This review article aims (a) to introduce this book to a wider readership (b) to present concisely what I see to be its most important findings for the study of Indo-European poetry and mythology (c) to add some additional material from my knowledge of this field, especially within the Indo-Iranian tradition, and (d) to make an over-all evaluation of the book.

When Martin West was awarded the Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies by the British Academy in 2002 he was described in the dedication as “the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation, not just in the United Kingdom, but worldwide”. Though by his own admission he is not a comparative philologistFootnote ¹, he has taken an increasing interest in the place of Greek in the Indo-European stemma and as early as 1973 he wrote an article on metre in the parent language.Footnote ² In 1988Footnote ³ he published a seminal study of semantic and linguistic parallels between the earliest Greek and Sanskrit literature. While this was much indebted to recent work by Rüdiger SchmittFootnote ⁴, Marcello DuranteFootnote ⁵ and Enrico CampanileFootnote ⁶ among others, it showed great judgment in assessing the merits of the various parallels adduced by those scholars. It also shows that West was developing a good working knowledge of Sanskrit among other languages.Footnote ⁷ When freed from the trammels of bureaucracy by his appointment as a Research Fellow of All Souls, he found time to turn his attention to the prehistory of Greek epic and the influence of other literatures and cultures upon its development; this would entail an examination of the Indo-European inheritance and the debt to Near Eastern poetry. It was the latter study that first engaged him. The striking result of this was the large book (he intended it to be ‘a separate little book’) entitled The East Face of Helicon published by the Clarendon Press in 1997. The comparative material here is drawn mostly from Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Syrian and Biblical sources. Debts to other Indo-European literatures apart from Hittite are not discussed in any detail. These were clearly saved for the volume under review. This is not the place to appraise West's achievement in The East Face of Helicon other than to say that it is incomparably the most comprehensive and credible attempt ever made to assemble and analyse this subject. What can we expect after this when the North (i.e. Indo-European) FaceFootnote ⁸ of the mountain is explored? West hints at the answer in his Preface and at the same time warns us that the focus of this book is different from that of the 1997 volume. Here the main subject is not Greek poetry, although it provides fundamental evidence, but the whole Indo-European tradition as far as it can be discovered in the surviving literatures. This is a “heritage from the past, not a continuing irradiation”.Footnote ⁹

In the introduction to Indo-European Poetry and Myth, West establishes his methodology by proposing a stemma identifying three levels for the original languages, the first being Proto-Indo-European which divides at the second level into Anatolian and ‘Mature’ Indo-EuropeanFootnote ¹⁰ and at the third level (c.2300 bce) into Western (Italic and Celtic), Northern-Central (Germanic, Baltic, Slavic) and Eastern (Greek, Armenian, Indo-Iranian). All three levels will form part of the study and ‘Indo-European’ will be used as a ‘shorthand’ term. Most of the evidence will involve the second and third levels. There is an important caveat: what is identified here as Indo-European does not exclude the possibility that similar material may exist in Semitic and other literate culturesFootnote ¹¹; it is important therefore to distinguish what seems to be a specifically historic connection and one that can be attributed to horizontal transmission, which is a way of describing borrowings between literatures or cultures in the recorded period.Footnote ¹² “When we have parallels that extend all the way from India or Iran to the Celtic world, their probative value may be rated particularly high, because horizontal transmission seems virtually ruled out”.Footnote ¹³ He defends his inevitable use of late sources for a number of language groupsFootnote ¹⁴ by using the analogy of comparative philology where conclusions are drawn about the parent language from data as chronologically diverse as Hittite and Vedic texts, which are over three thousand years old, and evidence from Albanian or Lithuanian which has only been recorded in the last five or six centuries. This analogy will not convince all West's readers. Reconstruction of the original language by linguists meets with understandable scepticism when attempts are made to reconstruct ‘real’ words, phrases and sentences. West himself wittily quips that when it comes to reconstructed roots peppered with laryngeals he defers to the authorities “whom some may view as the unreadable in pursuit of the unpronounceable”.Footnote ¹⁵ This fails to recognise that, however algebraic the forms postulated by philologists may seem, they do represent a consistent scheme of explaining the origin and relationship of the known reflexes; they should not be viewed as phonetic representations of actual words. The validity of the comparative method in constructing the Indo-European linguistic stemma has been proved by its convincing results, as West is ready to acknowledge; indeed he believes that a similar method can be used with poetry and mythology. The proof of such a belief can only be judged by its results. The results are set out fully in this book and it will be for the reader to decide. There is no objective canon, as in comparative philology, and West admits that judgement will be made by the “intrinsic appeal” of the evidence in the absence of hard facts. He also admits the possibility that the best that can be done in this field is the identification of ‘isomyths’ which he defines as “elements shared by a particular pair or a particular constellation of peoples, acknowledging that they may date only from a comparatively late phase in the long history of the diaspora”.Footnote ¹⁶

Before discussing the body of material which forms the substance of the book, something needs to be said about the use of late sources, as they may mislead by an appearance of antiquity which they do not possess, despite the disclaimers of the author. A case in point is the occasional citation of Firdowsi's Shāh-nāma which dates from about 1000ce. While the oldest parts of the Avesta are written in a language comparable in antiquity to the Rigveda and, like the Younger Avesta,Footnote ¹⁷ are essential for the Iranian component in any study of Indo-European, the same cannot be said for the medieval Persian epic. West justifies his use of it by stating that “it does not continue a native tradition of epic, but it does embody much ancient myth and folktale”. There is no evidence for written epic poetry among Iranian peoples; even the existence of an oral tradition is difficult to document, despite its probability. Those like Mary Boyce who have painstakingly assembled what slight evidence exists for it acknowledge that from so much that has been distorted and lost, especially with the coming of Islam, a case for continuity into the era of Firdowsi cannot be proved definitively.Footnote ¹⁸ The myth and folklore embodied in the Shāh-nāma must therefore be viewed with some caution and no certain conclusions can be drawn about its origins or about its significance in such a study as this. The same caveat applies a fortiore to the use of Ossetic Nartä tales, folk legends of the northern Caucasus, which have only been studied quite recently.Footnote ¹⁹ They have an Iranian substratum which warrants their inclusion in the material presented here, but they have a most complex pedigree and any comparisons must be considered at best speculative.Footnote ²⁰

All judgments about content in the main body of the book must be made in the light of West's warning that he has not attempted to provide a compendium of all available material, but only “a selection representing a personal vision, or rather vista”.Footnote ²¹ The first chapter deals with the poet and his craft; metaphors of weaving, carpentry, sailing and chariot-riding are discussed before an excellent discussion of versification where the author shows his great expertise in this field. After reconstructing the main features of a metrical system based on quantitative prosody and lines of indeterminate length which applies to Greek and Indo-Iranian texts, he looks at Italic, Celtic and the admittedly much more recent Slavonic material and finds there sufficient evidence to connect the latter to the former. This strongly suggests that we can discern metrical features going back to the ‘Mature’ Indo-European period (Level 2). He admits that the Baltic and Germanic evidence is inconclusive, as is the material which can be gleaned from the small traces in Tocharian of a syllabic prosody with cola of between three and eight syllables combined into lines of unequal length grouped in four line strophes. In his discussion of poetic genres he leaves open the question of the existence of Indo-European epic; though well-represented in Greece, India, medieval England and among South Slavs and Albanians, there is little or no trace of it over a large expanse of Indo-European territory. The chapter ends with some striking observations about assembliesFootnote ²² and contests between poets; the latter often involves riddles with the loser forfeiting his or her life.

