""As a student of history of religions, I (Lincoln) was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer. The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them. Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement. To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind. Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalist (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth. Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected. The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although Hitler and Co. had badly abused it. But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole. Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes. In the pages that follow, I hope to show that things are not so simple and the problems-moral and intellectual­ that attend this discourse and discipline are not so easily resolved."