Engaging Bruce Lincoln

Abstract

There is much to be said in appreciation for Bruce Lincoln's work. Among his contributions, two that stand out are his impressive mas tery of languages that makes most of us look linguistically feeble and his attention as early as the 1970's (in Emerging from the Chrysalis) to women's rituals.1 Even Lincoln's more recent regretful confession that he previously had been inattentive to issues of power, violence, and victimization (Lincoln 1999: 22, 188, 190-191) is, from a different per spective, praiseworthy: how many distinguished scholars would publicly reveal their idiocies and contradictions, as he calls them? His par ticular idiocy, he claims, lay in trying to reconstruct a prototype of an Indo-European myth that would account for all the attested vari ants, to assume an original that would recapture a primordial (and ahistoric) moment of unity, harmony, and univocal perfection. Such research, he came to think, is itself a form of myth, based on nostal gia for paradise (Lincoln 1991: 119-120, 123). It was not, to be sure, the mere quest for an Urheimat, an Ursprache, and an Urvolk that Lincoln came to deem foolish: the political dimensions of that quest—nationalist, colonialist, racist, Orientalist, and especially anti-Semitic—became increasingly apparent to him (Lincoln 1999: 74, 95, 212, 216). Both scholarship on, and revelations about, former giants in Indo-European studies, from Sir William Jones to Georges Dumezil2 and Mircea Eliade, uncovered their associations with right-wing, even