The second chapter continues to examine the art of poetry, this time concentrating on aspects of vocabulary and phraseology, much of it familiar since such etymological correspondences as Vedic śrávás akṣitam and Homeric κλέoς ἄϕθιτoν have been collected since Adalbert Kuhn's mention of this example in 1853.Footnote ²³ Here the discussion broadens into lexical and semantic correspondences without the necessity of direct etymological links. In dealing with similes West is at pains to point out that the short comparison type is so common as to be an almost universal feature of poetry, but that the developed similes which are so striking in the Homeric poems are very rare elsewhere. In The East Face of Helicon some notable examples are given from Sumerian, Akkadian and the Old Testament but, apart from one extended simile in Beowulf, West can offer nothing in Indo-European outside Greek epic. He therefore tacitly dismisses examples from the Rāmāyaṇa in the battle book Ayodhyākāṇḍa.Footnote ²⁴ This may be because some which seem to belong here have been excised as late additions in the critical edition.Footnote ²⁵ He does, however, cite a good example where exactly the same comparison, the tired swimmer's relief on reaching land, is found in a developed form in the Odyssey and in a short version in the Mahābhārata.Footnote ²⁶ The most impressive collection of data in this section is, I think, to be found in very wide-ranging examples of the juxtaposition of like terms with different inflections (polyptoton). Some of the most convincing evidence for Indo-European poetry will be found here, but West surprisingly does not make the telling point that the inflected nature of Indo-European language is preeminently suited to this figure. Similar expressions do, it is true, occur in other Near Eastern languages, notably in divine titles. In The East Face of Helicon West is no doubt correct to call ἄναξ ἀνάκτων in Aeschylus Supplices 525 an unprecedented expression in GreekFootnote ²⁷ which must be an imitation of frequently occurring Near Eastern titles. Those which he quotes include titles on a Hittite-Akkadian bilingual, but there is no mention of the title, shāhān shāh, so common in the Iranian tradition, perhaps for the reason that it might originate simply as a translation of Aramaic MLKYN MLK. Because of its linguistic antiquity the title of the Nartä lord xucauti xucau which Bailey translates ‘autocrat of autocrats’ should be included here.Footnote ²⁸ The chapter ends on a very strong note with examples of what West calls the Augmented Triad, which is a verse containing three proper names, the third furnished with an epithet. Sufficient for illustration are Λάμπoν τϵ Kλυτιóν θ' ‘Iκϵτάoνα τ’ὄζoν Ἄρηoς in Iliad 3 147 and damaṃ dāntaṃ damanaṃ ca suvarcasam in Mahābhārata 3 72.Footnote ²⁹ The preliminary work for this treatment will be found in West's 2004 contribution to the Joachim Latacz Festschrift entitled ‘An Indo-European Stylistic Feature in Homer’Footnote ³⁰ where copious examples are displayed from the Vedas, Indian epics, the Younger Avesta, Homer and Hesiod, Germanic and Celtic; to these he now adds some from Hittite and Latvian. It seems difficult not to see an Indo-European inheritance in the widespread usage of this quite distinct feature and I agree with the author that “here we seem to find a remnant of the Indo-European storyteller's building work: a recognisable structural component with the lineaments of its verbal patterning still in place”.

Gods and Goddesses are the theme for the third chapter. Amid much familiar material from the earliest texts many original and valuable insights will be found. The fact that there are so few shared names in the different pantheons receives close examination and West bases his discussion on the fact that divine names may be expected to express some idea and are not likely to be invented arbitrarily. He supports this by reference to the earlier two-gender system which distinguished between animate and inanimate. There are many such cases: for example, the Indo-Iranian word for ‘contract’ (Sanskrit mitrám Avestan miθrəm) is transferred from the inanimate to the animate gender to become the god of contracts (Mitráḥ/Miθrō). In dealing with the formation of divine names, he expands the concept of a nominal expression and its derivative in –no- ‘controller of’ discussed by BenvenisteFootnote ³¹ by adding female names which have derivative in -nā- so that to the collection including Hittite Tarhunna, Vedic Varuṇa, Latin Volcanus and Lithuanian Perkunas are added Latin Bellona, Gallic Epona, Lithuanian Žemýna etc. Examples are also given of words for ‘leader’ or ‘lord’ which might be used of gods: Greek κoίρανoς, Latin dominus, Gothic þiudans, Old English dryhten, Old Norse drottinn. In all these cases the original noun can be clearly identified.Footnote ³² The minor part which female gods played in the earliest scheme of things is apparent, if, with West, we regard the Vedic situation as our best evidence for this. It is also significant that no feminine counterpart has been found for the most important name of all, that of the sky-god *d(i)yéus and its derivative *deiwós which has representation in almost all branches of Indo-European. Turning to mythological themes, West has much of interest to say about divine assemblies and means of transport, the recurrent motif of ‘gold’ and ‘golden’, the shared heritage of a divine smithFootnote ³³, the idea of special food and drink for the gods including where it comes from,Footnote ³⁴ and their possession of a special language. A full set of examples of divine words and their human counterparts in Greek poetry was made by West in his edition of Hesiod's Theogony in 1966.Footnote ³⁵ From the Sanskrit examples given here, it would seem that this concept was not a pervading or important one in the Indian tradition. It is worth adding that Zoroastrian theology of the good and evil creations was profoundly significant in producing the Iranian phenomenon of a double vocabulary for good and evil creatures in which many common words were given ‘Daevic’ equivalents; the common word is seen as Ahuric, that is belonging to the good creation and its divinities, but it has a counterpart in the evil creation, the world of the Daevas.Footnote ³⁶ As this may be a post-Gathic development West has some justification in leaving it out of account. He does, however, in the final part of this chapter which deals with conflict between present gods and an earlier pantheon, discuss allusions in the Sanskrit epics to battles between the earlier Asuras and the later gods (Devas), pointing out that the situation is reversed in the Avesta where it is the Daevas who were evil and the Ahuras good. In Zoroastrian terms the Daevas represent the ‘heathen’ divinities of the religion before its reformation by the prophet.

