Summary of Contemporary Theories of Myth

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 4, Chapter 10, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

    For a summary of contemporary theories of myth, see James Kissane, "Victorian Mythology," Victorian Studies 6 (1962),5-28. F. Max Müller, the leader of the philological school of comparative mythology, lectured at Oxford and London in the 1850s and 1860s and receives mention in The Queen of the Air, but his view is the complete reverse of Ruskin's. Müller traced the genealogy of Indo-Aryan myths through resemblances in the names of deities and argued that myth making is a "disease of language" occurring spontaneously under the primitive experience of awe, deities being the simple product of grammatical requirements like gender and the need of a subject to perform an action. For Müller the verb is of particular importance in the "deformation" of language. Ruskin, on the contrary, recreates the living presence of Athena by a deliberate accumulation of verbs, reaffirming his belief that the universe is an incarnate language.

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    Last modified December 2000