Before the storm has a name, it has a will. Wind that seems to mean the harm it does, thunder that answers back — the shape kept at this address is the storm imagined as a spirit, weather with someone inside it.

No storyteller's storm-spirit is yet wired to served text on this shelf: the legend-books Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist, filed here — a Germanic handbook, with Dutch, Livonian, and Slovenian collections, the last a Graz study of 1941 — wait unread. What the record holds instead is a scholar's testimony that the greatest god of Greece began as such a spirit. Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), the Cambridge classicist, argues in Themis (published 1912) that the Titanomachia (the war of gods and Titans) in Hesiod's Theogony (the archaic Greek poem of the gods' origins) is "but a half-humanized thunderstorm". She sets out the old battle-piece — Zeus descending "in one sweep of thunders that ceased not" while "the bolts went winged from his mighty hand" — and presses the point: the self-styled Father and Councillor of Olympus "remains to the end an automatically explosive thunderstorm". Even the Titans he overthrew are, in her reading, "These powers of the upper air, these gods of storm and lightning", lawless only because not understood. And in a footnote she borrows from R. R. Marett (1866–1943), the Oxford anthropologist, a word for the reflex that meets the thunderstorm as a person before crediting it with a soul: "as I propose to call it, Animatism".

The shelf is therefore a curious one: the shape still waits for its village witnesses, while the grandest of literary skies already testifies on its behalf. If the king of heaven himself is a storm never quite tamed into a person, how much of any god is weather?