Karuk Indian Myths #226095

Indian myths are valuable as literature in direct proportion to the faithfulness to the Old style Indian linguistic form in which they are told. Volumes of mythology distorted by being told loosely in English will be of only secondary usefulness in the future, when ethnology and mythology have become more exacting sciences. The only proper method for recording mythology is to obtain the services of a good mythologist and then to take down syllable by syllable in his own language, with unrestrained literary freedom, the story as he tells it, and as nearly as possible as he heard it from those a little farther back in the lines of elders.