Mythologies And Folk Tales

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

IF we found it difficult to reduce to a consistent unity the religious ideas of the Aryan races, what hope have we to find any thread through the labyrinth of their unbridled imagination in dealing with more fanciful subjects? The world is all before them where to choose, nature, in her multitudinous works and ever-changing shows, is at hand to give breath to the faculty of myth-making, and lay the foundation of all the stories which have ever been told. The two elements concurrent to the manufacture of mythologies are the varying phenomena in nature, and that which is called the anthropomorphic (personifying) faculty in man. Not, indeed, that all myths represent natural appearances, some may well enough relate events, human adventures; but the gods themselves being in almost every instance the personifications of phenomena or powers of nature, the myths of widest extension were necessarily occupied with these. Religion being the greatest concern of man, the myths which allied themselves most closely to his religious ideas would be those which maintained the longest life and most universal acceptance. In reviewing some of the Aryan myths —in a hasty and general review as it must needs be the preceding chapter Will serve as a guide to the myths most closely connected with religious notions, which have a chief claim upon our attention. Indeed, conversely, it was the fact that so many myths cling around certain natural phenomena which allowed us, with proper reservation, to point these out as the phenomena which held the most intimate place in men's minds and hearts. With proper reservations, because the highest abstracted god does not lend himself to the myth-making faculty. He stands apart from the polytheistic cycle below him the nature-gods who are also the heroes of the mythologies.

With a backward glance, then, to what has been already written, we may expect the chief myth systems to divide themselves under certain classes corresponding with the god or natural phenomenon who is their concern. We may expect to find myths relating especially to the labors of the sun, like those of Heracles and Thorr, or to the wind, like that of Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo, or to the earth sleeping in the embrace of winter, or sorrowing for the loss of her greenery, or joying again in her recovered life. And again we may look to find myths more intimately concerned with death, and with the looked-for future of the soul. These will mingle like mingling streams, but we shall often be able to trace their origin.

The diversity of the natural phenomena which give them rise will not in any way hinder the myths from reproducing the human elements which have, since the world began, held their pre-eminence in romance and history. There will be love stories, stories of battle and victory, of magic and strange disguises, of suddenly acquired treasure, and, most attractive of all to the popular mind, stories of princes and princesses whose princedom is hidden under a servile station or beggar's gaberdine, and of heroes who allow their heroism to rust for a while in strange inaction, that

"Imitate the sun,
Who cloth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at."

Not necessarily because such heroes were the sun, but rather that the tales, appealing so correctly to the common sympathies of human nature, attach themselves pre-eminently to the great natural hero, the sun-god.

Yet, to begin with the sun-god, his love stories relate most commonly the pursuit of the dawn, a woman, by the god of day. She flies at his approach; or if the two are married in early morning, when the day advances, the dawn dies or the sun leaves her to pursue his allotted journey. We read how Apollo pursued Daphnê, while she still fled from him, and at last, praying to the gods, was changed into a laurel, which ever afterwards remained sacred to the son of Lêtô. There is nothing new in the story; it might be related of any hero. Yet, as we find Greek art so often busy with it, we might guess that it had obtained for some reason a hold more than commonly firm upon the popular imagination. And when we turn from the Greek to the Sanskrit we are able to unravel the' myth and show it, so far as the names are concerned, peculiar to the sun-god. Daphnê is the Sanskrit Dahanâ, that is to say, the Dawn.

A tenderer love story is that which speaks of the sun and the dawn as united at the opening of the day, but of the separation which follows when the sun reveals himself in his true splendor. The parting, however, will not be eternal, for the sun in the evening shall sink into the arms of the west, as in the morning he left those of the east all the physical appearances at sundown will correspond with those of the dawn so in poetical language he will be said to return to his love again at the evening of life. Well according with its natural origin and native attractiveness, we find this story repeated almost identically as regards its chief incidents by all the branches of the Aryan family. For an Indian version of it the reader may consult the story of Urvasi and Pururavas told by Mr. Max Müller from one of the Vedas,1 Urvasi is a fairy who falls in love with Pururavas, a mortal, and consents to become his wife, on condition that she should never see him without his royal garment on, "for this is the manner of women." For a while they lived together happily; but the Gandhavas, the fairy beings to whom Urvasi belonged, were jealous of her love for a mortal, and they laid a plot to separate them. " Now there was a ewe with two lambs tied to the couch of Urvasi and Pururavas, and the fairies stole one of them, so that Urvasi upbraided her husband and said, ` They steal my darlings as though I lived in a land where there is no hero, and no man.' And Pururavas said, 'How can that be a land without heroes or men where I am,' and naked he sprang up. Then the Gandhavas sent a flash of lightning, and Urvasi saw her husband naked as by daylight. Then she vanished. 'I come back,' she said; and went."

