According to Lincoln, then, Indo-European research misses what is instructive about studying myths and religious texts in the first place, since it d… - Stefan Arvidsson

However the main reason why scholarship about the Indo-Europeans has tended to produce myths is that so many who have written (and read) about it have interpreted it as concerning their own origin : "We all have a need to understand," writes, for example Danish scholar of Iranian studies, Jes P. Asmussen, "What our Indo-European" forefathers felt and thought." The research on the Indo-Europeans has created a "web of scientific myths," to use Vernant's phrase, because it has dealt with "our origins" and hence, about the way "we" should do things. However, as we shall see later on, there have been many scholars who have resisted presenting the Indo-Europeans as "our true ancestor"—some (scholars of Jewish ancestry) because the Indo-Europeans could not possibly have been their forefathers, and others because they disproved of the mythologization for various reasons, even though they themselves might have been defined as "Indo-Europeans," (Arvidsson 2006, p.8, emphasis in the original).

The discussion about the Indo-Europeans has never been pure and simple fiction. The question is, however, what relationship the scholarly pursuit of knowledge has to mythical thinking and to its more universal relative, ideology—if we define ideology as a somewhat coherent system of ideas and norms that express a socially determined interest.(6)

The term "Nordic race" now began to be used as synonymous with “Aryan" and 'Indo-Germanic race." 143