Chips From a German Workshop, Vol. 4: Essays on Mythology and Folk-Lore
Friedrich Max Muller
Hardcover
(Forgotten Books, Feb. 4, 2018)
Excerpt from Chips From a German Workshop, Vol. 4: Essays on Mythology and Folk-LoreThe systematic classification to which most myths have been submitted before they reached us, though it may be helpful in some respects, is nevertheless as likely to be misleading as a Hortas siccus would be to a botanist, if debarred from his rambles through meadows and hedges. Nothing seems more natural therefore than that in examining the various specimens of mythology, carefully collected and arranged for their inspection, different students should have felt absorbed each in his own special department, losing sight of the general character of mythology and of the surroundings in which it was formed.If we keep our eyes open to survey not only a portion, but the whole of mythology, we shall find that whatever detritus it may carry along, its original constituent elements were words and phrases about the most striking phenomena Of nature, such as day and night, dawn and evening, sun and moon, sky, earth, and sea, in their various relations to each other and to man.These snowflakes of early thought soon became hardened and changed into ice by inevitable misunderstandings, inevitable,1 I say, because, as we are now able to understand, they sprang from the very nature of language.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.