I. Character of Aryan folklore. BOOK :. It is scarcely necessary id go further...If we do, we shall only be Confronted by the same astonishing parallelism which is exhibited by the several versions of the stories already cited. The hypothesis of conscious borrowing is either superfluous or dangerous. It is unnecessary, if adduced to explain the distant or vague resemblances in one story, while they who so apply it admit that it cannot account for the far more striking points of likeness seen in many others. It is dangerous because it may lead us to infer an amount of intercourse between the separated Aryan tribes for which we shall vainly seek any actual evidence. It is inadequate, because in a vast number of instances the point to be explained is not a similarity of ideas, but a substantial identity in the method of working them out, extending to the most unexpected devices and the subtlest turns of thought and expression. That the great mass of popular tradition has been thus imported from the East into the West, or from the West into the East, has never been maintained; and any such theory would rest on the assumption that the folk-lore of a country may be created by a few scholars sitting over their books, and deliberately determining the form in which their stories shall be presented to the people. It would be safer to affirm, and easier to prove, that no popular stories have thus found their way from learned men to the common people. The ear of the people has in all ages been deaf to the charming of the scholars, charm they never so wisely. Bookmen may, if they please, take up and adapt the stories of the people; but the legend of "the Carter, the Dog, and the Sparrow" would never have found its way into the nurseries of German peasants if written by Grimm himself in imitation of some other Aryan tale. The importation of one or two stories by means of written books is therefore a matter of very slight moment, so long as it is admitted that legends, displaying the most astonishing parallelism in the most distant countries of Europe and Asia, cannot be traced to any intercourse of the tribes subsequent to their dispersion from a common home. We thus have before us a vast mass of myths, fables, legends, stories, or by whatever name they are to be called, some in a form not much advanced beyond the proverbial saying which was their kernel, others existing apparently only as nursery tales, others containing the germs of the great epics of the Eastern and the Western world. All these may be placed together in one class, as springing from phrases which at first denoted physical phenomena; and enough has perhaps been already said to show that this class includes a very large proportion of strictly popular stories which seem at first sight to be in no way connected with epical mythology. There remain the comparatively few stories UBIQUITY OF THE TROJAN WAR. V. ΙΟΙ which seem to have had their origin in proverbs or adages; and it is, ̈- CHAP. of course, possible that some or all of these may belong to those more recent times when men had attained to some notion of the order of a moral world, to some idea of law and duty. But it is impossible not to see that some at least of these stories turn on notions suggested by the older mythical speech. The dog and the parrot in the stories of the Carter and the Nautch-girl are weak things which bring down the pride of those who oppress the helpless; but this is simply the character and the office of Boots in Teutonic stories, and Boots and Cinderella, Oidipous and Heraklês, alike represent the sun, who, weak and powerless as he starts on his course, is at length victorious over all his enemies. The phenomena of nature present analogies to the order of the moral world, which are perhaps closer than theologians have imagined. If the words which we use to denote the most abstract ideas were at first mere names of sensible things,' the phrases which described the processes of nature must be capable of receiving a moral meaning. The story of the sun starting in weakness and ending in victory, waging a long warfare against darkness, clouds, and storms, and scattering them all in the end, is the story of all heroism, of all patient self-sacrifice, of all Christian devotion. There is, therefore, nothing to surprise us if the phrases. which we use with a spiritual meaning, and the proverbs in which we sum up our spiritual experience, should have been suggested by the very phenomena which furnished the groundwork of Aryan epic poetry. The tendency of physical science is to resolve complex agencies into a single force: the science of language seems to be doing the same work for the words and the thoughts of men. value of traditions. But the story of the heroes of Teutonic and Hindu folk-lore, the Historical stories of Boots and Cinderella, of Logedas Raja, and Surya Bai, Aryan are the story also of Achilleus and Oidipous, of Perseus and Theseus, popular of Helen and Odysseus, of Baldur and Rustem and Sigurd. Everywhere there is the search for the bright maiden who has been stolen away, everywhere the long struggle to recover her.1 The war of Ilion has been fought out in every Aryan land. Either, then, the historical facts which lie at the root of the narrative of the Iliad took place before the dispersion of the Aryan tribes from their common home, or they are facts which belong to the beautiful cloudland, where the misty Ilion "rises into towers at early dawn. If there be monotony in the character thus imparted to popular stories, the monotony is not confined to these tales. Sir Walter Scott was not thinking of mythology when he said, "It is curious VRANGLI GHORMATZ BOOK Points of CHAPTER VI. MYTHICAL PHRASES AS FURNISHING MATERIALS FOR THE TEUTONIC THE results obtained from an examination of Greek epic poetry, tonic epics. contemporary documents, as soon as we reach the historical age; but, whatever may be its defects or its vices, we are fully justified in saying that it is not the character of the great Achaian chieftains as exhibited either in the Iliad or the Odyssey. We have absolutely no warrant for the belief that the ancestors of Perikles or Themistokles, within ten or even more generations, were men who would approve the stabbing of enemies behind their backs, the use of poisoned arrows, and the butchery of captives deliberately set apart to grace the funeral sacrifices of a slain chief. Nay, more, we shall look in vain in any historical record for any portrait which will justify the belief that the picture of Achilleus in the Iliad is the likeness of an actual Achaian chieftain, while on any psychological analysis we seem to be