"I do not suppose that the struggle between light and darkness was Homer's subject in the 'Iliad' any more than it was Shakespeare's subject in 'Hamlet.' Homer's subject was the wrath of the Greek hero, as Shakespeare's subject was the vengeance of the Danish prince. Nevertheless, the story of 'Hamlet,' when traced back to its Norse original, is unmistakably the quarrel between summer and winter; and the moody prince is as much a solar hero as Odin himself. (See Simrock, Die Quellen des Shakespeare, I., 127-133.) Of course Shakespeare knew nothing of this, as Homer knew nothing of the origin of Achilleus. The two stories are therefore not to be taken _as sun-myths in their present form_. They are the offspring of other stories which were sun-myths. They are stories which conform to the sun-myth type.... The sun and the clouds, the light and the darkness, were once supposed to be actuated by wills analagous to the human will; they were personified and worshipped or propitiated by sacrifice; and their doings were described in language which applied so well to the deeds of human or quasi-human beings, that in course of time its primitive import faded from recollection. No competent scholar now doubts that the myths of the Veda and the Edda originated in this way, for philology itself shows that the names employed in them are the names of the great phenomena of nature. And when once a few striking stories had thus arisen--when once it had been told how Indra smote the Panis, and how Sigurd rescued Brynhild, and how Odysseus blinded the Kyklops--then certain mythic or dramatic types had been called into existence; and to these types, preserved in the popular imagination, future stories would inevitably conform.... In this view I am upheld by a most sagacious and accurate scholar, Mr. E. A. Freeman, who finds in Carlovingian romance an excellent illustration of the problem before us."