Gods and Goddesses lead on naturally to Sky and Earth, the subject of the next chapter. As pointed out above, the most important Indo-European god, indeed the only one that can be traced linguistically across the whole expanse from India to Italy, is *d(i)yéus and its derivative *deiwós. The root *di- is associated with ‘light’, ‘day’ and the ‘bright sky’. The oldest word for ‘earth’Footnote ³⁷ is rarely used for the mother goddess for whom different terms are current in different cultures. Many of the attributive adjectives used with words for ‘earth’ are the same and may point to a common inheritance. More significant is the pairing of sky and earth. Prominent in Vedic, the theme is also attested specifically in Hesiod and, interestingly, in the Germanic tradition in an old English ploughing prayer where the earth is asked to become pregnant in God's embrace. West argues that the Christian God has replaced the old Sky-god and that the prayer may descend from the same source as the invocation of Zeus and Demeter for the same purpose in Works and Days pp. 465–469. Advice by Hesiod given to the farmer to plough and sow naked may also have a very early origin since it is referred to by the Elder Pliny (HN 18.131) where it is accompanied by a ritual prayer; it is attested for Germanic by the description given in Jan de Vries's Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte of German and Danish peasants stripping naked to plough and protecting their crops from birds by rising at dawn, removing their clothes and going around the fields three times reciting the Our Father. In the Golden Bough Frazer noted that in India in time of drought men remain indoors while women perform naked ploughing. The same has been observed in recent times in Uttar Pradesh (1979) and Nepal (2002), as reported in English newspapers. Bulls and cows naturally belong in this discussion; not surprisingly in view of their prominence in the Rigveda they are equated with Heaven and Earth in several of its hymns, but it is doubtful whether the Russian riddleFootnote ³⁸ quoted by West is relevant here. Of greater moment is the strong similarity which the author goes on to evince between the ‘Sons of God’ who appear in Lithuanian and Latvian songs and the divine twins of Greek and Indian literature. The Aśvins and Dioskouroi have long been seen as a possible remnant of Indo-European mythology, but the case is immeasurably strengthened by the material that links them to the Dieva dēli of Baltic folklore so well presented here.

West has the rare facility of being able to present a complicated linguistic argument with perfect clarity. At the beginning of the fifth chapter he elucidates the relationship between reflexes of the word for ‘sun’, which he admits to be ‘a problem of great complexity’,Footnote ³⁹ by explaining how the neuter forms of Vedic svàr and Avestan hvarə along with the Latin masculine sōl continue the neuter prototype for this word (*sh₂wl), but that Vedic s r(i)ya-, Greek ἥλιoς (masculine) and Lithuanian saulė (feminine) were created by adding the suffix –(i)yos/yā. The Proto-Germanic form *sun-nōn (feminine) which has the ending –n not –l derives from the same prototype in an oblique case in a heteroclite declension with l/n alternation. Such alternation is not otherwise attested but is quite probable in view of the well-established r/n heteroclite paradigms.Footnote ⁴⁰ The feminine gender prevails in northern Europe. In Old Irish súil ‘eye’ (feminine) is thought to be the same word. The concept of the eye of the all-seeing sun is widely attested, as West's varied examples show. Oaths by the sun are common, but the dubious example from the Shāh-nāma might well be omitted. The passage of the sun through the sky seems to have been the subject of speculation in the earliest period and various explanations are given: the sun is a wheel or a wheeled vehicle either self-propelled or drawn by horsesFootnote ⁴¹ or a boat. The latter, sometimes in the form of a large cup, conveys the sun from west to east during the night. Various pictorial devices for the solar wheel are mentioned here; they are broadly distributed from earliest times and include the swastika which may be an Iron Age representation of a spoked wheel in motion.Footnote ⁴² Shared vocabulary for the path of the sun's horses is exemplified; there is even a possible etymological equivalence between mahó ájmasya describing the sun's ‘great drive’ in the Rigveda and μέγας ὄγμoς the phrase used to describe the moon's orbit in a later Homeric Hymn.Footnote ⁴³ Considering its prominence in Egyptian solar mythology,Footnote ⁴⁴ no exclusive claims of Indo-European origin can be made for the sun's boat or cup well-known in the Greek mythology of HeraklesFootnote ⁴⁵ and in an elegy of Mimnermus which is quoted here in full.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, a Latvian parallel is available, which West wryly calls an “integrated transport system, wheeled vehicle in the morning connecting with night ferry”.Footnote ⁴⁷ In The East Face of Helicon he was prepared to state categorically that the horses and chariot of the sun were imported “to Greece from outside, and presumably from the East, though it is difficult to determine its place of origin”.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here he is more guarded, no doubt by reason of his more recent review of the evidence. He rightly draws attention to the strong possibility that when the motif of the sun's horses and chariot appears later in Egypt and China it is borrowed from an Indo-European source; in the latter case it may be, as Pulleyblank has suggested, from the Tocharians.Footnote ⁴⁹

There are many similar features both in timing and performance in the way in which the sun is worshipped in cultic observance among Indo-European peoples; festivals at the beginning of spring and at the summer solstice are common; ring-dances like the Athenian κύκλιoι χoρoί may well have originally been designed to recall the sun's shape and movement. It is worth adding to West's information that circular dances have a special association with the Greek sun-god Apollo.Footnote ⁵⁰ Salutations of the rising and setting sun are too common throughout the world to be hard evidence in this discussion, but the sacred prayer of the Brahmans (RV 3.62.10) is ancient and important enough to warrant quotation, as is the survival of a Scots Gaelic chant of like character found in Carmichael's collection.Footnote ⁵¹ It was recorded in the Western Isles from a ninety-nine-year-old man. In it the sun is invoked as the ‘eye of the king of the living’ sùil Rìgh nam beò in which West ingeniously recognises the title víśvasya bhúvanasya r jā used of Indra and Varuṇa in the Rigveda.Footnote ⁵² The poetry of dawn next receives extended treatment,Footnote ⁵³ but most of this is drawn from the copious and beautiful descriptions in Greek and Indian verse, with rare excursions outside; most interesting here is bovine imagery which has the marks of great antiquity. Bulls and cows named Day and Night draw the chariot of the Hittite storm-god. ‘New dawns’ is the traditional understanding of the Gathic Avestan ‘bulls of days’ uxšānō asnạm.Footnote ⁵⁴ Reference in Vedic hymns to dawn as a cow being milked may well shed light on the mysterious Homeric phrase describing some time of night when stars are shining, possible just before daybreak. The received literal translation of νυκτὸς ἀμoλγ has been ‘the milking time of night’ or something similar and has often been judged to be meaningless or corrupt.Footnote ⁵⁵ West is the first scholar, as far as I am aware, to suggest that the phrase might be an archaic survival of the idea of Night and Day as cows and further investigation of the phrase on these lines is now required. A separate though closely related deity is the Daughter of the Sun. Although an important figure in the Rigveda and prominent in Baltic and Slavonic lore,Footnote ⁵⁶ her appearance in Greek in the guise of Helen, if West's attribution is correct, takes centre stage. The problem is that she is the daughter of Zeus, not the sun. West, who is now on home ground, summons all his expertise to make out a convincing case for the identification, starting from the fact that she is sister of the Dioskouroi, just as the Daughter of the Sun in Vedic is closely associated with a divine pair, the Aśvins, and in Baltic and Slavonic with the Dieva dēli. The link between the three sets of brothers has already been confirmed and this is most suggestive. Helen's association with St Elmo's fire, her birth from a goose egg, even her seduction by Paris find their counterparts in the Daughter of the Sun elsewhere. As the Dioskouroi are her brothers she cannot, like her Vedic, Baltic and Slavonic counterparts, have them as her suitors; these are replaced by another pair of brothers Agamamnon and Menelaus. The abduction of the Sun-maiden is a toposFootnote ⁵⁷ and Helen was twice abducted; the second occasion caused the Trojan War. West will not, however, convince all readers that her name was originally *Swelénā to be derived from the word for ‘sun’ discussed above, but the etymological reconstruction is impeccable, based as it is on the initial digamma in the name as it appears on two Laconian inscriptions and various grammarians;Footnote ⁵⁸ it connects her etymologically with Vedic Sūry. The whole argument is highly ingenious and may well be right. It is supported by rites associated with the Daughter of the Sun in the relevant cultures.

