Why the wolves are the chief shamans of the animal world is an interesting question… I always thought it must have something to do with their interest in carrion and the regurgitating they do to feed the pups. But also there’s what it’s like to hear them howling to each other in the night time… leaves a big impression.

Re original texts: in this case I have some knowledge of the language, but by no means that of a native speaker (and the language has changed a great deal over the last century). The story I was translating was taken down from the storyteller, and the dictionary I used had the virtue of having many textual citations, so you could go look at how the root was used, often very helpful. That being said, there were plenty of times in the translation process where I found myself with questions, and places where it’s my best guess.

Back in the 19th century the theory about Native American languages was that they were so primitive they didn’t have fixed sounds. The theory of “alternating sounds” was blasted by Franz Boas, who noted that you could tell from any transcription of Inuit what the native language of the transcriber was–German, English, Norwegian, etc. Each heard the sounds through the filter of their own language, and where the Inuit sound categories crossed their own, heard a sound sometimes one way, sometimes the other.

We now know that every language has its own sound system where each unit is relative to (contrasts with) others in the system. We now have a whole vocabulary with which to describe individual phonological systems, using articulatory phonetics, rules of allophonic variation, and the like. No one argues with this any more. But everyone’s still arguing about mythology.

My argument (I wrote my dissertation on it) is that mythologies are complex communicative systems like languages and each one has multiple levels of structure, each level with its own sets of rules and conventions. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (that biology metaphor again) is an analysis of a single level of structure, the sequence of plot functions, in the Russian wonder tale. It looks pretty good and people applied it blindly to bodies of tales from other traditions and were then critical that it didn’t apply to those nearly as well, and therefore it must not be a very good theory. In this case, it’s like examining Inuit through the phonological system of Norwegian and then saying Norwegian phonology isn’t a very good explanation of universal sound rules.

I don’t think the problem is with mythology! It’s that people tend to have too much invested in their views about mythology to study it empirically.

And even if you had the actual texts, you’re still kind of stuck, because you’re working not with direct knowledge of the language, but with a translator’s interpretation of it. Whatever your glossary says, it’s not true, it’s only as close to true as the guy that wrote it is able to get.

The error propagation in comparing the syntax and vocabulary of two works that are themselves translated must border on the astronomical.

Jason, in the classical version, is another figure whose success depends on the intervention of others (although I’m not sure mercy is the applicable concept here). And, come to think of it, he also brings destruction home with him, in the form of the classical Medea (apparently a much more malevolent figure than she was in preclassical versions of the story).

Mythology strikes me as being a lot like biology: the field of evidence is incredibly complex, and that inspires the impulse to systematize, organize. But this impulse tends to be destructive of the evidence it’s meant to explain. (”If it swims in the sea, it’s a fish. Get out of here with your porpoises, Aristotle! You can’t even count teeth. Okay, now if it flies in the air, it’s a bird. Why is Mr. Wayne looking upset over there?”)