abstract
20/05/2014 14:05
Abstract: At each stage in transmission of a tale from generation to generation, modifications
take place but something remains. Thus there is a potential for material to be retained
from a time in the distant past when the narrative was embedded in a total oral worldview
or cosmology. This article introduces the analogical discovery method and uses it to build up
a structure based on a group of tales from Greece, Ireland and Wales. It draws the conclusion
that the structure of myth that is indirectly discernible through them deals with four
generations, both of gods and of humans, the last of which contains the king. It agrees with
the view proposed by Georges Dumézil that myth reflects human social organisation and
argues in addition that matrilineal succession to kingship provides a good fit with the tales.
The suggestion is put forward that there was a total, quite complex, cosmological code of
which narratives retain traces and that scholars today have the opportunity of deciphering
it.