Watkins himself was something of a mythical figure. A Casaubonian in scholarship and determination without tragic vanity, he was born in Pittsburgh in 1933 and raised in New York City, inheriting from his Texas parents a pride in the Lone Star State as well as an incessant poignancy. He went to Harvard with the Class of 1954 and then stayed there, first for his doctorate and then as a professor of linguistics and classics until his retirement in 2003. His intellectual range was amazing. By the age of fifteen he was immersed in Indo-European studies; his ability with languages was so uncanny that people joked that he could board a train at one end of the country and get off at the other, speaking its national language fluently. He forgot nothing, and his ability to find hidden connections bordered on the supernatural. In 1984, while reading a fragmentary Luwian text—a relative of the Hittite language—he chose the phrase “steep Wilusa,” a counterpart to the Greek “high Troy.” [Ilios]”, and suggested that this points to the epic tradition of Troy that existed before Homer. The discovery made the front page Time.
How to Slay a Dragon showed that ancient mythology could be reconstructed not only from disparate titles or motifs, but also from general poetic formulas—pieces of old myth embedded in texts, like pagan altar slabs placed in the foundations of later temples. Watkins's prime example was the phrase “he/you slew the serpent,” a formula that appears everywhere: in Vedic hymns, Greek poetry, Hittite myths, Iranian scriptures, Celtic and Germanic sagas, Armenian epics, and even in spells for healing or harm. “There can be no doubt that this formula is the bearer of the central theme of the prototext,” he wrote, “the basic symbol of Proto-Indo-European culture.” His approach made reconstructing a myth look less like a guessing game and more like a genuine work of history.
The formula for killing a snake probably dates back to an old Indo-European myth. The storm god—muscular, bearded, full of thunder—defeats a snake that hoards something precious: cows, women, or the water of life. This god, who may have been called Perkvunos, rode a goat-drawn cart and wielded stone or metal weapons. In India he became Indra; among the Hittites – Tarhunna; in Old Church Slavonic – Perun; in Lithuanian Perkūnas; in the Scandinavian world Thor. In Greece the office of storm god passed to Zeus, although the name of Perkvunos survived, half disguised, in Zeus's thunderbolt Keravnos.
The killing of the serpent was a mythological superspreader that mutated and spread throughout the Indo-European world and beyond. According to books such as Ola Vikander's: “Unburnt Glory(2017), the story may even have spread among Semitic-speaking peoples—Yahweh's battle with Leviathan echoes Indra and Vritra, Apollo and Python, and Beowulf and his dragon.
Evolutionary thinkers have long argued that humans evolved to notice snakes, which may explain why these creatures have found their way into countless mythologies, from Quetzalcoatl in Mexico and Damballah in West Africa to sky dragons in China. But the classic dragon—reptilian, treasure keeper, and doomed to death—feels distinctly Indo-European. Siegfried against Fafnir, Bilbo against Smaug, Harry against the Basilisk: they all echo the ideas of the earliest Indo-European poets.
Indo-European mythology is more than just the sky father and the snake. Here is the wife of Heavenly Father, Mother Earth; his daughter Dawn; and his sons, the Divine Twins. There is a cosmogony in which the world is created from the corpse of a slain giant or proto-man, and another in which a Promethean-style hero steals fire from the gods and gives it to mortals. Nymphs and river goddesses abound here, as well as the all-seeing Sun God, who, since the invention of the spoked wheel, crosses the sky in a horse-drawn chariot.
The richness of this reconstructed kingdom raises a larger question: if we can piece together such a detailed mythological landscape from five to six thousand years ago, why not go back even further? Proto-Indo-Europeans appeared very recently in the history of our species; The Ice Age ended twelve thousand years ago, migration from Africa occurred about sixty thousand years ago, and Homo sapiens arose about three hundred thousand years ago. Do we still have stories from those distant times?
