing from a shared reservoir of expression. Poetry here is not individual genius erupting in isolation, but tradition speaking through individuals. That idea felt almost unsettling in its implications. It challenges modern notions of originality and authorship, replacing them with a vision of creativity as skilled participation in a long-standing system. Homer, in this light, becomes not a solitary genius but an extraordinarily gifted inheritor.
Equally important is West’s attention to ritual context. Myths are not treated as free-floating stories but as components of religious practice. The slaying of a monster, the marriage of sky and earth, and the journey to the underworld: these are not just narratives but symbolic acts tied to seasonal cycles, social order, and cosmic anxiety. Reading these sections, I was struck by how inseparable poetry and religion once were. Language did not merely describe reality; it was believed to act upon it. Words bound gods, sealed treaties, and ensured continuity between generations.
At the same time, the book demands intellectual humility from its reader. West is careful to mark the limits of reconstruction. He repeatedly reminds us that similarity does not always imply inheritance, and that convergence can occur independently. This caution is refreshing in a field often tempted by sweeping claims. The result is a work that feels trustworthy even when it ventures into speculative territory. West never pretends certainty where there is none. He models a scholarly ethic that values restraint as much as insight.
Reading the book now, I was also aware of how it quietly resists ideological misuse. Indo-European studies have long been shadowed by racial and nationalist distortions. West does not polemicise against these abuses, but his method itself undermines them. There is nothing triumphant or supremacist in his account. The shared Indo-European heritage he reconstructs is not a badge of superiority but a reminder of interconnection. Cultures diverge, adapt, and hybridise. What survives is not purity but transformation.
Personally, I found the book deeply humbling. It made me rethink how I read epics, hymns, and myths I thought I knew well. The Rig Veda no longer felt isolated within Indian tradition; Homer no longer felt uniquely Greek. Each became part of a vast conversation stretching back into prehistory. That awareness does not flatten difference; it deepens it. Knowing that similar structures underlie these traditions makes their divergences more meaningful, not less.
This is not an easy book, nor does it pretend to be. It assumes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to move slowly through dense argument. But the reward is commensurate with the effort. Few books manage to make the ancient world feel simultaneously more intelligible and more mysterious. West explains patterns, but he never drains them of wonder. On the contrary, understanding how myth and poetry travel across time only intensifies their strangeness. That humans separated by millennia could imagine the cosmos in structurally similar ways is not comforting; it is astonishing.
By the time I closed the book, I felt less like I had finished reading something and more like I had been inducted into a way of seeing. Literature, after West, is no longer merely national or chronological. It is genealogical. It carries deep memory. And myth, far from being childish fantasy, emerges as one of humanity’s most durable intellectual achievements: a means of thinking through existence when explanation alone is not enough.
'Indo-European Poetry and Myth' is not fashionable, nor is it easily summarised. It asks for time, seriousness, and intellectual honesty. But it repays those demands by offering a vision of human culture that is both rigorously grounded and quietly profound. Few scholarly works manage to feel this necessary. A most recommended book.
A classic for ages. Most Recommended.
Martin L. West’s 'Indo-European Poetry and Myth' is one of those books that quietly but permanently alters how you understand both literature and history. It does not dazzle with rhetorical flourish or attempt to seduce the reader with grand metaphysical claims. Instead, it works through accumulation, patience, and precision, until a startling realisation takes shape: that vast stretches of what we call Western, South Asian, and even Eurasian imagination are not isolated achievements but variations of a deep, shared poetic inheritance. Returning to this book now, I am struck less by its erudition, formidable though that is, and more by its discipline. West does not speculate where evidence does not carry him. He reconstructs, cautiously and methodically, a lost world of song, ritual, and story whose echoes still vibrate through Homer, the Rig Veda, Old Norse poetry, and beyond.
This is not a book about mythology in the popular sense of gods and monsters alone. It is a book about form: how poetry remembers, how myth travels, and how language preserves memory long after cultures forget their origins. West’s central argument, that Indo-European-speaking cultures inherited not only linguistic structures but also poetic conventions, mythic themes, and ritual formulas from a common ancestor, is both bold and restrained. He does not claim to recover a complete proto-mythology. Instead, he shows recurring patterns: the dragon-slayer myth, the cosmic twin, the sacred drink, the poet-priest, the binding power of oaths, and the centrality of fame and remembrance. These motifs appear across cultures separated by centuries and geography, not as carbon copies but as recognisably related transformations.
