वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

336 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
or hold that it was woven out of stray references in the Ṛig-Veda.
But in the absence of the Arctic theory, or the theory of
long darkness extending over nearly four months or a third
part of the year, European Scholars have been at a loss to
understand why the deity should have been named 'the Third';
and various ingenious theories have been started to explain how
Trita, which ordinarily means the third, came to denote
the deity that was thrown into a pit or well in a distant
land. Thus Prof. Max Muller thinks that the name of the
deity was originally Tṛita (तृत) and not Trita (त्रित); and he
derives the former from the root tṛî (तॄ) to cross. Tṛita (तृत)
which, by-the-by, is not a regular grammatical form though
found in the Atharva Veda VI, 113, 1 and 3, would thus
mean "the sun crossing the ocean," being in this respect
comparable to taraṇi which means "the sun" in the later
Sanskrit literature. In short, according to Prof. Max Muller,
Tṛita (तृत) means the 'set sun'; and the story of Trita (त्रित)
is, therefore, only a different version of the daily struggle be-
tween light and darkness. But Prof. Max Muller's theory re-
quires us to assume that this misconception or the corruption
of Tṛita (तृत) into Trita (त्रित) took place before the Aryan
separation, inasmuch as in Old Irish we have the word triath
which means the sea, and which is phonetically equivalent to
Greek triton, Sanskrit trita and Zend thrita. Prof. Max
Muller himself admits the validity of this objection, and
points out that the Old Norse Thridi, a name of Odin, as the
mate of Har and Jasnhar, can be accounted for only on the
supposition that tṛita (तृत) was changed by a misapprehen-
sion into trita (त्रित) long before the Aryan separation. This
shows to what straits scholars are reduced in explaining
certain myths in the absence of the true key to their meaning.
We assume, without the slightest authority, that a mis-
apprehension must have taken place before the Aryan separa-
tion, because we cannot explain why a deity was called