Kate Neville gave one of her characteristically brilliant talks this morning at Mythmoot VI. Her theme was that Tolkien’s dragons always lie, and that this is essential to their nature.
In the Q&A period Chuck reminded us that evil can’t create anything, so Morgoth must have had some raw material to make dragons from, and asked Kate for her opinion about what that material might have been.
Kate replied that Tolkien didn’t say, so the floor was open for guesses.
Sparrow sat up and said, since lies are essential to dragon’s nature, then they must be a twisted version of language itself! In a world created by a philologist this would make them the most powerful of monsters. The audience loved that; applause all around.
Then Richard delivered the punch line: “Well, that explains the Old English term ‘word-hoard’!”
LeesMyth
So perhaps this is what Max Müller got wrong — it is just one type of mythical creature, rather than mythology itself, that is a “disease of language.”
Joe
I’m not familiar with Müller, so I looked around. Found this site by a guy who sounds like he would be a fascinating person to drink beer with:
https://www.creationmyths.org/mythology-meanings/mythology-meanings-10-max-muller.htm
The next sentence Müller wrote after that phrase says, “a myth is … a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence.” I can imagine JRRT grabbing that idea and inflating it from a single word to larger linguistic constructs.
Nice find!