Reviews for Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnologischen Grundlagen and Die Sonne im Mythos

The average rating for Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnologischen Grundlagen and Die Sonne im Mythos based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-18 00:00:00 Don Whilhoit This book is everything. I thought I didn't know about it when Neil Gaiman spoke of it in the introduction to his newest book, Norse Mythology, but as it turned out shortly after I bought this English version, I had it all along. *lol* Typical me. My original copy is in German though as the book was written by the Austrian professor Rudolph Simek of the University of Bonn who is a luminary in the field. I kept this translation because it has some additional text to my copy (included after the newest discoveries, the original is older and therefore had a few less archaeological knowledge to include). This is not a novel. This is what the title says: a dictionary. You hear the name of a Norse god and want to know all about him/her? You just look him/her up in this. However, it needs pointing out that this does not only contain all the Norse mythology but also the Anglo-Saxon myths, Germanic mythology, etc. Hence, you can find details on the Nibelungen saga and other (often less popular) myths and figures too. Since it's in alphabetical order (as is every dictionary), there is no narrative, a term from Norse mythology might be followed by a Germanic one so there is a "disruption", and some explanations might include details on other characters/events of the same mythology that one doesn't know about yet (but there is a great cross-reference section). Every explanation is detailed (as much as our knowledge allows, a lot has been lost because Vikings and other people of Northern faiths didn't keep written records) and easy to understand. Also, it gets more and more obvious when reading such works that most myths are variations of one another. One already has that feeling when reading the Edda or Neil Gaiman's version of those stories, but here it's even more obvious because you get the legends of several "different" faiths. If we look at Siegfried of the Nibelungen saga, for example, who slew a dragon ... even the depiction from several hundred years ago (that is still featured on MANY German churches) looks very much like the slaying of Jörmungandr (the Midgard Serpent, which can technically also be described as a dragon). I had already been on a Norse trip ever since Neil Gaiman's book (that one has a narrative and is in novel form) so I read the entire dictionary although that is not the way to do it of course. And it was a great way to remind me of some popular German myths that are usually not found in any novels/movies. Despite me reading the whole thing through and this being "only" a reference book, the reading never got tedious or boring. A definite authoritative work from a great scholar.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-08-23 00:00:00 George Hutchcraft Now in print for nearly 30 years, Rudolf Simek's well-known handbook is often celebrated for its breadth of coverage, yet after all these years and editions it contains as much useful information as it does flaws. The most immediately obvious issue is the lack of an index or table of contents of any kind. This situation is made more problematic by referrals to entries that do not exist or appear to have been absorbed into other entries (for example "stag cult"). The only organization that occurs in this work is bare-boned alphabetical order. In other words, prepare to sail solo in a sea of small entries about votive inscriptions, my friend. Much more of a problem is Simek's presentation of theory as fact combined with hyper-criticism of Snorri. Simek's approach to Snorri seems to owe something to the infamous ideological sphere of Eugen Mogk and Sophus Bugge. In other words, Simek generally seems to be of the school of thought that if Snorri is the only one to attest to something, then clearly Snorri must have simply made it up or was just confused. Sure, while Snorri's systemized, manual-writing approach may sometimes veer off into synthesis and blatant Euhemerism, Simek's criticisms often deal in plain conjecture, throwing the principle of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" to the wind. Sometimes these criticisms are even flatly wrong. For example, in an entry for "Vanaheimr", Simek states that, in the Prose Edda book "Gylfaginning", Snorri "unquestionably invented the name as a counterpart to Asgard". However, Snorri's claim is in fact echoed in a stanza of the Poetic Edda poem "Vafþrúðnismál": In Vanaheim wise powers him created, and to the gods a hostage gave. At the world's dissolution, he will return to the wise Vanir. (Thorpe trans.) A straightforward mistake. However, it should not be ignored that Snorri had access to material now long lost to us ("Heimdalargaldr", as an example, comes to mind), and, that said, perhaps a quote from the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil is appropriate here: "On this point as on so many others, Snorri knew what he was saying better than we do" (1973, "Remarks on Heimdall"). This is hardly an isolated problem. Some entries contradict one another; compare the entry for the goddess Hlín to the entry for the goddess Sága. Were they written by different people? Other problematic entry examples include an entry on the goddess Sif that somehow manages to argue against the "earth goddess" notion without mentioning the matter of Sif's "earth" heiti, the'to be frank'outright bizarreness of the *tiwaz-related entries, and an off-handed dismissal of the Indo-European Fjorgynn-Thor question. In this handbook opinions and preferred theories are pushed throughout, the word "recently" appears in entries apparently dating back to the 1970s, and the provided etymologies, as they are translated from German to English, need to be double-checked before use. At the end of the day, when one needs reach for this handbook, checking the source material for confirmation is a necessary additional step. Consider also supplementing it with Andy Orchard's and John Lindow's handbooks which, while smaller and less wide in coverage, generally do not suffer from the same issues.