What makes the book so compelling is West’s refusal to mystify this process. There is no romantic nostalgia for a lost golden age, no spiritualised longing for primordial unity. The proto-Indo-Europeans, as they emerge here, are not noble abstractions but human communities shaped by violence, hierarchy, ritual obligation, and the harsh demands of survival. Their poetry was functional before it was beautiful: it praised warriors, sanctified contracts, invoked gods for protection, and preserved lineage. Aesthetics grew out of necessity. Reading this now, I was reminded how often modern readers forget that poetry was once a technology of memory and power, not a private art.
West’s scholarship is formidable, but what impressed me most on rereading was his clarity. He moves effortlessly between Greek hexameter, Vedic hymns, Hittite ritual texts, Latin epic, and Old Irish verse without losing the reader. The comparisons are precise, often startling. A phrase in Homer suddenly illuminates a line in the Rig Veda. A Norse myth about Thor resonates uncannily with Indic storm-god imagery. These moments accumulate into something like intellectual vertigo. One begins to sense how thin the walls between traditions really are, how much has been inherited, reshaped, and half-forgotten rather than invented ex nihilo.
The chapters on poetic diction and formulaic language are especially revealing. West shows that certain epithets, metaphors, and narrative structures recur not because later poets copied earlier ones, but because they were drawing from a shared reservoir of expression. Poetry here is not individual genius erupting in isolation, but tradition speaking through individuals. That idea felt almost unsettling in its implications. It challenges modern notions of originality and authorship, replacing them with a vision of creativity as skilled participation in a long-standing system. Homer, in this light, becomes not a solitary genius but an extraordinarily gifted inheritor.
Equally important is West’s attention to ritual context. Myths are not treated as free-floating stories but as components of religious practice. The slaying of a monster, the marriage of sky and earth, and the journey to the underworld: these are not just narratives but symbolic acts tied to seasonal cycles, social order, and cosmic anxiety. Reading these sections, I was struck by how inseparable poetry and religion once were. Language did not merely describe reality; it was believed to act upon it. Words bound gods, sealed treaties, and ensured continuity between generations.
At the same time, the book demands intellectual humility from its reader. West is careful to mark the limits of reconstruction. He repeatedly reminds us that similarity does not always imply inheritance, and that convergence can occur independently. This caution is refreshing in a field often tempted by sweeping claims. The result is a work that feels trustworthy even when it ventures into speculative territory. West never pretends certainty where there is none. He models a scholarly ethic that values restraint as much as insight.
Reading the book now, I was also aware of how it quietly resists ideological misuse. Indo-European studies have long been shadowed by racial and nationalist distortions. West does not polemicise against these abuses, but his method itself undermines them. There is nothing triumphant or supremacist in his account. The shared Indo-European heritage he reconstructs is not a badge of superiority but a reminder of interconnection. Cultures diverge, adapt, and hybridise. What survives is not purity but transformation.
Personally, I found the book deeply humbling. It made me rethink how I read epics, hymns, and myths I thought I knew well. The Rig Veda no longer felt isolated within Indian tradition; Homer no longer felt uniquely Greek. Each became part of a vast conversation stretching back into prehistory. That awareness does not flatten difference; it deepens it. Knowing that similar structures underlie these traditions makes their divergences more meaningful, not less.
This is not an easy book, nor does it pretend to be. It assumes patience, curiosity, and a willingness to move slowly through dense argument. But the reward is commensurate with the effort. Few books manage to make the ancient world feel simultaneously more intelligible and more mysterious. West explains patterns, but he never drains them of wonder. On the contrary, understanding how myth and poetry travel across time only intensifies their strangeness. That humans separated by millennia could imagine the cosmos in structurally similar ways is not comforting; it is astonishing.
By the time I closed the book, I felt less like I had finished reading something and more like I had been inducted into a way of seeing. Literature, after West, is no longer merely national or chronological. It is genealogical. It carries deep memory. And myth, far from being childish fantasy, emerges as one of humanity’s most durable intellectual achievements: a means of thinking through existence when explanation alone is not enough.
'Indo-European Poetry and Myth' is not fashionable, nor is it easily summarised. It asks for time, seriousness, and intellectual honesty. But it repays those demands by offering a vision of human culture that is both rigorously grounded and quietly profound. Few scholarly works manage to feel this necessary. A most recommended book.
A classic for ages. Most Recommended.