All chapters in the book have doublets in their title and the next one is ‘Storm and Stream’. Here we find the god of thunder and his weapon, the water dragon, the gods of wind and fire, as well as fire in the water and the waters themselves. It is almost automatic for the classicist to associate storm and thunder with the chief sky god, Zeus or Jupiter, but in other traditions the god of thunder and storm is a separate being and this almost certainly represents the Indo-European situation. His functions have been assumed later by the Greek and Roman deities, but not without leaving some trace – or so it would seem from the link which West makes between the Baltic thunder god Perkūnas and Greek κϵραυνóςFootnote ⁵⁹ and much more speculatively with a conjectural Latin *Quercūnus, an exact etymological equivalent.Footnote ⁶⁰ Perkūnas has counterparts in the Norse god Fiorgynn and the Slavonic Perún.Footnote ⁶¹ He is especially associated with the oak tree which he splits and inseminates with his fire. *perkwu -s is well established as an Indo-European word for ‘oak’.Footnote ⁶² The word is seen in Celtic guise in the ‘Hercanian’ mountains.Footnote ⁶³ In any case, Perkūnas, to give him his Lithuanian name, may well be the survival of the original Indo-European god of thunder and storm.Footnote ⁶⁴

Attention turns to the Vedic situation where, although Indra is preeminently the god of thunder and storm, Parjanya is also closely associated with such natural phenomena; tempting as it seems, West finally rejects proposed hypotheses to connect his name etymologically with Perkunas and focuses on the principal god of the Rigveda. Indra has all the hallmarks of antiquity: he is named in the Hittite treaty recorded between Suppiluliuma and Mitanni and is mentioned as a Daeva in the Avestan Vidēvdāt. He shares many of the activities and attributes of the other storm gods which, as West speculates, he may have taken over from Parjanya. Like Perkunas he is compared to a bellowing bull, but his activities on the battle field show developments within the Indo-Iranian tradition itself. One of his chief epithets is vṛtrahán-, ‘smiter of Vṛtra’. With this must be compared VǝrǝθraƔna, the name of an important divinity in the Avesta. Much learned ink has been spilt over the relationship between the two since Louis Renou and Émile Benveniste, two of the greatest names in Indo-Iranian studies in the twentieth century, combined in 1934 to publish their findings.Footnote ⁶⁵ Calvert Watkins wrote extensively on this in How to Kill a Dragon and the position he adopts there is basically that of Benveniste but with some important reservations.Footnote ⁶⁶ West seems to accept Watkins's position and, in his usual way, reduces a complex discussion into a lucid and well-balanced summary: in brief, and at risk of over-simplification, I take his suggestion to be that in the Indo-Iranian period the prototype of vṛtrahán-VǝrǝθraƔna, which clearly means ‘victorious’ in Avestan,Footnote ⁶⁷ was an epithet of Indra.Footnote ⁶⁸ After the two peoples divided the Indic tradition retained the epithet of Indra as vṛtrahán- but gave it the meaning ‘smiter of Vṛtra’ and interpreted Vṛtra as the name of a monster. In the Iranian tradition Indra was relegated to the status of a Daeva but the epithet VǝrǝθraƔna became the name of an important Ahuric deity who was primarily a battle god. It is, however, unlikely that the later Armenian Vahagn who derived from VǝrǝθraƔna provides useful evidence here, any more than does the Wahram of Zoroastrian Middle Persian who is rightly omitted. The monster Vṛtra is described as a snake or dragon and in one of the best known Vedic hymns to Indra (RV 1. 32), which West translates and sets out in extenso,Footnote ⁶⁹ the words áhann áhim “he smote the serpent” are identical to Avestan janat azim with the same meaning in the Hymn to Haoma.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the Avestan context the dragon is the three-headed Aži Dahāka and he is smitten by θraētaona; West makes the link with Vedic Trita Āptya who defeated a three-headed dragon called Viśvarūpa (lit. ‘of all shapes’)Footnote ⁷¹, but does not mention that one of the epithets of Aži Dahāka in the Avestan hymn is hazaŋra.yaoxštay- ‘of a thousand senses’ which is very close in meaning. Viśvarūpa was a possessor of cows which were released by Trita Āptya. This leads on naturally to the cow-capturing exploits of Herakles to whose opponent Geryon, mentioned above in connection with the solar boat or cup, Greek poets assign a triple body with six arms and legs. In his role as thunder-god Zeus strikes down his chief opponent Typhoeus, a monster with a hundred heads.Footnote ⁷² A common theme is the use of fire in the defeat of the dragon by the storm-god. A striking example which has been adapted to a Zoroastrian setting is the contest for x^uarenah- ‘divine glory’ between the spirits of good and evil, Spenta Mainyu and Aŋra Mainyu. It is fought out between them by their champions Ātar ‘fire’ and the evil Aži Dahāka and forms a highly dramatic passage in the Zamyād Yasht of the Younger Avesta.Footnote ⁷³ In the Rigveda Agni ‘fire’ is often personified as a god and is of immense ritual significance; it is the subject of over two hundred hymns which are always placed first in the book collections. Avestan Ātar is of comparable scope, but in the monotheism that followed the reforms of Zoroaster, was not worshipped as a god, although treated with such reverence that outside observers such as HerodotusFootnote ⁷⁴ believed this to be so. To this day the Parsees are at pains to point out that despite its supreme sanctity fire is not given divine status in their religion. The cultic significance of the domestic hearth, Hestia or Vesta, in the Graeco-Roman world is in many ways comparable to the Vedic and Avestan situation and West goes further afield to justify his claim that “the cult of the hearth goes back to Indo-European times”.Footnote ⁷⁵

The ancient figure of Āpām nápāt- in Vedic and Āpm napāt- in Avestan, ‘Grandson of the Waters’ can possibly be recognised in motifs in Greek literature which West assembles. It may even be that the seals of Proteus described by Homer in Od. 4. 404 as νέπoδϵς καλς Ἁλoσύδνης have a place here, as νέπoδϵς has long been recognised as a cognate of Latin nepotes and therefore of nápāt-.Footnote ⁷⁶ Mankind's acquisition of fire is explained in various traditional myths and West is again on home ground in his treatment of the figure of Prometheus in early Greek literature. The reverence accorded to water from the earliest times is shown by the invocation of rivers and springs as witnesses to Hittite treaties, by hymns dedicated to the Waters in the Veda, by the sanctity of water as early as the Gātha of the Seven Chapters in the Avesta, by Hesiod's divine genealogies of rivers, by Herodotus's inclusion of water among the objects of Persian worship, by the cult of Father Tiber in Rome and by cogent later examples from Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and Baltic. Here West examines in detail the possible connection of Latin Neptunus with Āpām nápāt- and Irish Nechtan propounded especially by Dumézil and accepted by Puhvel and other notable authorities only to reject it on the grounds that the element of fire in the waters, so fundamental in this theory, is quite unproven for the Roman god. He does not discount the possibility that other Celtic water gods existed; in Roman Gaul there are a number of inscriptions in which the name Neptunus is used for them.Footnote ⁷⁷ From the evidence which he provides here, West is justified in saying that the prevalence of this theme “must be due at least in some degree to the power of Indo-European tradition”.Footnote ⁷⁸

