Part 3

Nor in one Norse tale alone, but in many, we find traces of these three wonderful things, or of things like them. They are very like the cloth, the ram, and the stick, which the lad got from the North Wind instead of his meal. Very like, too, the cloth, the scissors, and the tap, which will be found in No. xxxvi, “The Best Wish”. If we drop the number three, we find the Boots again in “Soria Moria Castle”, No. lvi. [Moe, Introd., xxxii-iii] Leaving the Norse Tales, we see at once that they are the seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer. In the _Nibelungen Lied_, when Siegfried finds Schilbung and Niblung, the wierd heirs of the famous “Hoard”, striving for the possession of that heap of red gold and gleaming stones; when they beg him to share it for them, promising him, as his meed, Balmung, best of swords; when he shares it, when they are discontent, and when in the struggle which ensues he gets possession of the “Tarnhut”, the “cloak of darkness”, which gave its wearer the strength of twelve men, and enabled him to go where he would be unseen, and which was the great prize among the treasures of the dwarfs;[11] who is there that does not see the broken fragments of that old Eastern story of the heirs struggling for their inheritance, and calling in the aid of some one of better wit or strength who ends by making the very prize for which they fight his own?

And now to return for a moment to _Calila and Dimna_ and _The Seven Sages_. Since we have seen that there are other stories, and many of them, for this is by no means the only resemblance to be found in _Somadeva’s_ book[12] which are common to the Eastern and Western Aryans, but which did not travel to Europe by translation; let us go on to say that it is by no means certain, even when some Western story or fable is found in these Sanscrit originals and their translations, that that was the only way by which they came to Europe. A single question will prove this. How did the fables and apologues which are found in Æsop, and which are also found in the _Pantcha Tantya_ and the _Hitopadesa_ come West? That they came from the East is certain; but by what way, certainly not by translations or copying, for they had travelled west long before translations were thought of. How was it that Themistius, a Greek orator of the fourth century[13] had heard of that fable of the lion, fox, and bull, which is in substance the same as that of the lion, the bull, and the two jackals in the _Pantcha Tantya_ and the _Hitopadesa_? How, but along the path of that primaeval Aryan migration, and by that deep-ground tone of tradition by which man speaks to man, nation to nation, and age to age; along which comparative philology has, in these last days, travelled back thither, listened to the accents spoken, and so found in the East the cradle of a common language and common belief.

And now, having, as we hope, finally established this Indian affinity, and disposed of mere Indian copying, let us lift our eyes and see if something more is not to be discerned on the wide horizon now open on our view. The most interesting problem for man to solve is the origin of his race. Of late years comparative philology, having accomplished her task in proving the affinity of language between Europe and the East, and so taken a mighty step towards fixing the first seat of the greatest—greatest in wit and wisdom, if not in actual numbers—portion of the human race, has pursued her inquiries into the languages of the Turanian, the Semitic, and the Chamitic or African races, with more or less successful results. In a few more years, when the African languages are better known, and the roots of Egyptian and Chinese words are more accurately detected, Science will be better able to speak as to the common affinity of all the tribes that throng the earth. In the meantime, let the testimony of tradition and popular tales be heard, which in this case have outstripped comparative philology, and lead instead of following her. It is beyond the scope of this essay, which aims at being popular and readable rather than learned and lengthy, to go over a prolonged scientific investigation step by step. We repeat it. The reader must have faith in the writer, and believe the words now written are the results of an inquiry, and not ask for the inquiry itself. In all mythologies and traditions, then, there are what may be called natural resemblances, parallelisms suggested to the senses of each race by natural objects and every-day events, and these might spring up spontaneously all over the earth as home growths, neither derived by imitation from other tribes, nor from seeds of common tradition shed from a common stock. Such resemblances have been well compared by William Grimm,[14] to those words which are found in all languages derived from the imitation of natural sounds, or, we may add, from the first lisping accents of infancy. But the case is very different when this or that object which strikes the senses is accounted for in a way so extraordinary and peculiar, as to stamp the tradition with a character of its own. Then arises a like impression on the mind, if we find the same tradition in two tribes at the opposite ends of the earth, as is produced by meeting twin brothers, one in Africa and the other in Asia; we say at once “I know you are so and so’s brother, you are so like him”. Take an instance: In these Norse Tales, No. xxiii, we are told how it was the bear came to have a stumpy tail, and in an African tale,[15] we find how it was the hyaena became tailless and earless. Now, the tailless condition both of the bear and the hyaena could scarcely fail to attract attention in a race of hunters, and we might expect that popular tradition would attempt to account for both, but how are we to explain the fact, that both Norseman and African account for it in the same way—that both owe their loss to the superior cunning of another animal. In Europe the fox bears away the palm for wit from all other animals, so he it is that persuades the bear in the Norse Tales to sit with his tail in a hole in the ice till it is fast frozen in, and snaps short off when he tries to tug it out. In Bornou, in the heart of Africa, it is the weasel who is the wisest of beasts, and who, having got some meat in common with the hyaena, put it into a hole, and said:

