Note 845 — Chapter XVI · GRECIAN MYTHES, AS UNDERSTOOD, FELT AND INTERPRETED BY THE GREEKS THEMSELVES.
Reading edition
O. Müller, in his Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (cap. iv. p. 108), has pointed out the mistake of supposing that there existed originally some nucleus of pure reality as the starting-point of the mythes, and that upon this nucleus fiction was superinduced afterwards: he maintains that the real and the ideal were blended together in the primitive conception of the mythes. Respecting the general state of mind out of which the mythes grew, see especially pages 78 and 110 of that work, which is everywhere full of instruction on the subject of the Grecian mythes, and is eminently suggestive, even where the positions of the author are not completely made out.
The short Heldensage der Griechen by Nitzsch (Kiel, 1842, t. v.) contains more of just and original thought on the subject of the Grecian mythes than any work with which I am acquainted. I embrace completely the subjective point of view in which he regards them; and although I have profited much from reading his short tract, I may mention that before I ever saw it, I had enforced the same reasonings on the subject in an article in the Westminster Review, May 1843, on the Heroen-Geschichten of Niebuhr.
Jacob Grimm, in the preface to his Deutsche Mythologie (p. 1, 1st edit. Gött. 1835), pointedly insists on the distinction between “Sage” and history, as well as upon the fact that the former has its chief root in religious belief “Legend and history (he says) are powers each by itself, adjoining indeed on the confines, but having each its own separate and exclusive ground;” also p. xxvii. of the same introduction.
A view substantially similar is adopted by William Grimm, the other of the two distinguished brothers whose labors have so much elucidated Teutonic philology and antiquities. He examines the extent to which either historical matter of fact or historical names can be traced in the Deutsche Heldensage; and he comes to the conclusion that the former is next to nothing, the latter not considerable. He draws particular attention to the fact, that the audience for whom these poems were intended had not learned to distinguish history from poetry (W. Grimm, Deutsche Heldensage, pp. 8, 337, 342, 345, 399, Gött. 1829).