Lesser deities associated with water are discussed fully in Chapter 7 along with sylvan nymphs, elves, dwarves, satyrs and giants. The elusive Pan, who makes a late appearance in Greek mythology, has a possible equation with Pūṣán, a Vedic god who shares sufficient of his characteristics to warrant the close examination devoted to this at the beginning of the chapter. The linguistic analysis deriving the two names from the root * peh₂ ‘protect’ is rather sophisticated and the argument is not strengthened by the fact that Hermes, it would seem, shares even more of Pūṣán's qualities than Pan. West thinks it likely that panhellenic Hermes and the more localised Pan may have been originally the same. Hermes's name may deriveFootnote ⁷⁹ from ἕρμα which is early attested as ‘support for a beached ship’, ‘stones used as ballast’, ‘column of stones’ among other similar meanings, the last cited well-known from the herms, columns surmounted by a bust of the god, set up before houses in Athens and elsewhere in Classical times as fertility symbols. Stone cairns in the mountains were used as landmarks; if they were once thought to belong to Pan he may have been later remembered as the ἕρμα god. This is not strong evidence for the identification in my opinion. West is, however, rightly sceptical of any early connection between Pūṣán and Pan on the one hand, and the Roman Mercury on the other, the latter a god of commerce who was equated with Hermes. We are on much firmer ground with female spirits of the waters, woodlands and mountains for whom the Greek name ‘Nymphs’ is a convenient generic description. There is a wealth of comparative material. The Indian Apsarás-, while not playing the major role given to nymphs in Greek lore, share a large number of their characteristics. The Iranian tradition starting as it does from Zoroastrian scriptures has little occasion to mention such creatures and it is unlikely that the much-discussed Ahurānīś Ahurahyā of the Gāthā of the Seven Chapters in the Avesta are relevant here (pace West). Discussion of them belongs with the Vedic and Avestan Āpas. As noted by Mary Boyce, the great historian of Zoroastrian religion, they have a counterpart in Vedic Varuṇāni, the wives of Varuṇa and, according to her, ‘the Ahura’ was an Iranian cult invocation of Varuṇa's.Footnote ⁸⁰ She also suggests that the Ahura of the genitive Ahurahyā was probably originally Āpm Napāt-.Footnote ⁸¹ Even if Humbach has correctly conjectured that Aramaic 'hwrnyš on the trilingual inscription at Xanthos in Lycia is an attempt to translate Greek Nυμϕν by Ahurānīś,Footnote ⁸² this is of purely linguistic significance and cannot be used as evidence that Ahurānīś were water nymphs in Iranian popular mythology. The Ossetic legend of the daughters of Donbettyr has some points of similarity to nymphs elsewhere but is recorded at the end of mixed tradition where the Iranian substrate is subject to contamination from other cultures. The basic meaning of νυμϕή in Ancient and Modern Greek is ‘bride’Footnote ⁸³ and this must be born in mind in discussing the noun when used of Calypso or Circe in Homer.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is an easy semantic shift to the meaning of ‘nymph’ as commonly used of the beautiful young maidens who pervade Greek folklore. West provides a useful summary of their existence as spirits of the sea, lakes, rivers, forests and mountains, their cults and their unions with mortal men. They were an early import to Italy where they become part of Roman folklore, but there is little evidence for their existence in early Italic culture. Some traces of ancient Illyrian mythology may be present in the nymph-like beings in Albanian legends. In later German folklore copious examples of nymph-like creatures of both sexes have been collected by Grimm and MannhardtFootnote ⁸⁵ and West judiciously selects those most relevant for comparison in this context. Celtic, Slavonic and Baltic material is equally telling.

Nymphs have male counterparts in elves, goblins, dwarfs and satyrs, the last-named representing a class of half human, half animal beings found widely among Indo-European peoples. In Sanskrit epicFootnote ⁸⁶ we meet the Kiṃpurusas who attend on Kubera, lord of northern climes. Such monsters in Greek mythology, though sometimes mischievous and destructive, can also be wise like Achilles's tutor Chiron. Other creatures of the wild not possessing animal features have similar qualities. Though scantily attested,Footnote ⁸⁷ the Kerkopes would certainly seem to belong here and West is surely correct to view them as “a species of goblin rather than rascally humans”. Elves are important beings in the Old Norse Edda and it is conceivable that they are etymologically connected to the Indic Ṛbhus, skilled craftsmen who later acquired divine status, or with Greek Orpheus, though West is non-committal. Dwarves seem chiefly to belong to the world of Germanic mythology with possible appearances elsewhere such as the Rūkis of Latvian folklore. It is unlikely that Greek Hephaestus can claim kinship despite the interesting observations of the author. Unlike this group who are part of our world, giants are normally remote figures living in a world of their own, the subject of stories, often an extinct race, rarely interacting with mankind and not the object of supplication or associated with cults. It is only in Greek and Germanic that giants form a separate class. As individuals they appear in Celtic, Baltic and Slavonic. The Greek Cyclopes are by no means the only one-eyed giants; they appear in Irish and Lithuanian as well in Ossetic Nartä tales among which is a striking parallel to Odysseus' meeting with Polyphemus.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the latter case it is hard to see an Iranian residue as giants seem wholly absent from the Indo-Iranian tradition, which weakens their status as an Indo-European legacy. West does not make this point, but, as he modestly says, he is looking here only “for motifs that may suggest an element of shared heritage”. One such motif is stone-throwing. In Greek poetry the Gigantes, the Cyclopes and the LaestrygoniansFootnote ⁸⁹ famously hurl boulders but so do over-sized ogres in Ossetic, Celtic, Germanic and Baltic stories. They also use stones for building. It is hardly surprising that large-scale ancient ruins were attributed to the work of a giant race. In surveying the wealth of material collected in Chapter 7 West gives a balanced assessment of its value as proof of Indo-European origin and admits that there are “more questions than answers”.Footnote ⁹⁰

