The mythology of the Veda is to comparative mythology what Sanskrit has been to comparative grammar. Names are used in one hymn as appellatives, in another as names of gods. The same god is sometimes represented as supreme, sometimes as inferior to others. This chapter focuses on myths, and then proceeds to the more difficult, which must receive light from more distant regions, whether from the snowy rocks of Iceland and from the borders of the 'Seven Rivers'. The deep shadow which lies on the Greek mind from the very beginning of its political and literary history, the real character of that age which must have preceded the earliest dawn of the national literature of Greece. The rich imagination, the quick perception, the intellectual vivacity, and ever-varying fancy of the Greek nation, make it easy to understand that after the separation of the Aryan race, no language was richer, no mythology more varied, than that of the Greeks.