The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

WEREWOLVES AND SCHOLARS
shape in this unaccountable manner, and in another minute they were
all in full cry after the wretched victim of science, who might have fared
badly indeed had he not succeeded in gaining a carriage on the highroad
before his pursuers came up. 69
The ‘mistaken werewolf’ idea in fact became a regular motif in Victorian
fiction. These narratives would generally involve an individual
pretending to be a werewolf amongst credulous peasants (or peasants
persecuting an individual they supposed to be a werewolf). The
situation would be resolved through the rational explanation of the
‘objective’ protagonist or narrator. 70
While the early folklorists’ monographs were generally collections of
material from a designated area, the urge towards the more scientific
analysis of folklore came to fruition in 1856 with the publication of
Max Müller’s essay ‘Comparative Mythology’. Müller held a professorship
at Oxford, but he had been schooled in the German tradition of
philological mythology founded by the Brothers Grimm, a tradition
characterized by an emphasis upon the role of language in the evolution
of folklore and mythology. Basing his theory upon a knowledge
of Sanskrit, Müller postulated that myths are born from ‘a disease of
language’. Dorson summarizes his argument succinctly:
All the Indo-European peoples belonged to a common Aryan stock; after
the migration of the European groups from their Indic homeland, the
parent language, and the mythology it related, splintered into various
offshoots. A time came when the original meanings of the names of the
Vedic gods [those deities described in the Veda, an ancient Sanskrit text]
were forgotten, and survived only in mythical phrases and proverbs of
uncertain sense. Stories then developed to explain these phrases. From
this ‘disease of language’ myths were born. 71
The task of the comparative mythologist, then, was to sift through
mythological systems in search of linguistic and thematic clues which
would indicate the origins and genealogy of the myth, and which would
explain the relationships between apparently diverse stories. Müller
himself believed that the primary subject of early mythology (and hence
all subsequent mythology) was the rising and setting of the sun, which
is why his approach was sometimes referred to as ‘solar mythology’:
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