driven to the conclusion that the character is one removed altogether from the bounds of humanity. If the analysis1 of the character of Odysseus and Achilleus shows that almost every feature is traditional, and that the portraits, as a whole, are not of the poet's making, that the wisdom and the falsehood, the truthfulness and the sullenness, whether of the one hero or the other, were impressed upon each by a necessity which no poet could resist, and that these conclusions are proved by the evidence, overwhelming in its amount, which shows that Achilleus and Odysseus are reflexions of Perseus, Theseus, Heraklês, and these, again, of Phoibos and Helios, or of other deities who share their attributes—if the whole story which has gathered round the names of these great national Science of Comparative Mythology, ch. ix. section 2. For this analysis I must refer the reader to my Introduction to the LIKENESS BETWEEN GREEK AND TEUTONIC EPICS. heroes resolves itself into the cloudland of heaven with its neverceasing changes, we are at once justified in thinking that the history of the Teutonic heroes may be of much the same kind; and if on examining it we not only find this suspicion borne out, but discern in it some of the most important incidents and sequences which mark the Greek legends, the conclusion is forced upon us that the Teutonic epics, like the Hellenic, are the fruit of one and the same tree which has spread its branches over all the Aryan lands, and that the heroes of these epics no more exhibit the actual character of Northmen and Germans than the portraits of the heroes in the Iliad and Odyssey are the pictures of actual Achaian chieftains. When we find further that the action in each case turns on the possession of a beautiful woman and the treasures which make up her dowry, that this woman is in each case seduced or betrayed, while the hero with his invincible weapons is doomed to an early death after the same stormy and vehement career, we see that we are dealing with materials which under different forms are essentially the same; and our task becomes at each stage shorter and simpler. 103 CHAP. VI. Hence as we begin the story of Volsung (who is Diogenes or the The Volson of Odin, his father Rerir and his grandfather Sigi being the only sung Tale. intermediate links), we suspect at once that we are carried away from the world of mortal men, when we find that he is one of those mysterious children whose birth from a mother destined never to see them1 portends their future greatness and their early end; and as we read further of the sword which is left for the strongest in the rooftree of Volsung's hall, no room is left for doubt that we have before us the story of Theseus in another dress. The one-eyed guest with the great striped cloak and broad flapping hat, who buries the sword up to its hilt in the huge oak stem,2 is Odin, the lord of the air, who in Teutonic mythology is like the Kyklops, one-eyed, as Indra Savitar is one-handed. But Aigeus in the Argive story is but one of the many names of Zeus Poseidôn, and as the husband of Aithra, the ether, he also is lord of the air. In vain, when Odin has departed, So in the Hindu popular story, Vikramaditya (the child of Aditi, Kronos, or the Dawn-land of the East), is the son of Gandharba-sena. When his sire died, his grandfather, the deity Indra, resolved that "the babe should not be born, upon which his mother stabbed herself. But the tragic event duly happening during the ninth month, Vikramaditya came into the world by himself." Burton, Tales of Indian Devilry, preface, p. xv. One of the most remarkable and, from a certain point of view, most important of the 2 This tree grows through the roof I. BOOK do Siggeir, the husband of Volsung's daughter Signy, and the other guests at her marriage-feast, strive to draw the sword. It remains motionless in the trunk until it is touched by Sigmund,' the youngest and bravest of Volsung's sons-a reproduction in part of Volsung himself, as Odysseus is of Autolykos. To Sigmund's hand, as to Arthur, the sword yields itself at once, without an effort. Theseus lifts the huge stone beneath which Aigeus had placed his magic. sword and sandals. The weapon of the Greek story is the sword of Chrysâôr; that of the Teutonic legend is the famous Gram, the Excalibur of Arthur and the Durandal of Roland, and Sigmund thus becomes, like Achilleus, the possessor of an irresistible arm. In truth, the whole myth of Volsung and his children is but a repetition, in all its phases, of that great drama of Greek mythology which begins with the loss of the golden fleece and ends with the return of the Herakleidai. This drama represents the course or history of the sun in all its different aspects, as ever young or growing old, as dying or immortal, as shooting with poisoned weapons or as hating a lie like death, as conquering the powers of darkness or as smitten by their deadly weapons; and thus in the defeat of Sigmund we have an incident belonging as strictly to the solar myth as the victory of Achilleus over Hektor, or the discomfiture of the Sphinx by Oidipous. It could not be otherwise. Odin and Phoibos live while Baldur and Asklepios die, but these rise again themselves or live in their children. So, too, there must be a struggle between Siggeir and Sigmund for the possession of Gram, for Siggeir stands to Sigmund in the relation of Polydektês to Perseus, or of Paris to Menelaos. But he is the dark being regarded for the present as the conqueror, and Sigmund and his ten brothers, the hours of the sunlit day, are taken and bound. The ten brothers are slain; Sigmund himself is saved by his sister Signy, and with his son Sinfiötli, now runs as a werewolf through the forest, the Lykeian or wolf-god wandering through. the dark forest of the night-a dreary picture which the mythology of sunnier lands represented under the softer image of the sleeping Helios sailing in his golden cup from the western to the eastern ocean. But the beautiful Signy is no other than Penelopê, and The Sigmund of Beowulf and the Volsung Tale bears a name which is an epithet of Odin, the giver of victory. He is drawn by Regin from the trunk of a poplar tree, he is loved by the Valkyrie Brynhild, and instructed by the wise Gripir, as Achilleus and other heroes are taught by Cheiron. He wears the invisible helmet, and like many or most mythical champions, can be wounded only in one part of his body. If again Fafnir, when dying by his hand, tells him of the things which shall happen hereafter, we must remember that the Pythian dragon guarded the oracle of Delphi.-Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 343. |