Vedic Hymns, Part I (SBE32)

This is one of the pinnacles of 19th century western Vedic scholarship. It is one of the three volumes in the Sacred Books of the East which Max Müller, the series editor, was the sole author of. Müller focuses here on four dozen hymns in the Rigvedas to the 'Storm Gods:' the Maruts. Distant relations of Mars, Thor, and Ares, the Maruts are Vedic-era deities associated with lightning, thunder, and the heavens.

If you excerpted just the translations, this would amount to about sixty pages. The full book weighs in at 550 pages. The true value of this work is Müller's deep analysis of the mythological, linguistic and poetic background of the hymns. The index, which gives every root form of every word in the text, is practically a skeleton key to Vedic Sanskrit.

PRODUCTION NOTES: This book took nearly two months of focused work to transcribe, and a total of four proof passes, as conventional OCR technology is unable to handle many of the aspects of this book at this point in time. Unicode implementations and web browsers are only now catching up with the typography used here. My goal was to reproduce the book in its entirety with all of the metrical markup in place. Only in one case did I have to compromise: the start of elision is indicated by a Unicode combining double inverted breve (0x361); but the end of the overbarred section is indicated by a green asterisk, e.g. hă͡rĭ*bhīr (p. ciii). --John Bruno Hare, June 28th, 2008.

Preface to the First Edition

Vedic Hymns

Appendices

I. Index of Words