August 30, 2016
Breathtaking erudition, delivered in a readable style. West has set himself to trace out the features of Indo-European poetry and myth from the preliterate period, using a method akin to stemmatics in textual criticism or to historical linguistic reconstructions. As a classicist, I particularly enjoyed the connections with literatures of cultures other than Greece and Rome: Ireland, Germany, Armenia, India, Old English, etc.. It is rather staggering to think of someone knowing all these languages, let alone having enough familiarity with the various epics to produce a book of this sort.
The warning in one of the other reviews below is accurate: you won't get the most out of the book unless you already know a good deal of mythology and preferably some classical languages. While West is scrupulous to translate the Old Irish, Sanskrit, Armenian, and other less commonly studied tongues, he frequently leaves Greek and Latin untranslated.
The warning in one of the other reviews below is accurate: you won't get the most out of the book unless you already know a good deal of mythology and preferably some classical languages. While West is scrupulous to translate the Old Irish, Sanskrit, Armenian, and other less commonly studied tongues, he frequently leaves Greek and Latin untranslated.
June 20, 2021
As other reviewers have noted, proceed with caution: a number of the connections drawn out here are fanciful, and West often cherry-picks, ignoring evidence from the wider Indo-European context that wouldn't support (or would contradict) his inferences. The book is by no means without merit, and has a lot of good material; but I don't recommend it to readers not prepared to separate the wheat from the chaff. Much sounder starting places are Calvert Watkins' "American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots" and (better still) Carl Darling Buck's "Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages."
Read
June 23, 2013An extremely useful, philological, language-based approach to its subject matter. ("Archaeology through words," as another reviewer aptly puts it.) Absolutely fascinating; but there is cause to be skeptical over certain more speculative interpretations (especially where underlying assumptions which are not foregone conclusions underlie the argument). Some conclusions are more sound than others. Extremely valuable book, however.
December 30, 2009
Author describes himself as "a stranger in Paradise with a clipboard". Aye, and for 100 bucks, I wish this read better than a well-ordered file cabinet. Anyway, someone had to venture forth to try and make sense of it all.
[LIST of parallels at end of back DJ blurb:]
[LIST of parallels at end of back DJ blurb:]
April 18, 2020
A lot of this is a real stretch but no less fun for that.
January 28, 2026
A mic-dropping show of erudition from West, who if I had to guess knew everything worth knowing about Vedic, Hittite, Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Latvian, German, Norse and Irish literature and amassed a nearly uncountable number of shared words and phrases, rhetorical styles, religious genres and much more. Sadly, I may never know the full extent of his learning, because someone walked off with my New York Public Library interlibrary loan copy today from the coffee shop where I planned to read last five or six chapters. Now some miscreant is faced with haaving to unload a secondhand 503-page book from one of the more obscure corners of the humanities. Good luck to you, you thieving bastard.
Where was I? Right. The book wasn't as absorbing as West's The East Face of Helicon, because shared elements across Indo-European cultures are what you'd expect, while Greek borrowings from non-IE Middle Eastern civilizations are more surprising (or were until people in Classics and Biblical studies departments started recognizing them). Then again there's a lot of IE stuff I didn't know, such as the decades-old discovery of a fragment of Luwian poetry that seems to be from an epic about the Trojan War, composed hundreds of years before the Homeric version. I don't know if that supports the war's historicity or merely the fact that mythological tropes are endlessly retold, inherited and borrowed. Not a question West stops to consider, at least not in the part I got to read.
Hardly as satisfying as "Helicon," then, and not nearly as much fun as Michael Witzel's The Origins of the World's Mythologies, which theorizes recklessly about the spread of myths shared by nearly every culture on the planet. But still a solid survey.
Where was I? Right. The book wasn't as absorbing as West's The East Face of Helicon, because shared elements across Indo-European cultures are what you'd expect, while Greek borrowings from non-IE Middle Eastern civilizations are more surprising (or were until people in Classics and Biblical studies departments started recognizing them). Then again there's a lot of IE stuff I didn't know, such as the decades-old discovery of a fragment of Luwian poetry that seems to be from an epic about the Trojan War, composed hundreds of years before the Homeric version. I don't know if that supports the war's historicity or merely the fact that mythological tropes are endlessly retold, inherited and borrowed. Not a question West stops to consider, at least not in the part I got to read.
Hardly as satisfying as "Helicon," then, and not nearly as much fun as Michael Witzel's The Origins of the World's Mythologies, which theorizes recklessly about the spread of myths shared by nearly every culture on the planet. But still a solid survey.