“Behold two men came out of the forest, took the meat, and put it into a hole: stop, I will go into the hole, and then thou mayst stretch out thy tail to me, and I will tie the meat to thy tail for thee to draw it out”. So the weasel went into the hole, the hyaena stretched its tail out to it, but the weasel took the hyaena’s tail, fastened a stick, and tied the hyaena’s tail to the stick, and then said to the hyaena “I have tied the meat to thy tail; draw, and pull it out”. The hyaena was a fool, it did not know the weasel surpassed it in subtlety; it thought the meat was tied; but when it tried to draw out its tail, it was fast. When the weasel said again to it “Pull”, it pulled, but could not draw it out; so it became vexed, and on pulling with force, its tail broke. The tail being torn out, the weasel was no more seen by the hyaena: the weasel was hidden in the hole with its meat, and the hyaena saw it not.[16]

Here we have a fact in natural history accounted for, but accounted for in such a peculiar way as shows that the races among which they are current must have derived them from some common tradition. The mode by which the tail is lost is different indeed; but the manner in which the common ground-work is suited in one case to the cold of the North, and the way in which fish are commonly caught at holes in the ice as they rise to breathe; and in the other to Africa and her pitfalls for wild beasts, is only another proof of the oldness of the tradition, and that it is not merely a copy.

Take another instance. Every one knows the story in the Arabian Nights, where the man who knows the speech of beasts laughs at something said by an ox to an ass. His wife wants to know why he laughs, and persists, though he tells her it will cost him his life if he tells her. As he doubts what to do, he hears the cock say to the house-dog “Our master is not wise; I have fifty hens who obey me; if he followed my advice, he’d just take a good stick, shut up his wife in a room with him, and give her a good cudgelling.” The same story is told in Straparola[17] with so many variations as to show it is no copy; it is also told in a Servian popular tale, with variations of its own; and now here we find it in Bornou, as told by Kölle.

There was a servant of God who had one wife and one horse; but his wife was one-eyed, and they lived in their house. Now this servant of God understood the language of the beasts of the forest when they spoke, and of the birds of the air when they talked as they flew by. This servant of God also understood the cry of the hyaena when it arose at night in the forest, and came to the houses and cried near them; so, likewise, when his horse was hungry and neighed, he understood why it neighed, rose up, brought the horse grass, and then returned and sat down. It happened one day that birds had their talk as they were flying by above and the servant of God understood what they talked. This caused him to laugh, whereupon his wife said to him “What dost thou hear that thou laughest?” He replied to his wife “I shall not tell thee what I hear, and why I laugh”. The woman said to her husband “I know why thou laughest; thou laughest at me because I am one-eyed”. The man then said to his wife “I saw that thou wast one-eyed before I loved thee, and before we married and sat down in our house”. When the woman heard her husband’s word she was quiet.

But once at night, as they were lying on their bed, and it was past midnight, it happened that a rat played with his wife on the top of the house and that both fell to the ground. Then the wife of the rat said to her husband “Thy sport is bad; thou saidst to me that thou wouldst play, but when we came together we fell to the ground, so that I broke my back”.

When the servant of God heard the talk of the rat’s wife, as he was lying on his bed, he laughed. Now, as soon as he laughed his wife arose, seized him, and said to him as she held him fast: “Now this time I will not let thee go out of this house except thou tell me what thou hearest and why thou laughest”. The man begged the woman, saying “Let me go”; but the woman would not listen to her husband’s entreaty.

The husband then tells his wife that he knows the language of beasts and birds, and she is content; but when he wakes in the morning he finds he has lost his wonderful gift; and the moral of the tale is added most ungallantly: “If a man shews and tells his thoughts to a woman, God will punish him for it”. Though, perhaps, it is better, for the sake of the gentler sex, that the tale should be pointed with this unfair moral, than that the African story should proceed like all the other variations, and save the husband’s gift at the cost of the wife’s skin.

