Indo-European Poetry and Myth

West, Martin Litchfield: Indo-European Poetry and Myth. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. XIII, 525 p.

Indo-European Poetry and Myth is a comparative study of Indo-European poetic and mythological traditions. Though, as West himself notes, it is similar in some respects to Calvert Watkins's How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford/New York 1995), the two, in fact, as West hopes (p. vi), complement each other: Watkins's book focuses more on the formulaic structures of Indo-European narrative traditions while West's book focuses more on comparative mythology. West's book might be seen, and would be useful, as an advanced text complementing Jaan Puhvel's introductory survey of IndoEuropean mythology Comparative Mythology (Baltimore 1987).

After an introduction that outlines West's methodological assumptions, the book moves to two chapters that offer a survey of the place of the poet and poetry in Indo-European culture and a brief account of "Phrase and Figure" in IndoEuropean literary traditions, and then on to a series of thematic chapters covering, in Chapter 3 "Gods and Goddesses"; in Chapter 4 "Sky and Earth" (images of the sky and earth as divinities in Indo-European traditions); in Chapter 5 "Sun and Daughter" (the sun as divine, as well as dawn goddesses); in Chapter 6 "Storm and Stream" (thunder gods and their weapons and opponents); in Chapter 7 "Nymphs and Gnomes" (creatures of the Indo-European lower mythology); in Chapter 8 "Hymns and Spells"; in Chapter 9...