No Germanist was more influential on Dumezil than Höfler, nor more closely associated with him throughout his career, except the Dutch historian of r… - Bruce Lincoln

"As a student of history of religions, I (Lincoln) was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer. The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them. Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement. To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind. Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalist (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth. Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected. The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although Hitler and Co. had badly abused it. But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole. Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that things are not so simple and the problems-moral and intellectual­ that attend this discourse and discipline are not so easily resolved.

What differentiates him from others of like opinion is the intricate scholarly code he developed, through which he made the arcane data of Indo-European mythology serve as t11e vehicles for his views, and through which his work came to command t11e attention of scholars everywhere. the body of work he produced is so challenging, so dense, and so influential, it deserves continued attention but attention of a critical variety. 137

First, the hypothesis for which Sir William Jones is most famous had deep antecedents and was always problematic. Most immediately, Jones was influenced by Jacob Bryant's bibliocentric attempt to trace all world mythology back to Ham and all right religion to Shem. 94