Cupid loves Psyche as Pururavas Urvasi, but here the story is so far changed that the woman breaks the condition laid upon their union. Not this time by accident, but from the evil counselling of her two sisters, Psyche disobeys her husband. They have long been married, but she has never seen his face; and doubts begin to arise lest some horrid monster, and not a god, may be the sharer of her couch. So she takes the lamp, and when she deems her husband is fast locked in sleep, gazes upon the face of the god of love.

" But as she turned at last
To quench the lamp, there happed a little thing
That quenched her new delight, for flickering,
The treacherous flame cast on his shoulder fair
A burning drop ; he woke, and seeing her there, v The meaning of that sad sight knew full well ;
Nor was there need the piteous tale to tell."

It may be said that we have here wandered far from the sun. Cupid or Eros is in no sense a sun-god; nor has Psyche any proved connection with Ushas, the Dawn. This is true; once a sun-myth does not imply always a sun-myth. So much the contrary, that it is part of our business to show how stories, first appropriated to Olympus or Asgard, may descend to take their place among the commonest collection of nursery tales. It is the case with this myth of the Dawn. The reader's acquaintance with nursery literature has probably already anticipated the kinship to be claimed by one of the most familiar childish legends. But as one more link to rivet the bond of union between Urvasi and Pururavas and Beauty and the Beast, let us look at a story of Swedish origin called Prince Hatt under the Earth.

" There was once, very very long ago, a king who had three daughters, all exquisitely fair, and much more amiable than other maidens, so that their like was not to be found far or near. But the youngest princess excelled her sisters, not only in beauty, but in goodness of heart and kindness of disposition. She was consequently greatly beloved by all, and the king himself was more fondly attached to her than to either of his other daughters.

" It happened one autumn that there was a fair in a town not far from the king's residence, and the king himself resolved on going to it with his attendants. When on the eve of departure he asked his three daughters what they would like for fairings, it being his constant custom to make them some present on his return home. The two elder princesses began instantly to enumerate precious things of curious kinds; one would have this, the other that; but the youngest daughter asked for nothing. At this the king was surprised, and asked her whether she would not like some ornament or other; but she answered that she had plenty of gold and jewels. When the king, however, would not desist from urging her, she at length said, 'There is one thing which I would gladly have, if only I might venture to ask it of my father.' ' What may that be ?' inquired the king, 'say what it is, and if it be in my power you shall have it.' 'It is this,' replied the princess, 'I have heard talk of the three singing leaves, and them I wish to have before anything else in the world.' The king laughed at her for making so trifling a request, and at length exclaimed, 'I cannot say that you are very covetous, and would rather by half that you had asked for some greater gift. You shall, however, have what you desire, though it should cost me half my realm.' He then bade his daughters farewell and rode away."

Of course he goes to the fair, and on his way home happens to hear the three singing leaves, " which moved to and fro, and as they played there came forth a sound such as it would be impossible to describe." The king was glad to have found what his daughter had wished for, and was about to pluck them, but the instant he stretched forth his hand towards them, they withdrew from his grasp, and a powerful voice was heard from under the earth saying, " Touch not my leaves." "At this the king was somewhat surprised, and asked who it was, and whether he could not purchase the .leaves for gold or good words. The voice answered, ' I am Prince Hatt under the Earth, and you will not get my leaves either with good or bad as you desire. Nevertheless I will propose to you one condition.' ' What condition is that ?' asked the king with eagerness.

