Of gods and men: studies in Lithuanian mythology
ENGreimas constructs this mythology by searching into the crevices of his memory that are filled with the voices, rhythms, and smells of his childhood and youth, writing an ethnography of recollection. Then he supplements the personal with the cultural memory, or perhaps it is the other way around. Fragmentary allusions from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, descriptions of rituals and customs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and ethnographic documentation from the nineteenth century are interwoven with the aroma of firewood, the echoes of village songs, and the resonating voice of a storyteller. Together they provide the ethnographic and historical dimensions for the structure of mythology that Greimas builds upon the foundations of the Lithuanian language. [...] In conclusion, this volume is a literary, philological, semiotic, and folkloristic tour de force in which subjective attitude and objective analysis join in a synthesis, reconstructing the mythology of the past in a way that will be a model for future studies. [p. vii, x].
