Hamlet's Mill - Reception

Reception

Hamlet's Mill was severely criticized by academic reviewers on a number of grounds: tenuous arguments based on incorrect or outdated linguistic information; lack of familiarity with modern sources; an over-reliance on coincidence or analogy; and the general implausibility of a far-flung and influential civilization existing and not leaving behind solid evidence. At most, it has been given a grudging sort of praise. Thus, Jaan Puhvel (1970) concluded that

"This is not a serious scholarly work on the problem of myth in the closing decades of the twentieth century. There are frequent flashes of insight, for example, on the cyclical world views of the ancients and on the nature of mythical language, as well as genuinely eloquent, quasi-poetic homilies."

Writing in The New York Review of Books, Edmund Leach noted:

“ authors' insistence that between about 4000 B.C. and 100 A.D. a single archaic system prevailed throughout most of the civilized and proto-civilized world is pure fantasy. Their attempt to delineate the details of this system by a worldwide scatter of random oddments of mythology is no more than an intellectual game. Something like 60 percent of the text is made up of complex arguments about Indo-European etymologies which would have seemed old-fashioned as early as 1870.”

H. R. Ellis Davidson referred to Hamlet’s Mill as

"amateurish in the worst sense, jumping to wild conclusions without any knowledge of the historical value of the sources or of previous work done. On the Scandinavian side there is heavy dependence on the fantasies of Rydberg, writing in the last century, and apparent ignorance of progress made since his time."

De Santillana and von Dechend state in the Introduction to Hamlet's Mill that they are well aware of modern interpretations of myth and folklore but they find them shallow and lacking insight: "...the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this - critics without nonsense and extremely wise". Consequently, de Santillana and Dechend prefer to rely on the work of "meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, Boll and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius...". They give reasons throughout the book for preferring the work of older scholars (and the early mythologists themselves) as the proper way to interpret myth; but this viewpoint did not sit well with their modern critics schooled in the "current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the primitive and what came after".

Barber (2006), itself a study aiming to "uncover seismic, geological, astrological, or other natural events" from mythology, appreciates the book for its pioneer work in mythography, judging that "Although controversial, have usefully flagged and collected Herculean amounts of relevant data." Nevertheless, the conclusions the authors draw from their data have been "virtually ignored by the scientific and scholarly establishment.”