It is,' answered the voice, 'that you promise me the first living thing that you meet when you return to your palace.' " As we anticipate, the first thing which he meets is his youngest daughter, who therefore is left with lamentation under the hazel bush : and, as is its wont on such occasions, the ground opens, and she finds herself in a beautiful palace. Here she lives long and happily with Prince Hatt, upon condition that she shall never see him. But at last she is permitted to pay a visit to her father and sisters; and her stepmother succeeds in awakening her curiosity and her fears, lest she should really be married to some horrid monster. The princess thus allows herself to be persuaded to strike a light and gaze on her husband while he is asleep. Of course, just as her eyes have lighted upon a beautiful youth he awakes, and as a consequence of her disobedience (here the story alters somewhat) he is struck blind, and the two are obliged to wander over the earth, and endure all manner of misfortunes before Prince Hatt's sight is at last restored.

The sun is so apt to take the place of an almost superhuman hero, that most of the stories of such when they are purely mythical relate some part of the sun's daily course and labors. Thus in the Greek, Perseus, Theseus, Jason, are in the main sun-heroes, though they mingle with their histories tales of real human adventure. One of the most easily traceable sun-stories is that of Perseus and the Gorgon. The later representations of Medusa in Greek art give her a beautiful dead face shrouded by luxurious snaky tresses; but the earlier art presents us with a round face, distorted by a hideous grin from ear to ear, broad cheeks, low forehead, over which curl a few flattened locks. We at once see the likeness of this face to the full moon; a likeness which, without regard to mythology, forces itself upon us; and then the true story of Perseus flashes upon us as the extinction of the moon by the sun's light. This is the baneful Gorgon's head, the full moon, which so many nations superstitiously believed could exert a fatal power over the sleeper; and when slain by the son of Danaê, it is the pale ghostlike disc which we see by day. It is very interesting to see how the Greeks made a myth of the moon in its one may say literal unidealized aspect, as well as the countless more poetical myths which spoke of the moon as a beautiful goddess, queen of the night, the virgin huntress surrounded by her pack of dogs the stars. In the instance of Medusa these two aspects of one natural appearance are brought into close relationship, for Athênê in her character of moon-goddess wears the Gorgon's head upon her shield.

As we have passed on to speak of the moon, we may as well notice some of the other moon-myths: though in the case of these, as of the myths of the sun, our only object must be to show the characteristic forms which this order of tales assume, so that the way may be partly cleared for their detection; nothing like a complete list of the infinitely varied shapes which the same nature-story can assume being possible. One of-the most beautiful of moon-myths is surely the tale of Artemis (Diana) and Endymion. This last, the beautiful shepherd of Latmos,1 by his name " He who enters," is in origin the sun just entering the cave of night.' The moon looking upon the setting sun is a signal for his long sleep, which in the myth becomes the sleep of death. The same myth reappears in the well-known German legend of Tannhauser. He enters a mountain, the Venusberg, or Mount of Venus, and is not sent to sleep, but laid under an enchantment by the goddess within. In other versions of the legend the mountain is called not Venusberg but Horelberg, and from this name we trace the natural origin of the myth. For there was an old moon-goddess of the Teutons called Horel or Hursel. She therefore is the enchantress in this case; and the Christian knight falls a victim to the old German moon-goddess. It has been supposed that the story of the massacre of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins whose bones they show to this day at Cologne arose out of the same nature-myth; and that this St. Ursula is also none other than Hursel, followed by her myriad troop of stars.3

The northern religion has been fruitful of its sun-myths, though in this system the sun is not preeminent, but holds an almost equal place with the wind the myths of Thorr and Baldur are balanced by those of Odin in his character of wind-god. And both sorts of stories have descended to a place in our nursery tales. Thorr, the champion of men, and the enemy of the Jötuns (giants), becomes in later days Jack the Giant Killer; Odin, by a like descent, the Wandering Jew, or the Pied Piper of Hameln. And thus through a hundred popular legends we can detect the natural appearance out of which they originally sprang. Let us look at them first in their old heathen forms. Thorr, the hero and sun-god, the northern Herakles, distinguishes himself as the implacable enemy of the rime-giants and frost-giants, the powers of cold and darkness; and to carry on his hostilities, he makes constant expeditions, "farings" into giant-land, or Jötunheim, as it is called; and these expeditions generally end in the thorough discomfiture of the strong but rude and foolish personifications of barren nature. One of these, the adventure to the house of Thrym,1 is to recover Thorr's hammer, which has been stolen by the giant and hidden many feet beneath the earth. A spy is sent from Asgard (the city of the gods) into Jötunheim, and brings back word that Thrym will not give up his prize unless Freyja goddess of Spring and Beauty be given to him as his bride; and at first Thorr proposes this alternative to Freyja herself, little, as may be guessed, to her satisfaction.

