Indo-European Poetry and Myth
A monograph by M. L. West (1937–2015), one of the twentieth century's foremost classicists (All Souls College, Oxford), applying systematic comparative method to reconstruct PIE poetic formulas, narrative themes, and religious concepts. Unlike purely linguistic handbooks, West works from attested literary texts — Rigveda, Avesta, Homer, Hesiod, Old Irish, Old Norse, and others — to identify shared formulas that imply a common inherited tradition of oral poetry. The book is structured in twelve thematic chapters covering the cosmos, the gods, heroes, eschatology, and the afterlife. Described by anthropologist Manvir Singh (writing in The New Yorker) as "the most comprehensive treatment" of Indo-European mythology available in English. Directly relevant to this vault because it provides the comparative evidence base for specific claim notes on sky-father theology and the dragon-slaying formula.
West reconstructs a PIE poetic formula for the sky father invocation, noting that the vocative Zeû páter in Homer, dyauṣ pitar in the Rigveda, and the embedded Iūpiter in Latin liturgy constitute three independent attestations of the same inherited formula — not mere cognates but the same syntactic unit functioning as a divine address. The probability of this being coincidental is negligible.
On Týr/Tiwaz: "The Germanic sky-god Tîwaz was apparently displaced from supreme status by Odin during the Migration Age. His name retains the PIE theonym (\dyeu-wos > \Tīwaz) but his mythology has been stripped back to a function of law and oath-keeping." (West discusses this in the context of the trifunctional analysis but treats the displacement as historically real, not merely functional.)
Chapter 5 ("The Sky and the Weather") establishes that the PIE sky deity was conceived as luminous (\dyeu-, "bright sky / daytime") and paternal, distinct from a storm deity (\Per(k)wunos, cognate with Thor/Indra/Perkunas). These are two separate reconstructible divine figures, not one.
West engages directly with the limits of reconstruction: "The further we go from attested languages, the more reconstruction becomes a probabilistic argument from shared archaism. Claiming to describe PIE religion is always partly speculation about a silence."
West is a mainstream Oxford classicist who applies the standard comparative method with exemplary philological rigor. His willingness to engage Norse and Vedic material as equals to Greek gives the book unusual breadth. However: (1) West is primarily a classicist; Indological and Iranist reviewers have noted occasional over-reliance on Greek as the comparative anchor. (2) The book reconstructs a single PIE poetic tradition; the degree to which this tradition was pan-PIE vs. a late-PIE dialect-area feature is debated. (3) As with all PIE reconstruction, evidence class is 3-reconstruction throughout the religion and mythology material — no direct PIE texts exist.
proto-indo-european-religion
dyeus-sky-father-cognate-set
pie-dragon-slaying-formula (claim note not yet written)