Chapter 8 is perhaps the least valuable part of the book, if West's sole purpose were to establish Indo-European status for its contents. On the other hand, for students of Indo-Iranian and Greek it is in some ways the most valuable because of its excellent collection of comparative material involving hymns in the two traditions. It can only convince the reader that here we have reached the Graeco-Aryan level and that any horizontal transmission would be so unlikely as to be irrelevant. Although he quotes Hittite hymns, West is cautious about them since they owe much to Mesopotamian traditions. No such reservations are necessary about what is found in early Greek literature, in the great corpus of Rigvedic hymns or in the Gāthās and Younger Avesta. Despite its name the Younger Avesta contains much that is pre-Zoroastrian. The antiquity of the Gāthās is assured by their more archaic language; West accepts the view commonly held that they were written by Zoroaster himself. What tells against this, in my opinion, is that this is nowhere stated in the tradition; the suggestion was first made by Martin Haug in the middle of the nineteenth century and he only applied it to some of the Gāthās. From that time it has been accepted as an article of faith by Zoroastrians.Footnote ⁹¹ In presenting the comparisons, West deals with them by theme and gives quite extensive quotations, most in bilingual form,Footnote ⁹² some only in English translation. In studying the stylistic features and structure of the hymns the author is beholden to Eduard Norden's Agnostos Theos Footnote ⁹³ for detail and methodology, but goes well beyond him in subject matter. Norden compared Greek and Latin hymns and prayers with those found in Jewish and oriental traditions and did not deal with Vedic and Avestan. From West's earlier work he is also able to cite Near Eastern parallels when appropriate.Footnote ⁹⁴ Appeals to gods involving narration of their past deeds does not usually occur in Near East hymnology, but is found extensively in Vedic, Avestan and Greek. Sometimes this takes the form of a long connected narrative, familiar from the Homeric HymnsFootnote ⁹⁵, at other times it is more a series of allusions. Both types are amply presented here. In prayers everywhere invocation is followed by supplication; the god may be reminded of past services done by the supplicant to encourage him to show favour once more. This is frequent in Greek literary prayers. In The East Face of Helicon Footnote ⁹⁶ West pointed out that this may well be a literary motif, not reflecting cult practice since there is no trace of it in inscriptions; at the same time he gave examples from Hittite, Akkadian and the Old Testament. In the book under review he can now add some examples which he has discovered in Sanskrit epicFootnote ⁹⁷ which weigh against the theory that the motif was borrowed in Hittite and Greek.

Within the corpus of Vedic poetry it has long been noted that compared with the Rigveda the Atharvaveda contains much material of a more popular character including magic, spells and incantations. As West explains, the difference between prayers and spells is that the first involves persuasion, “man proposes, God disposes” while the second has automatic efficacy. In dealing with spells he disclaims any attempt to survey Indo-European magical arts in general but offers only “a review of some noteworthy points and comparisons concerning the verbal aspects”.Footnote ⁹⁸ Among these are repetition, symmetrical phrasing, assonance and refrains;Footnote ⁹⁹ the examples given here from Vedic, Avestan, Latin, the Umbrian Tabulae Iguvinae and Old Norse show these in varying degrees. Nine and thrice nine as sacral numbers are widespread though not found in Indo-Iranian. Good examples of binding spells are given from the Atharvaveda, Greek and Old Norse. The use of incantations in healing is often accompanied by the application of herbs and or some other therapy. The most impressive case of the last-mentioned from a comparative point of view was a discovery made a century and a half ago by Adalbert KuhnFootnote ¹⁰⁰: a passage in the Atharvaveda has a spell accompanying the restoration of severed parts of the body where parallel phrases “bone to bone, sinew to sinew, skin to skin etc.” are used. A similar spell is found in Old High German in the Merseburg charm of which later versions have been found in Scandinavia and Britain, Latvia and also attested in an Old Irish spell. West accepts it as a stylistic feature traditional in Indo-European healing incantations.

Many wide-ranging linguistic parallels, particularly in phraseology, are found in cosmological descriptions of heaven and earth which appear at the beginning of Chapter 9. The word for ‘sky’ equates with ‘stone’ in some traditions, with ‘cloud’ in others. As West pointed out in 1971Footnote ¹⁰¹, the obscure Akmon mentioned as the father of Ouranos in Alcman and elsewhere may be this very ‘sky’ word; in Avestan, Old Persian and Middle Iranian dialects asman- can mean ‘heaven’. The later Iranian tradition associated the sky with metals.Footnote ¹⁰² The concept of a metallic sky is reflected in the Homeric epithets χάλκϵoς πoλύχαλκoς σιδήρϵoς ‘made of bronze, iron’ which may reflect modifications of the concept of a stone sky in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Imagery of the earth is shared quite widely; men travel on its back; forests are its hair and rocks its bones. Its navel (n bhi-) is localised at the place of sacrifice in the Rigveda and the cognate ὀμϕαλóς, ‘navel’ of the earth, describes Delphi.Footnote ¹⁰³ A column supporting the sky adapted in the Greek figure of Atlas has counterparts in Vedic and Germanic, but in view of its occurrence in Near Eastern Mythology and elsewhere, West is no more prepared to stake a claim for Indo-European heritage here than he is in the case of the world tree which is virtually restricted to Norse mythology. The idea of a celestial river is also left open. δι(ϵ)ιπϵτής, an epithet of some rivers in Homer, remains a puzzle. Does it mean ‘falling’ or ‘flying’ in the sky? A third possibility which occurs to me is that it might mean ‘stretched out in the sky’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ which would be particularly apt in the case of the Milky Way if, as he suggests, this may have been conceived as a celestial river. Lüders'Footnote ¹⁰⁵ collection of Vedic evidence for rivers in the sky conjoined with this supports the view that such a concept was Graeco-Aryan. It is perhaps worth adding that in Arabic astronomy the constellation Eridanus is represented as a river. West concludes that “the study of astronomy was not much developed among the Indo-Europeans, and probably only a few individual stars and star-groups had established names”.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Ursa Major may be one such. The Sanskrit Seven Rishis may have originally been the Seven Rikshas (‘Bears’) according to an authoritative Vedic prose text.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The singular in Greek is not easily explained and its alternative ἄμαξα ‘waggon’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ may, as West supposes,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ be taken from Babylonian nomenclature. Ingenuity has been expended on finding an etymological link between Greek Sirius, the Vedic Tisíya and the Avestan Tištryra who is the subject of one of the best known of the Yashts. It remains only a possibility. Interesting are the examples cited of words and phrases describing the sky as ‘ornamented’ and connected with the Indo-European root *peik such as Vedic péśas- and Greek πoικίλoς. ‘Star-adorned’ stəhrpaēsah- is the beautiful description of the heaven “that Ahura Mazdā wears as a garment” in Avestan. The example from Seneca's Medea of stars quibus pingitur aether is relevant etymologically, but it comes from a source unlikely to retain archaic usage and might well have been omitted here. In the section headed ‘The Solitary Twin’ West develops a complex argument to show that the cosmogonic ‘twin’ (Ymir in the Edda, Tuisto in Germanic, Vedic Yama and his Avestan counterpart Yima) is actually the product of the merging of two mythologies, one involving a primal hermaphrodite progenitor of the first man, the other a primal giant who is dismembered to make up the structure of the world. Given the obvious disparities in the texts quoted, the analysis is impressive and the conclusion convincing. The next section is devoted to methods of expounding cosmological and other arcane lore found among the Indo-European people; verse catalogues and catechetic verses show similar modes of expression which are demonstrated here from across a spectrum from India to Iceland. Nearly nine pages are devoted to riddles. Discussed in the first chapter in the context of poetic contests, they are shown here in much wider usage, often involving the same dire consequences for unsuccessful attempts to solve them. While some riddles are designed to test an individual's special knowledge, more typical are those which require lateral thinking, deduction and interpretation of metaphor. They can also be embedded in the language of ritual, as in the two Vedic hymns to Agni quoted here,Footnote ¹¹⁰ where in one ‘the sisters’ refers to fingers operating the fire-drill and in the other ‘the mothers’ are its two wooden components. Similar formats for posing riddles are demonstrated and discussed from a wide spectrum of Indo-European cultures; they are often couched in similar language, as well as having the same content. The familiar riddle of the Sphinx provides a good example. Although it can be traced well beyond the cultures under consideration (“it has reached Finno-Ugric peoples and Fiji”Footnote ¹¹¹), it is thought by West to have relevance to the traditional antithesis of two-footed and four-footed creatures which he discusses in Chapter 2 of this book. He has no hesitation, however, in assigning the ‘three-footed’ man with the stick to the Indo-European period on the basis of its appearance in the Rigvedic, Hesiodic and early Welsh passages cited here. Many riddles concern the year and West presents in some detail the work of Antti Aarne who distinguished four models for them.Footnote ¹¹² Days appear as spokes of the year's wheel in the Veda and Sanskrit epic;Footnote ¹¹³ in the latter they also appear as three hundred and sixty cows. To Homer the cattle and sheep on the island of the sun-god, each numbering three hundred and fifty,Footnote ¹¹⁴ may not have had calendrical significance but West is surely right to see an ancient riddle embedded here. As Aristotle noted, the cattle and sheep must be the days and nights of the lunar year.

