Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/121

 Reviews. 105

part of the Eddaic writers, and notably of Snorre. Why ? It is surely simpler to argue, what is indeed evident on other grounds, that Germans and Iranians, both members of the Aryan unity, were in such close contact before the Iranians set forth to occupy the regions to the south-west or south of the Caspian as to bring about exceptionally close kinship of the mythic germs which each race was to develop independently. Avesta and Edda are, as regards certain myths, closer to each other than even Avesta and Veda, or than either of the three to Hellenic mythology. This fact enables us to postulate prehistoric contacts between Germans and Iranians of which we should otherwise be ignorant. To explain it by literary influence within the historic period {i.e. from 500 B.C. to 900 A.D.) seems to me a complete ignoring of the plainest facts of history. For probably two-thirds of this space of time the Germans were almost as much cut off from the Aryans of Iran as from the Aryans of Northern India. If Eddaic mythology is to be treated as a loan (a point on which readers of Folk-Lore know my opinion) let it be a loan from those Aryan peoples with whom the Germans were in historic contact, Celts, Greeks, Romans.

I cannot but think M. Soderblom has paid too little attention to the non-eschatological Elysium (as it may be called) found in Greece, in Celtdom, and in Scandinavia. Certain Avestic myths find their natural explanation in a similar conception. And I may be permitted some surprise at his referring for Irish examples not to the Voyage of Bran, where the whole subject is discussed, but to a chance allusion in an article by M. Beauvois on Central American mythology.

This book, translated from the Swedish, is, perhaps through the translator's fault, hard reading, but it is well worth the attention of English readers. In spite of the fact that England possesses in Dr. Mills and Mr. West two of the most eminent of living " Zoroastrianists," in spite of the fact that the official heads of the oldest existing organised religion, save Judaism, are British subjects, the civilisation and religion of the Iranian Aryans are too little known in this country. And yet for the solution of many problems connected with the development of Aryan religion and culture, more assistance is perhaps to be derived from the Avestic than from the Vedic literature.

Alfred Nutt.