THE DAWN AND HER LOVER. II. 221 and a feather, to guide her in her quest of him.1 At last this guid- CHAP. dove had gone. "East of the Sun and West Moon." The Norse tale "East of the Sun and West of the Moon," approaches more nearly to the form of Beauty and the Beast. A white bear (we are at once reminded of the process which converted the of the seven shiners into seven bears) taps at a poor man's window on a cold winter night, and promises him boundless wealth, on condition that he receives his daughter as his wife. The man is willing, but the maiden flatly says nay, until, overcome by the thought of her father's poverty, she agrees to live with the beast. The bear takes her to a palace in which the rooms gleam with silver and gold; but the being who comes to her at night is a beautiful youth who never allows her to see him. The woman who acts the part of Venus in this tale is the mother, not of the lover, but of the maiden; and as she could scarcely be represented as jealous of her daughter's happiness, we are told that, while suggesting the same doubts which brought Psychê to her trouble, she warned her child not to let a drop of oil fall on her husband while she stooped to look upon him. The sequel of the story presents no features materially different from Frere, Deccan Tales, 221. In the German story of the Iron Stove (Grimm), the part of Erôs is played by a king's son, who is compelled by a witch to sit in a great iron stove which stood in a wood. This is manifestly a reversing of the myth of Brynhild, in which the flame surrounding the maiden on the Glistening Heath answers to the fiery stove in which the prince is imprisoned. In the tale of BOOK The Wan derers in the Forest. that of the Soaring Lark, except that the oil dropped from the maiden's lamp is made to bring about the catastrophe. The prince is, of course, under the power of the sorceress, who wishes to marry him, like Odysseus in the house of Kirkê or the cave of Kalypsô; but when on the wedding morning he displays a fine shirt with three drops of tallow on it, and declares that he will marry only the woman who can wash them out, the Trolls, vainly attempting the task, see the prize snatched from their hand by the maiden whom they had despised as a stranger and a beggar.1 The myth passed into other forms. In every case the bonds of true love were severed; but the persons thus separated were sometimes brothers and sisters, sometimes parents and children. In the German story of the Twelve Brothers, the sister goes forth to search for the lost children in that great forest which reappears in almost all tales of Teutonic folk-lore, the forest of the night or the winter, in which the huntsman or the king's daughter, or the two babes, or Tanhaüser or True Thomas, the prince, the tailor, or the soldier, lose their way, to fall in every instance into the hands of witches, or robbers, or magicians, sometimes malignant, sometimes merciful and almost genial. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that under this type of solar legend (for, as turning on the presence or the absence of light and warmth, these are all solar legends), four-fifths of the folklore of northern Europe may be ranged. The inhabitants of this dark forest are the Panis, by whom the wanderers are sometimes welcomed, sometimes slain. These wanderers, or stolen youths or maidens, can be recovered only through much suffering on the part of those who seek them. In the tales of the Twelve Brothers and the Six Swans, the sister must not utter a word for seven or for six years, an incident which, in the story of the Woodcutter's Child, is changed into loss of voice, inflicted as a punishment by the angel who has charged her not to look into the thirteenth door of the palace in the land of Happiness, or in other words, into the treasurehouse of Ixion or Tantalos. But the appetite for mythical narratives was easily gratified. Incidents repeated a thousand times, with different names and slight differences in their sequence or arrangement, never palled upon it. If Psychê has hard tasks to perform 1 In the German story of Bearskin, the soldier is not turned into a beast, but is under compact with the evil one not to comb his hair or wash his face for seven years, but to wear a bear sark or cloak. In this disguise he compels the king to give him one of his daughters in marriage, and the youngest consents to be the victim, saying that a promise which has been made must be kept. The transformation is more complete in the story of Hans the Hedgehog, whose enchantment is brought to an end by burning his skin, as in the Deccan story of the enchanted rajah. THE SPELL OF THE MOON-GODDESS. 223 II. before recovering Erôs, the Greek was as well content to listen to the CHAP. story of the same tasks as they are performed by Erôs before he can recover Psychê. Thus the part of the latter in the legend of Appuleius is played by the former in the German stories of the White Snake and the Golden Bird, the Queen Bee, Strong Hans, the Drummer, and many others.1 of moon The common element of all these stories is the separation of two The spell lovers by the intervention of a third person, who is represented some- light. times as the mother, more often as another lover of the youth whose heart is given to the maiden from whom he is to be parted. In the latter case, her great object is to prolong the separation for her own benefit; and we have at once the framework of the tales which relate the sojourn of Odysseus in the abodes of Kirkê and Kalypsô. Penelopê, like Psychê, is far away, and though Odysseus has not forgotten her and longs to be with her, still he cannot escape from his irksome bondage. While the time of slumber lasts, he must tarry with the beautiful women who seek to wean him from his early love. The myth is but the fruit of phrases which spoke of the sun as sojourning in the land of sleep, freed from all woes and cares, and but dimly remembering the beautiful hues of morning under the magic charm of night. Thus in Kirkê and Kalypsô alike we have the moongoddess beneath whose spell the sun may be said to slumber, and in the palace of the one and the flashing cave of the other we see the wonderful home of Tara Bai, the Star-maiden, the Ursula or Selênê of the modern Indian tale. Girt with her zone of stars, the beautiful being who can neither grow old nor die sings