Chapter 10 is concerned with mankind's speculations about its origins, the fates that guide its destiny, about death and posthumous fame. The concept of a single progenitor of mankind is best represented in Sanskrit manu- which is both ‘man’ and personified Manu, his mystical ancestor, and Germanic Mannus used likewise as a common and proper noun. The genesis of the first man often involves birth from the earth or its trees and stones. His lifespan was one hundred years – or at least this is what we find in a Rigvedic mantra, in a hymn from eighth-century Ireland and in a christening toast from Lithuania. Personified Fates, nearly always females depicted as spinning, are represented so widely that it is surprising to find virtually no trace of them in Indo-Iranian. In fact, were it not for this lacuna, they are among the strongest pieces of evidence assembled in this book for surviving Indo-European mythology. They appear in Bronze Age Anatolia in the Hittite Gulses; referred to more vaguely in Homer, they are numbered and named in Hesiod's Theogony; they are the ParcaeFootnote ¹¹⁵ of Latin literature where they may be in part a Greek importation and in part a native inheritance; the three NornsFootnote ¹¹⁶ of Norse mythology sit beneath the world ash tree at the well of Urð, a word connected with weaving elsewhere in GermanicFootnote ¹¹⁷ which in other places provides examples of spinning goddesses; there are seven goddesses who “fashion the threads of life” in an eighth century Irish hymn; in Lithuanian and Latvian folklore they are found in varying numbers, sometimes hundreds but also seven and three; examples abound in Slavonic folklore and they are also are found in Albanian. Before moving on to discuss death, West explains the prevalence of the idea of weaving in connection with destiny and analyses aspects of this ancient craft both physically and metaphorically: at the physical level incoherent threads are converted into something definite by the action of the spinning wheel; in terms of metaphor there is “the intimate connection in Indo-European speech between turning and eventuating”.Footnote ¹¹⁸

In the section dealing with death we are confronted with the dichotomy of death in the course of nature and a premature cessation of life as a result of accident, violence and so on. Much of the quoted material is of a general nature – death seen as a kind of sleep, an underworld abode of the dead, the one-way journey thitherFootnote ¹¹⁹ and the river to be crossed en route. Only the last two seem to have a fair claim to be considered specifically Indo-European; underworld rivers are given names such as Acheron in Greek and Vaitaranī in Indic sources; West's suggestion that Latin tarentum ‘tomb’ originally meant ‘ford’ or ‘crossing-place’ cognate with similarly used tīrthám in Vedic has much merit. It is not only in Aristophanes' Frogs that the ferryman of the dead collects coins; he is equally employed in Baltic and Slavic folklore. In the Iranian tradition attention is focussed on a bridge over the river of hell which the soul must cross. The peculiar feature of this ‘Accountant's Bridge’ (Avestan činvat.pərətus) is that for the virtuous it is a broad, easy passage, but for the sinner it is thin as a knife-edge. It is hard to see mere coincidence between this and the words in an old northern English song sung at wakes “the bridge of dread, no brader than a thread”. A bridge leading to the underworld is found several times in Norse folklore.Footnote ¹²⁰ We find dogs guarding the entrance to the underworld in Vedic, Avestan, Greek, Nordic and Baltic mythology. Yama's two dogs in the Rigveda are four-eyed and spotted; śabála- ‘spotted’ may well connect etymologically with Cerberus. Likewise two dogs in the Avestan Vidēvdāt guard the Accountant's Bridge. It is worth adding to what West says here that four-eyed dogs have an important role in the Vidēvdāt in connection with purificatory rites for bodies of the dead.Footnote ¹²¹ As four-eyed dogs did not exist, pious Zoroastrians interpreted this to mean dogs with two spots above the eyes which do exist (the Australian sheep-dog or kelpie is one such). Without making an etymological connection James Darmesteter wrote in his introduction to his translation of the Vidēvdāt, which was the first in English: “This reminds us at once of the three-headed Kerberos, watching at the doors of hell, and, still more, of the two brown, four-eyed dogs of Yama, who guard the ways to the realm of death”.Footnote ¹²² A festival for the souls of the dead is found across the spectrum of Indo-European cultures, but the attestations are relatively late. The Gṛhyasūtra provides an example for Indic, the Xύτρoι on the last day of the Anthesteria in Athens for Greek, the Parentalia and Lemuria in Rome for Italic. Other practices of this sort are shown from Germanic, Baltic and Slavonic, but the Christian influence of the Feast of All Souls cannot be discounted here, in my opinion. The most developed of all such practices is found in the Iranian Feast of All Souls, Avestan Hamaspathmaēdaya, to which West makes a passing reference.Footnote ¹²³ Its antiquity is assured by its detailed description in Yasht 13 of the Younger Avesta and, according to Mary Boyce, it has hardly changed down the centuries.Footnote ¹²⁴ It still occurs on the last day of the Persian calendar year and the last ten days of the year are also sacred to the fravašis or souls of the dead.Footnote ¹²⁵

The idea that one way of obtaining immortality is from posthumous fame seems to have endured in the Indo-European culture from very early times. Poets were often seen as powerful agents in this process; the importance of fame (I.E. *kléwes-) is shown by the number of times this word occurs in proper names of people. They abound in Sanskrit; two hundred and fifty have been collected by Solmsen for Greek;Footnote ¹²⁶ if Tawagalawas in Hittite records has been correctly seen to represent Etewoklewēs, he belongs here along with his namesake on the Mycenaean Linear B tablets; Roman names such as Cluentius, Gaulish names beginning with Cluto- etc, like those in Germanic beginning in Chlodo- etc, have their place here, as do Norse names such as Hlédís and even a Welsh Clotri (*kluto-rēg-, ‘famed king’). An impressive collection indeed! Further analysis of names, typically two-part compounds, with other common and often cognate elements, makes a strong case for Indo-European origin and it is notable how often they reflect a warrior society. West has some interesting remarks about patronymics, but they are not as compelling evidence in this context as what has gone before. Specific statements in texts about life after death through fame, though West describes them as “thinly scattered”, are nonetheless widely distributed and have some force; but there are parallels in the Near East, as he has shown in The East Face of Helicon Footnote ¹²⁷ and his caution is therefore justified.

