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Editorial Reviews
Publishers Weekly
From Iceland to India, from prehistoric cave paintings and fertility figurines to such modern-day "myths" as the invisible hand, the Oedipal conflict and Schrodinger's cat, Leeming's intriguing treatise on comparative mythology covers a lot of ground. Out of this enormous variety of information, Leeming, a professor of comparative literature and author of The World of Myth, discerns a coherent, distinctive European mythical tradition. He traces it back to the encounter, starting in the 3rd millennium B.C., between a sedentary, agricultural "Old Europe" and nomadic, pastoral Indo-European invaders. In Leeming's view, this conflict gave rise to creation myths of apocalyptic battles between rival bands of deities, in which archaic earth-goddesses were subdued (but not obliterated) by new warrior-sky gods. He shows how common Indo-European themes-the tripartite nature of divinity, the death and rebirth of a god, the preoccupation with cattle raiding-resonate throughout classical Greek, Roman, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic and Norse mythologies. The European mythological tradition culminated, he feels, in Christianity, which featured the tripartite Holy Trinity, the hero-God Jesus (who died and was resurrected), and the comeback of the earth-goddess in the guise of the Virgin Mary. Leeming subscribes to the Carl Jung-Joseph Campbell belief that myths voice an essential "European psyche or soul," and underpin everything from environmental despoliation to Nazism to free-market economics. While he occasionally overstates these arguments, his wide-ranging, well-written treatment contains a wealth of insights on the development of Western culture. Photos. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Leeming (English & comparative literature, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs; The World of Myth) offers a chronological and thematic survey of the European mythological tradition that most libraries should not fail to note. After exploring his subject's prehistoric and Indo-European roots, the author discusses mythologies from the major European cultures, including Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic, as well as Finnish and a few other cultures that are not Indo-European, such as Iberian and Basque. He also considers the development of the hero tradition, including Arthur and the concept of the "once and future king." In this way, the book is highly reminiscent of Joseph Campbell's oeuvre on comparative world mythologies. Leeming closes with a discussion of mythic patterns among the various European cultures that ties much of the mythology to Christian and other tripartite traditions. Although it retells select illustrative stories, this is primarily a scholarly history, though less dense and more compact than any of Campbell's books. Potentially a reference in secondary schools and public libraries, this is most suitable for academic libraries.-Kathy Koenig, Ellis Sch., Pittsburgh Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
An overview, dry as the dust of the Parthenon, of the major streams of ancient European mythmaking and of modern scholarship thereon. Leeming (English, Comp. Lit./Univ. of Conn., Storrs; Stephen Spender: A Life in Modernism, 1999, etc.) is working on fertile ground here; who could fail to be fascinated, for instance, by stories of magical men who turn themselves into maggots to infest sacred cows, of giant oak trees that block out the sun, of screeching harridans whose scary hovels rest on stilts made of chicken bones? Yet, darting from one mythic tradition-Slavic, Hellenic, Celtic-to another, Leeming spends little time retelling such stories, instead offering schematic summaries of such grand tales as the Tain, the Mabinogion, and the Prose Edda, buttressed by snippets of history-a couple of pages on archaic Greece here, a paragraph on the arrival of Christianity to Ireland there. His forays into the scholarship on, say, proto-Indo-European society are similarly cursory, and they overlook the considerable controversies that have developed around such matters as the Dumezilian elaboration of that society into "tripartite functions" headed by priests and warriors (a reconstruction that, some have charged, reflects the late Georges Dumezil's devotion to fascism more than the historical record). Leeming peppers his slender narrative with provocative remarks that bear further discussion, as when he links Adam Smith's notion of the "invisible hand," a metaphysical construct through and through, to "the old Judeo-Christian mythology," adding that the modern marketplace is itself something of a mythological being. One imagines that this will be most useful for students in courses on comparativemythology. General readers certainly won't find it a gripping read; they'll do better to turn to The Golden Bough, whose doubtful scholarship is at least offset by good storytelling. More sophisticated than the typical gods-for-clods survey, but far less interesting.Product Details
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Meet the Author
David Leeming is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. His books include The World of Myth, Dictionary of Asian Mythology, Myths, Legends, and Folktales, and Myth: A Biography of Belief. He lives in New York City.
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