" Wroth was Freyja
And with fury fumed,
All the AEsir's hall
Under her trembled ;
Broken flew the famed
Brisinga-necklace."

But the wily Loki settles the difficulty. Thorr shall to Jötunheim clad in Freyja's weeds,

"Let by his side, keys jingle, and a neat coif set on his head."

So taking Loki with him clad as a serving-maid, the god fares to Thrym's house, as though he were the looked-for bride. It must, one would suppose, have been an anxious time for Thorr and Loki, while unarmed they sate in the hall of the giant; for the hero could not avoid raising some suspicions by his unwomanly appearance and demeanor. He alone devoured, we are told, an ox, eight salmon, "and all the sweetmeats women should have," and he drank eight " scalds " of mead. Thrym naturally exclaimed that he never saw brides eat so greedily or drink so much mead. But the "all-crafty" Loki sitting by, explained how this was owing to the hurry Freyja was in to behold her bridegroom, which left her no time to eat for the eight nights during which she had been journeying there. And so again when Thrym says

" Why are so piercing Freyja's glances?
Methinks that fire burns from her eyes."

Loki explains that for the same reason she had not slept upon her journey; and the foolish, vain giant is gulled once more. At last the coveted prize, the hammer, was brought in to consecrate the marriage, and "Thorr's soul laughed in his breast, when the fierce-hearted his hammer recognized. He slew Thrym, the Thursar's (giant's) lord, and the Jötun's race crushed he utterly." At another time Thorr engages Alvis, "of the race of the Thursar,"' in conversation upon all manner of topics, concerning the names which different natural objects bear among men, among gods, among giants, and among dwarfs, until he guilefully keeps him above earth till after sunrise, which it is not possible for a dwarf or Jötun to do and live. So Alvis burst asunder.' This tale shows clearly enough how much Thorr's enemies are allied with darkness.

Thorr is not always so successful. In another of his journeys' the giants play a series of tricks upon him, quite suitable to the Teutonic conception of the cold north, as a place of magic, glamour, and illusion. One giant induces the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him, and to hurl at it the death-dealing bolt—his hammer Mjölnir. Afterwards he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely more than the rim has been left bare; at the same time Loki engages in an eating match with one Logi, and is utterly worsted. But in reality Thorr's horn has reached to the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Afterwards Thorr cannot lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth the great Midgard serpent which girds the whole earth, and he is overcome in a wrestling match with an old hag, whose name is Ella, that is, Old Age or Death. Enough has been said in these stories to show how directly the cloak of Thorr descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and Jack and the Bean-Stalk.

Closely connected with the sun god are the mythical heroes of northern poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of Germany and Scandinavia. The famous Sigurd the Volsung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of the Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem Beowulf,1 are especially at war with dragons which represent the powers of darkness or with beings of a Jotun-like character. They are all discoverers of treasure; and this so far corresponds with the character of Thorr that the thunderbolt is often spoken of as the revealer of the treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was employed as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the tales or poems in which these adventures are told we see how entirely unhuman in character they were, and how much the actors in the drama bear the reminiscences of the natural phenomena from which they sprang. This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is weird and imaginative in the highest degree: the atmosphere into which we are thrown seems to be the misty delusive air of Jötunheim, and the unearthly beings whom Beowulf encounters must have had birth within the shadows of night and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on human beings, whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thorr wrestles with Ella) and puts to death, is described as an "inhabiter of the moors," the "fen and fastnesses;" he comes upon the scene "like a cloud from the misty hills, through the wan night á shadow-walker stalking "; and of him and his mother it is said,

" They a father know not,
Whether any of them was
Born before
Of the dark ghosts."

They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves' retreat, and in " windy ways

Where the mountain stream
Under the nesses mist Downward flows."

