Birth Narrative in Indo-European Mythology

Anna June Pagé
Indo-European Studies Program
UC Los Angeles

Anna June Pagé’s dissertation presents a study of the narrative patterns that underlie a set of tales about the extraordinary births of heroes.  These tales have been selected from a range of Indo-European mythological traditions, but she places particular emphasis on texts from Celtic, Greek, and Indic literatures.  Birth narratives of this type have primarily been studied within the context of the “Heroic Biography Pattern,” which encompasses the full life-cycle of the hero.  However, her approach to these narratives goes beyond the study of this unified narrative pattern by identifying multiple types and sub-types of narrative structure, and by treating both the formal characteristics of these structures and their functional properties.  She then evaluates the evidence for some of these types, or some features of these types, being specifically Indo-European, and identifiable as reflexes of Proto-Indo-European myth.  She focuses on a few key themes, including reincarnation, miscarriage, incest, and various types of asexual conception, in a representative selection of ancient and medieval narratives. Drawing especially from the methods of comparative linguistics and folkloristics, she establishes correspondence sets of narrative features, which in turn support the examination of how motifs, narrative episodes, and even full tales interact with one another to form variants of familiar tales or entirely new tale types. Her dissertation devotes considerable attention to the comparison of diverse myths, but also to the problems and methodological considerations involved in arguing for reconstructing aspects of myth, as opposed to attributing shared features to typological factors or to diffusion through cultural contacts.