March 3, 2020
The breadth and depth of information is great. My only complaint is the structure. I didn’t come away with it with a comprehensive overview of the material. I would have preferred to have it organized more like a story, or at least a concluding chapter that ties everything together. It’s still fine as a reference work, it’s just not as interesting or effective as it could have been.
February 11, 2024
Loved this. By no means a light read, but the breadth of sources cited makes this an invaluable resource for those interested in the mythemes and poetic traditions of the IE diaspora. Plus, West flashes a surprisingly great sense of humor here and there.
March 11, 2020
This is one of my "grab when the house is burning down" books. Must have.
August 31, 2024
partes boas e partes ruins.
February 9, 2026
Highly erudite. One wants to wear tweed and smoke a pipe in a leather armchair while reading it.
October 2, 2023
As enjoyable as my experience with this book has been overall, I would advise to approach it with caution. It is very readable – provided you are really interested in the subject as it’s quite a heavy volume. The matter is arranged in a very clear and comprehensive way. There is huge wealth of knowledge gathered there – but not all of it is up to date.
I’m reluctant to make claims to be expert in anything to be honest, but there are some things that I know a wee bit about. One such subject is early Irish history, so I was able to note a number of inaccuracies and/or out-of-date statements in the fragments devoted to this subject – and one or two passages that in my opinion demonstrated that the Author had not read the works he was referencing.
I have seen evidence of this sin before in other books by other authors. It is arguably a legitimate way of referring the reader to other literature, but it’s good manners to admit that the references are quoted after someone else’s work. Not everyone can be bothered with good manners though – after all, there is very little chance that someone’s going to notice.
Another grudge that I have against this book is that, on several occasions, the Author doesn’t provide translations of quotes from other languages – Latin, French, or German. My Latin is a bit rusty, I had one year of French 20 years ago, and in German I can say ‘Ich liebe dich’ and ‘auf wiedersehen’. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who is bothered by this.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fascinating read – and undoubtedly a lot of hard work went into producing this book. But in my opinion a book of such scope should have been done collaboratively, because it’s just not possible for one person to know it all. This book not only contains some out-of-date material, but it is also in itself a product of an out-of-date scholarly culture where one was expected to produce their own ‘opus magnum’. Nowadays, a project like this would probably have several authors specialised in a range of relevant subjects. For one person, it is just too much to manage efficiently.
I’m reluctant to make claims to be expert in anything to be honest, but there are some things that I know a wee bit about. One such subject is early Irish history, so I was able to note a number of inaccuracies and/or out-of-date statements in the fragments devoted to this subject – and one or two passages that in my opinion demonstrated that the Author had not read the works he was referencing.
I have seen evidence of this sin before in other books by other authors. It is arguably a legitimate way of referring the reader to other literature, but it’s good manners to admit that the references are quoted after someone else’s work. Not everyone can be bothered with good manners though – after all, there is very little chance that someone’s going to notice.
Another grudge that I have against this book is that, on several occasions, the Author doesn’t provide translations of quotes from other languages – Latin, French, or German. My Latin is a bit rusty, I had one year of French 20 years ago, and in German I can say ‘Ich liebe dich’ and ‘auf wiedersehen’. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who is bothered by this.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a fascinating read – and undoubtedly a lot of hard work went into producing this book. But in my opinion a book of such scope should have been done collaboratively, because it’s just not possible for one person to know it all. This book not only contains some out-of-date material, but it is also in itself a product of an out-of-date scholarly culture where one was expected to produce their own ‘opus magnum’. Nowadays, a project like this would probably have several authors specialised in a range of relevant subjects. For one person, it is just too much to manage efficiently.
January 9, 2014
It wasn't what I was hoping for by the title. I was hoping for a book that would gather together what little science, anthropology and archaeology knows about the Indo-Europeans and their stories. The myths and legends and things they believed. Instead, it's a very academically wordy book with much guessing as to what these people believed by taking root words and trying to make them match up with things the author believes makes sense using Greek and Roman and Slavic texts. Phrases like "it has been suspected" are used a ton in this book. There are no epic poems or coherent Myths in this text at all. If you know your Greek and Roman myth, then you already know all the stories in this book.
July 29, 2011
Please see my full review at Celtic Scholar
February 25, 2012
Other than a decent dictionary, this is possibly the most valuable book I have on my shelf in terms of being a writer.
Archaeology by means of words.
Archaeology by means of words.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews