"Here, treacherous fiend, take your sword of light!" shouted
Sculloge in tones of thunder; and as he drew it from its
sheath the whole valley was lighted up as with the morning
sun, and next moment the head of the wretched Druid was lying
at his feet, and his sweet wife, who had come to meet him, was
laughing and crying in his arms. November, 1870.
V. MYTHS OF THE BARBARIC WORLD.
THE theory of mythology set forth in the four preceding
papers, and illustrated by the examination of numerous myths
relating to the lightning, the storm-wind, the clouds, and the
sunlight, was originally framed with reference solely to the
mythic and legendary lore of the Aryan world. The phonetic
identity of the names of many Western gods and heroes with the
names of those Vedic divinities which are obviously the
personifications of natural phenomena, suggested the theory
which philosophical considerations had already foreshadowed in
the works of Hume and Comte, and which the exhaustive analysis
of Greek, Hindu, Keltic, and Teutonic legends has amply
confirmed. Let us now, before proceeding to the consideration
of barbaric folk-lore, briefly recapitulate the results
obtained by modern scholarship working strictly within the
limits of the Aryan domain.
In the first place, it has been proved once for all that the
languages spoken by the Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans,
Kelts, Slaves, and Teutons are all descended from a single
ancestral language, the Old Aryan, in the same sense that
French, Italian, and Spanish are descended from the Latin.
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