the lulling song whose witching power no mortal may withstand. If she seeks for sensuous enjoyment, still her desire is not for the brutal pleasures which turn men into swine; but to see before her the wise chief whose glory is in all lands is a happiness for which she is ready to sacrifice all her 1 This myth reappears in a very thin disguise in the ballad of Erlinton, Scott's Border Minstrelsy. Here we have the forest, the maiden and her lover, while the robbers are a troop of knights headed by an old and grey-haired warrior, Winter himself. The knight, of course, fights with and slays all, except the grey-haired chief, who is suffered to go home to tell the tale; in other words, the mortal Medousa is slain, but the power of cold itself (her immortal sisters) cannot be destroyed. With this we may compare the deaths of Helle and Sarpedon, while Phrixos and Glaukos live on. So, too, the youngest child of Kronos is not de voured, and the youngest goat in 2 “ Υπν ̓ ὀδύνας ἀδαὴς ὕπνε δ' ἀλγέων. The turning of the companions of BOOK II. wealth and splendour. Still her abode is full of a strange mystery. Its magnificence is not the magnificence of the open sunshine, its pleasures are not the wholesome pleasures of the outer air. If then the sun tarries in her chambers, it is because he is under a spell, because Selênê has cast her deep sleep upon Endymiôn, and Zeus has not yet sent Hermes to bid Kalypsô let Odysseus go. Thus in these Greek myths we have the germ and the groundwork of all those countless stories which speak of mortal men carried away from their homes to dwell with unseen beings beneath the earth. These beings are in each story headed by a beautiful queen, whose will it is impossible to resist. This power is prominent in the myth which tells us that Thomas the Rimer was carried off in his youth to Fairyland, where he became possessed of vast and mysterious knowledge. At the end of seven years he was suffered to go back to the upper earth on condition of obeying the summons to return to Elfland whenever it might be given. The bidding came while Thomas was making merry with some friends in the Tower of Ercildoune. A hart and a hind, it was said, had come from the neighbouring forest and were slowly moving up the street of the village. Thomas immediately rose, left the house, and following the animals to the wood was never seen again.1 The story of Thomas is substantially identical with Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas, in whom the beauty of the Fairy Queen excites the same desire which the sight of Helen awakened in the Athenian Peirithoös. This fairy queen sometimes assumes the 1 Scott, Border Minstrelsy, iv. 114. Mr. Gould, in his chapter on the Mountain of Venus, notices among other stories that of the Norse Helgi, Thorir's son, who is invited by Ingebjorg the Troll queen to come and live with her. His absence, however, is confined to three days, at the end of which he returns home laden with treasure. His second visit was extended over many years, and from this he returned blind. The story told by Gervase of Tilbury, the scene of which is the mountain of Cavargum in Catalonia, is cited by Sir Walter Scott in his introduction to the Ballad of Tamlane, Border Minstrelsy. 2 Mr. Price (introduction to Warton's History of English Poetry, 49) compares the journey of Thomas to Elfland, in the Scottish ballad, with Ælian's story (Var. Hist. iii. 18) respecting Anostos "the bourne from which no traveller returns," and remarks that the prophetic power acquired by the Rimer during his sojourn with the Fairy Queen is no novel feature in the history of such fictions. "In one of Plutarch's moreover, endowed with a miraculous HORSELBERG AND ERCILDOUNE. 225 II. form of the Echidna who for a time made Heraklês sojourn in her CHAP. dwelling but the Tailor's son of Basle in the medieval story had the courage neither of Heraklês nor of Sir Gawain, and he was so terrified by the writhing of her tail that in spite of the beauty of her face he fled after giving her only two of the three kisses which she had bargained for. Such a myth as this, it is obvious, would, if subjected to Christian influence, exhibit the fairy queen as a malignant demon who takes delight in corrupting the faith of true believers by plunging them into a horrible sensuality. Thus modified, the myth of Odysseus and Kalypso appears as the story of Tanhauser, whom Venus entices into her magic cave, within the Horselberg (Ercildoune) or mountain of Ursula. After a time the sensuous enjoyment of the place palls upon him as upon Odysseus, and he makes his escape to the earth with a weary load of sin upon his heart, for which he vainly seeks to obtain absolution. At last he comes before pope Urban IV., who tells him that his pastoral staff will put forth leaves and blossoms sooner than God should pardon him. Tanhaüser has scarcely departed when the staff is seen to bloom; but it is too late. The minnesinger cannot be found, and he re-enters the Horselberg in despair, never to leave it again. Another modification, not less obvious and more in accordance with the spirit of the medieval myth, would be that of mere sleep, and Endymion would thus become the type of other slumberers to whom a century was but as a day. Among such is Epimenides, who while. tending sheep fell asleep one day in a cave, and did not wake until more than fifty years had passed away. But Epimenides was one of the Seven Sages, who reappear in the Seven Manes of Leinster," and in the Seven Champions of Christendom; and thus the idea of seven sleepers was at once suggested. This idea finds expression in the remarkable legend of the seven sleepers of Ephesus; and the number seven may be traced through other mediæval stories. So Barbarossa changes his position every seven years, and at the end of every seventh year Charlemagne starts in his chair, and Olger Dansk 1 Gould, Curious Myths, &c., second series, 223. The same story is presented in the romance of Sir Launfal and the Fay Tryamour, who bestows on him the never-failing purse, and in the tale of Oberon and Huon of Bordeaux. This Oberon is the dwarf king Elberich of the Heldenbuch, who performs to Otnit the service discharged by Oberon to Huon. The story of Tanhauser, again, is only another form of the legend of Ogier the Dane, who is Tithônos re- Fergusson, The Irish before the Conquest. |