Mythologie comparée

by F. Max Müller

Max Müller (1823-1900) fut l'un des plus grands savants de son temps, linguiste, historien des religions, maître de ce qu'il appela lui-même la mythologie comparée. Plusieurs de ses livres furent traduits en français. À partir de ce qu'il appelait modestement des Chips, un volume d'Essais sur la mythologie comparée parut à Paris en 1873. Il était suivi, en 1898, des Nouvelles Études de mythologie. Le présent volume, qui réunit pour la première fois les deux ouvrages, permettra de découvrir ces études à la fois savantes et vibrantes, toujours inventives, consacrées à des sujets divers, avec pour centre le soleil dont Müller faisait un principe essentiel d'explication aussi bien des mythes grecs, que des mythes scandinaves, germaniques, hindous, perses ou africains. Central lui-même dans une histoire de la mythographie, ce comparatiste d'hier ouvre aussi la voie aux comparatistes d'aujourd'hui et invite à passer du mythe à la littérature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Mythology, Religion

928 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Friedrich Max Müller, K.M. (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1843)—generally known as Max Müller or F. Max Müller—was the first Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University, and an Orientalist who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of comparative religion. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology and the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations, was prepared under his direction.

Müller became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. In 1869, he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres as a foreign correspondent. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite (civil class) in 1874, and the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art the following year. In 1888, he was appointed Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, delivering the first in what has proved to be an ongoing, annual series of lectures at several Scottish universities to the present day. He was appointed a member of the Privy Council in 1896.

His wife, Georgina Adelaide Müller was also an author. After Max's death, she deposited his papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Reviews

[Stephan Naro]

Never trust someone else's report of a book, even if it is a - presumably reliable - scholar.

This is considerably better than I was led to believe. It can't be the whole explanation of how we come to have religion, but this evolution of our use of language must make up an important part of the total.