Of the myths which spring from the wind, and which may therefore be reckoned the children of Odin, by far the most interesting are those which attach to him in his part of Psycopomp, or soul-leader, and which form a part, therefore, of an immense series of tales connected with the Teutonic ideas of death as they were detailed in the last chapter. There were many reasons why these occupied a leading place in middle age legend. The German race is naturally a gloomy or at least a thoughtful one: and upon this natural gloom and thoughtfulness the influence of their new faith acted with re-doubled force, awaking men to thoughts not only of a new life but of a new death. Popularreligion took as strong a hold of the darker as of the brighter aspects of Catholicism, and was busy grafting the older notions of the soul's future state upon the fresh stock of revealed religion. Thus many of the popular notions both of heaven and hell maybe discovered in the beliefs of heathen Germany. Let us, therefore, abandoning the series of myths which belong properly to the Aryan religious beliefs as given in chapter ix. (though upon these, so numerous are they, we seem scarcely to have begun), turn to others which illustrate our last chapter. Upon one we have already touched; Odin, as chooser of the dead, hurrying through the air towards a battle-field with his troop of shield-maidens, the Valkyriur; or if we like to present the simpler nature-myth, the wind bearing away the departing breath of dying men, and the clouds which he carries on with him in his course. For there is no doubt that these Valkyriur, these shield or swan maidens, who have the power of transforming themselves at pleasure into birds, are none other than the clouds, perhaps like the cattle of Indra, especially the clouds of sunrise. We meet with them elsewhere than in northern mythology. The Urvasi, whose story we have been relating just now, after the separation from her mortal husband changes herself into a bird and is found by Pururavas in this disguise, sitting with her friends the Gandhavas upon the water of a lake. This means the clouds of evening sitting upon the wide blue sky. The Valkyriur themselves, when they have been married to men, often leave them as the Indian fairy left her husband, and lest they should do so it is not safe to restore them the swan's plumage which they wore as Valkyriur; should they again obtain their old equipment they will be almost sure to don it and desert their home to return to their old life. The Valkyriur, therefore, are clouds; and in so far as they appear in the legends of other nations have no intimate connection with Odin. But when they are the clouds of sunset and when Odin in his character f soul-bearer becomes before -all things the wind of the setting sun (that breeze which so often rises just as the sun- goes down, and which itself might stand for the escaping soul of the dying day), then the Valkyriur make part of an ancient myth of death. And almost all the stories of swan maidens, or transformations into swans, which are so familiar to the ears of childhood, originate from Odin's warrior maidens. If we notice the plot of these stories, we shall see that in them too the transformation usually takes place at sun-setting or sun-rising. For instance, in the tale of the six swans in Grimm's Household Stories,1 the enchanted brothers of the princess can only reappear in their true shapes just one hour before sunset.

In Christian legends, subject to the changes which inevitably follow a change of belief, the gods of Asgard become demoniacal powers; and Odin the chief god takes the place of the arch-fiend. For this part he is doubly suited by his character of conductor of the souls; if he formerly led them to heaven, he now thrusts them down to hell. But so many elements came together to compose the mediaeval idea of the devil that in this character the individuality of Odin is scarcely preserved. At times a wish to revive something of this personal character was felt, especially when the frequent sound of the wind awoke old memories; then Odin re-emerges as some particular fiend or damned human soul. He is the Wandering Jew, a being whose eternal restlessness well keeps up the character of the, wind blowing where it listeth: or he is, as we have said, the 'Wild Huntsman of the Harz, and of many other places.

The name of this being, Hackelberg, or Hackelbärend (cloak bearer), sufficiently points him out as Odin, who in the heathen traditions had been wont to wander over the earth clad in a blue cloak,' and broad hat, and carrying a staff. Hackelberg, the huntsman to the Duke of Brunswick, had refused even on his death-bed the ministrations of a priest, and swore that the cry of his dogs was pleasanter to him than holy rites, and that he would rather hunt for ever upon earth than go to heaven. " Then," said the man of God, "thou shalt hunt on until the Day of Judgment." Another legend relates that Hackelberg was a wicked noble who was wont to hunt on Sundays as on other days, and (here comes in the popular version) to impress the poor peasants to aid him. One day he was joined suddenly by two horsemen. One was mild of aspect, but the other was grim and fierce, and from his horse's mouth and nostril breathed fire. Hackelberg turned then from his good angel and went on with his wild chase, and now, in company of the fiend, he hunts and will hunt till the last day. He is called in Germany the hel jäger, " hell hunter." The peasants hear his "hoto" "hutu," as the storm-wind rushes past their doors, and if they are alone upon the hill-side they hide their faces while the hunt goes by. The white owl, Totosel, is a nun who broke her vows, and now mingles her " tutu " (towhoo) with his "holoa." He hunts, accompanied by two dogs (the two dogs of Yama), in heaven, all the year round, save upon the twelve nights between Christmas and Twelfth-night.2 If any door is left open upon the night when Hackelberg goes by, one of the dogs will run in and lie down in the ashes of the hearth, nor will any power be able to make him stir. During all the ensuing year there will be trouble in that household, but when the year has gone round and the hunt comes again, the unbidden guest will rise from his couch, and, wildly howling, rush forth to join his master. Strangely refracted there lurks in this part of the story a ray of the Vedic sleep-god Sârameyas.

" Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house, oh, thou who takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend."

The Valkyruir in their turn are changed by the mediaeval spirit into witches. The Witches' Sabbath, the old beldames on broom-sticks riding through the air, to hold their revels on the Brocken, reproduce the swan maidens hurrying to join the flight of Odin. And, again, changed once more, " Old Mother Goose " is but a more modern form of a middle-age witch, when the thought of witches no longer strikes terror. And while we are upon the subject of witches it may be well to recall how the belief in witches has left its trace in our word "nightmare." Mara was throughout Europe believed to be the name of a very celebrated witch somewhere in the north, though the exact place of her dwelling was variously stated. And it is highly probable that this name Mara was once a bye-name of the death-goddess Hel, and itself etymologically connected with the name of the sea (Meer), the sea being, as we have seen, according to one set of beliefs, the home of the soul.

Odin, or a being closely analogous with him, reappears in the familiar tale of the Pied Piper of Hameln, he who, when the whole town of Hameln suffered from a plague of rats and knew not how to get rid of them, appeared suddenly no one knew from whence and prfessed himself able to accomplish their wish by means of the secret magic of his pipe. But it is a profanation to tell the enchanted legend otherwise than in the enchanted language of Browning :

" Into the street the piper slept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while ;
Then like a musical adept
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled."

Then the townsfolk, freed from their burden, refused the piper his promised reward, and scornfully chased him from the town. On the 26th of June he was seen again, but this time (Mr. Browning has not incorporated this little fact) fierce of aspect and dressed like a huntsman, yet still blowing upon the magic pipe.

Now it is not the rats who follow, but the children :—

" All the little boys and girls.
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter."

And so he leads them away to the Koppelberg Hill, and

" Lo, as they reached the mountain side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed ;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed.
And when all were in, to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast."

This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we come to examine into the origin of popular tales how many we find that had at first a funeral character. This Piper bath indeed a magic music which none can disobey, for it is the whisper of death; he himself is the soul-leading Hermes (the wind, the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But the legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic; for it is a Slavonic notion which likens the soul to a mouse.1 When we have got this clue, which the modern folk lore easily gives us, the Odinic character of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, in this particular myth we can almost trace a history of the meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the junction of their legends. - Let us suppose there had been some great and long remembered epidemic which had proved peculiarly fatal to the children of Hameln and the country round about. The Slavonic dwellers there and in prehistoric times the Slaves probably spread quite as far as the Weser would speak of these deaths mythically as the departure of the mice (i. e. the souls), and perhaps keeping the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the water. Or further, they might feign that these souls were led there by a piping wind god : he too is the common property of the Aryan folk. Then the Germans coming in, and wishing to express the legend in their mythological form, would tell how the same Piper had piped away all the children from the town. So a double story would spring up about the same event. The Weser represents one image of death, and might have served for the children as well as for the mice : to make the legend fuller, however, another image is selected for them, the dark, "concealed" place, namely, Hel, or the cave of Night and Death.