The concluding two chapters of the book contain much of interest to students of comparative literature and ethnography but they do not to any great extent advance its main argument. The topics dealt with are under the broad headings ‘King and Hero’ and ‘Arms and the Man’. The author begins by noting that “not a single name of an Indo- European hero has come down to us”. What are studied here then are characteristics of recorded heroes which might allow generalisation. We are really in the realm of anthropology when West goes on to analyse the meaning and function of ‘king’, examining the etymology of the word, its distribution and contexts, following in the recent footsteps of Benveniste whose study of Indo-European vocabulary and its implications for ancient society remains a classic work in its field.Footnote ¹²⁸ He notes evidence for elective rather than hereditary kingship in several early Indo-European societies as well as cases where a man becomes king by marrying a widowed queen. He goes a little too far, I think, in claiming that “the correspondence between Vedic r jñī and Old Irish rígain points to the existence of an Indo-European title ‘ruler-female”’. The story of the personified Mead-Queen may indeed have an ancient origin in a ritual in which the king imbibed sovereignty by drinking this beverage, if Princess Mādhavī in the Mahābhārata has a lexical cognate in the Medb of Irish legend; the tales told about them are remarkably similar. The Aśvamedha ‘horse sacrifice’, whose performance is described fully in the Yajurveda and has always attracted attention because of its combination of spectacular pageantry and lurid detail, inevitably makes its appearance here. Claims for its Indo-European origin have often been made and need to be assessed. West's examination seems to me to show that while horse sacrifice was practised among Indo-European, as well as Finno-Ugric and Turkic people, the Indian royal ritual was a local development. In the same way, the particular details of the svayaṃvara, where the princess chooses her husband from eligible suitors assembled by the king, are not found before the period of the epics and the parallels involving assemblages and contests of suitors which West enumerates reflect an old story pattern of which the svayaṃvara was an indigenous poetic elaboration. The husband's return typified by Homer's Odyssey seems to belong to universal folklore, but the comparativist may be interested to be introduced to the tale of Alpamysh with many similar features in the Turkic epic tradition. Another widely transmitted wandering folk-tale involves the separation of father and son and their reunion, often in tragic circumstances. It seems to me that a disproportionate amount of space is accorded to this in the light of West's own “prudent diagnosis” that this “is just the kind of dramatic motifFootnote ¹²⁹ that might readily be taken over from one people to another and attached to different national heroes”. In other words all the examples he gives are probably horizontally transmitted. The same criticism may be applied to the last chapter in the book.

While West is the first to admit the possibility of horizontal transmission and is at pains to avoid disguising it, we find too many examples in Chapter 12 of what can only be reasonably attributed to this or other means of transmission which do not require descent from Indo-European for their explanation. In this category I would place the discussions headed ‘Alarming symptoms’ showing a hero as an object of fear, ‘Eagerness to fight’, ‘Altercations’, ‘Exhortations’, ‘Events of the Field’ which are typical battle scenes, ‘Divine participation’, ‘Archers’, ‘Chariots’ and ‘Single Combat’. Other readers might add to this list; after all West did stress at the outset that judgements will be subjective. Hallmarks of high antiquity are certainly found in the section on weapons with a remarkable number of heroes from different traditions within the Indo-European family possessing unique or non-standard accoutrements often with a special pedigree. Horses belong to the earliest Indo-European culture and therefore the poetic vocabulary which describes them and the roles which they play, including the special relationship they often have with their heroic riders, is important. The chariots they draw, which might, from the surviving literature, be thought to be of equal antiquity, are more problematic since they do not appear in the Indo-European domain until the beginning of the second millennium bce and must certainly be excluded from the earliest stratum. In battle scenes in Vedic and Sanskrit epic they are used as mobile platforms for archers, but in Homeric, as in later Gaulish, Irish and Germanic warfare, they are employed more as a means of transport. The charioteer in Indian, Greek and, it seems, Irish tradition often acts as confidential adviser to his master. The most striking example, not mentioned here by West, is in the Mahābhārata when Arjuna's charioteer is revealed as the god Krishna whose advice to him comprises the Bhagavadgītā, the most sacred of Hindu texts. Catalogues of fighting troops, enumeration of the forces and identification of warriors are widespread and parallels abound in the surviving literature, but none of this can have secure claim to remote antiquity. Horizontal transmission cannot be ruled out in the closeness of detail found the night raids described in the Tenth Books of the Mahābhārata and the Iliad.Footnote ¹³⁰ Most of the material surveyed in the sections that follow is drawn from Indian and Greek sources and may bring us back to the Graeco-Aryan stratum but hardly beyond that. West's disclaimer in dealing with skulls of enemies used as drinking cups in the section on ‘Vindictive victory’ is applicable to a number of other examples in this chapter: “The evidence does not allow us to treat this as a distinctive or originally Indo-European practice”.Footnote ¹³¹ There is a brief return to the subject of similes which was dealt with extensively in Chapter 2 in order to add some examples in warfare from Sanskrit and Greek epic in the battle context before an interesting survey of hero's funerals from a wide range of sources. Nothing here, as West admits, “takes us back before the Late Bronze Age, and we simply cannot project it back to the proto-Indo-European era”. He thinks it unlikely that the Indo-Europeans practised cremation, whereas archaeological discoveries trace burial back to the fourth millennium bce. The last word goes appropriately enough to funeral rites and dirges. There is plenty of evidence, possible though not conclusive for Indo-European, of the suicide of a wife concomitant with that of her husband. Perhaps the best known case of this is the Indian suttee (from Sanskrit satī ‘good woman’), although this is not strictly speaking an example of suicide since the Vedic evidence seems to show that the wife, having lain down with her husband on the pyre, descended before it was ignited.Footnote ¹³² As a parting jeu d'esprit West gives us his own ‘Elegy on an Indo-European Hero’ cleverly incorporating only names and motifs which have credibility for the earliest period.

So why call this book Indo-European Poetry and Myth rather than Elements in the Poetry and Myth of Indo-European Peoples which may be attributed to a Common Origin? The latter title, though unwieldy, is without question an accurate description of its contents. The former implies that solutions have been found to the problem of recognising incontrovertible examples of Indo-European poetry and mythology. The answer perhaps is that we should not judge a book by its cover or, in this case, by its title. There are no extravagant claims for solutions here and, although he has not given us the last word on the subject, West has provided us with more than the ‘vista’ he promised at the outset. It is, in fact, a virtual compendium of the most relevant material distilled by one of the finest minds to venture into this field.Footnote ¹³³ This book will remain a tool of immense value to scholars.