From the preface
Research activity in Indo-European comparative mythology has been regularly pursued at the University of California, Los Angeles, since the academic year 1959-60, when the Seminar in Indo-European Mythology was held for the first time. Other organizational milestones have been the creation of the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology in 1961 and of the Section of Indo-European Studies as an autonomous part of the Department of Classics in 1964.
Workers from many fields—anthropology, classical languages, English, folklore, Germanic languages, Indo-European studies, Slavic languages—have participated in these endeavors. Numerous research papers have been written and discussed over the years. A succession of research assistants (Anastasia Demetriades, C. Scott Littleton, Robert Gartman, Eleanor Long, Antoinette Botsford) have helped lay an exhaustive bibliographical and documentary groundwork under the auspices of the mythology section of the Center. At least two published doctoral dissertations have drawn their inspiration and inception from these efforts (C. Scott Littleton, The New Comparative Mythology: An Anthropological Assessment of the Theories of Georges Dumezil [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966], and Donald Ward, The Divine Twins: An Indo-European Myth in Germanic Tradition [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968]).
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