The two images of death which occur in the last story rival each other through the field of middleage legend and romance. When we hear of a man being borne along in a boat, or lying deep in slumber beneath a mountain, we may let our minds wander back to Baldur sailing across the ocean in his burning ship Hringhorn, and to the same Baldur in the halls of Hel's palace. The third image of death is the blazing pyre unaccompanied by any sea voyage. One or other of these three allegories meet us at every turn. If the hero has been snatched away by fairy power to save him from dying, and the last thing seen of him was in a boat as Arthur disappears upon the lake Avalon the myth hold out the hope of his return, and sooner or later the story of this return will break off and become a separate legend. Hence the numerous half-unearthly heroes, such as Lohengrin, who come men know not whence, and are first seen sleeping in a boat upon a river. These are but broken halves of complete myths which should have told of the former disappearance of the knight by the same route. Both portions really belong to the tale of Lohengrin; he went away first in a ship in search of the holy grail, and in the truest version' returns in like manner in a boat drawn by a swan. In some tales he is called the Knight of the Swan. He comes suddenly, in answer to a prayer to Heaven for help, uttered by the distressed Else of Brabant. But he does not return at once again to the Paradise which has sent him to earth. He remains upon earth, and becomes the husband of Else, and a famous warrior; and part of another myth entwines itself with his story. Else must not ask his name: but she disobeys his imperative command, and this fault parts them for ever. Here we have Cupid and, Psyche, or Prince Hatt and his Wife, over again. The boat appears once more drawn by the same swan, Lohengrin steps into it, and disappears from the haunts of men. We have already seen how through the Valkyruir the swan is connected with ideas of death. It remains to notice how they are naturally so connected by the beautiful legend myth or fact I do not know that the swan sings once only in life, namely, when he is leaving it, that his first song is his own funeral melody. A much older form of the Lohengrin myth is referred to in the opening lines of Beowulf, where an ancestor of that hero is said to have been found, a little child, lying asleep in an open boat which had drifted, no one knows whence, to the shore of Gothland.

Death being thus so universally symbolized by the River of Death, it is easy to see the origin of the myth that ghosts will not cross living water. It meant nothing else than that a ghost cannot return again to life. In the dark days which followed the overthrow of the Western Empire, when all the civilization of its remoter territories had melted away, there grew up among the fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of this island were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, that in the villages of the Gaulish coast the fishermen were summoned by rotation to perform the dreadful task of ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knocking was heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the water as though heavily freighted, but yet to their eyes empty. Each stepping in, took his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night across a distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily scarcely compass. in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore (our coast), they heard names called over and voices answering as if by rota, and they felt their boats becoming light. Then when all the ghosts had landed they were wafted back to Gaul.'

Among underground-sleepers, who reproduce the second image of death, the most celebrated are Kaisar Karl in the Unterberg the under-hill, or hill leading to the underworld; or, as another legend goes, in the Nürnberg, which is really the Niedern-berg, the down-leading hill; and Frederick Red-Beard sleeping in like manner at Kaiserslautern, or under the Rabenspurg (raven's hill). Deep below the earth he sits, his knights around him, their armor on, the horses harnessed in the stable ready to come forth at Germany's hour of need. His long red beard has grown through the table on which his head is resting. Once, it is said, a shepherd chanced upon the cave which leads down to the under-ground palace and awoke the Emperor from his slumber. " Are the ravens still flying round the hill ?" asked Frederick. " Yes." " Then must I sleep another hundred years."

There are two forms of allusion to the old heathen custom of fire-burial. One is by the direct mention of a fire a circle of fire, probably, through which the Knight must ride; the second is by putting in place of the fire the thorn which was the invariable concomitant of the funeral pile. A thorn-bush having been employed as the foundation of the fire, a thorn becomes a symbol of the funeral, and so of death.' Hence the constant stories of the Sleep-thorn. In the tale of Sigurd the Volsung both these symbols are used; when Sigurd first finds Brynhild she has been pricked by Odin with a sleep-thorn, in revenge, because she took part against his favorite Hialmgunnar ; for she was a Valkyria. Sigurd awakes her. At another time he rides to her through a circle of fire which she has set round her house, and which no other man dared face. In the myth of Sigurd, twice as it were riding through death to Brynhild, we see first of all a nature-myth precisely of the same kind as the myth of Freyr and Gerda (p. 143),2 precisely the reverse of the myth of Persephone. Brynhild is the dead earth restored by the kiss of the sun, or of summer. Afterwards the part of Brynhild is taken by the Sleeping Beauty, and Sigurd becomes the prince who breaks through the thorn-hedge. Observe one thing in the last story. The prick from the sleep-thorn becomes a prick from a spinning-wheel, and thus loses all its original meaning, while the circle of fire is transformed into a thorn-hedge, proof sufficient that they were convertible ideas. Lastly, it remains to say, that the stories of glass mountains ascended by knights are probably allegories of death heaven being spoken of to this day by Russian and German peasants as a glass mountain and perhaps the glass slipper of Cinderella is so too.