Critical Analysis
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein returned time and again to The Golden Bough, often enough that his commentaries have been compiled as Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, edited by Rush Rhees, originally published in 1967, with the English edition following in 1971. He writes, "Frazer is much more savage than most of these savages." Weston LaBarre made the observation that Frazer was "the last of the scholastics", and wrote The Golden Bough "as an extended footnote to a line in Virgil he felt he did not understand."
Some modern criticism sets Frazer in the broader context of the history of ideas, for example, Robert Ackerman in his The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. The myth and ritual school includes scholars Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A.B. Cook, who were connecting the new discipline of myth theory and anthropology with traditional literary classics at the end of the nineteenth century. This school was an important influence on a great deal of Modernist literature.
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