Take other African instances. How is it that the wandering Bechuanas got their story of “The Two Brothers”, the ground-work of which is the same as “The Machandelboom” and the “Milk-white Doo”, and where the incidents and even the words are almost the same? How is it that in some of its traits that Bechuana story embodies those of that earliest of all popular tales, recently published from an Egyptian Papyrus, coeval with the abode of the Israelites in Egypt? and how is it that that same Egyptian tale has other traits which reminds us of the Dun Bull in “Katie Woodencloak”, as well as incidents which are the germ of stories long since reduced to writing in Norse Sagas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries?[18] How is it that we still find among the Negroes in the West Indies[19] a rich store of popular tales, and the Beast Epic in full bloom, brought with them from Africa to the islands of the West; and among those tales and traditions, how is it that we find a “Wishing Tree”, the counter-part of that in a German popular tale, and “a little dirty scrub of a child”, whom his sisters despise, but who is own brother to Boots in the Norse Tales, and like him outwits the Troll, spoils his substance, and saves his sisters? How is it that we find the good woman who washes the loathsome head rewarded, while the bad man who refuses to do that dirty work is punished for his pride; the very groundwork, nay the very words, that we meet in Bushy-bride, another Norse Tale? How is it that we find a Mongolian tale, which came confessedly from India, made up of two of our Norse tales, “Rich Peter the Pedlar” and “The Giant that had no heart in his body”?[20] How should all these things be, and how could they possibly be, except on that theory which day by day becomes more and more a matter of fact; this, that the whole human race sprung from one stock, planted in the East, which has stretched out its boughs and branches laden with the fruit of language, and bright with the bloom of song and story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth.

NORSE MYTHOLOGY

And now, in the second place, for that particular branch of the Aryan race, in which this peculiar development of the common tradition has arisen, which we are to consider as “Norse Popular Tales”.

Whatever disputes may have existed as to the mythology of other branches of the Teutonic subdivision of the Aryan race—whatever discussions may have arisen as to the position of this or that divinity among the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Goths—about the Norsemen there can be no dispute or doubt. From a variety of circumstances, but two before all the rest—the one their settlement in Iceland, which preserved their language and its literary treasures incorrupt; the other their late conversion to Christianity—their cosmogony and mythology stands before us in full flower, and we have not, as elsewhere, to pick up and piece together the wretched fragments of a faith, the articles of which its own priests had forgotten to commit to writing, and which those of another creed had dashed to pieces and destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could reach. In the two Eddas, therefore, in the early Sagas, in Saxo’s stilted Latin, which barely conceals the popular songs and legends from which the historian drew his materials, we are enabled to form a perfect conception of the creed of the heathen Norsemen. We are enabled to trace, as has been traced by the same hand in another place,[21] the natural and rational development of that creed from a simple worship of nature and her powers, first to monotheism, and then to a polytheistic system. The tertiary system of Polytheism is the soil out of which the mythology of the Eddas sprang, though through it each of the older formations crops out in huge masses which admit of no mistake as to its origin. In the Eddas the natural powers have been partly subdued, partly thrust on one side, for a time, by Odin and the Aesir, by the Great Father and his children, by One Supreme and twelve subordinate gods, who rule for an appointed time, and over whom hangs an impending fate, which imparts a charm of melancholy to this creed, which has clung to the race who once believed in it long after the creed itself has vanished before the light of Christianity. According to this creed, the Aesir and Odin had their abode in Asgard, a lofty hill in the centre of the habitable earth, in the midst of Midgard, that _middle earth_ which we hear of in early English poetry, the abode of gods and men. Round that earth, which was fenced in against the attacks of ancient and inveterate foes by a natural fortification of hills, flowed the great sea in a ring, and beyond that sea was Utgard, the outlying world, the abode of Frost Giants, and Monsters, those old-natural powers who had been dispossessed by Odin and the Aesir when the new order of the universe arose, and between whom and the new gods a feud as inveterate as that cherished by the Titans against Jupiter was necessarily kept alive. It is true indeed that this feud was broken by intervals of truce during which the Aesir and the Giants visit each other, and appear on more or less friendly terms, but the true relation between them was war; pretty much as the Norseman was at war with all the rest of the world. Nor was this struggle between two rival races or powers confined to the gods in Asgard alone. Just as their ancient foes were the Giants of Frost and Snow, so between the race of men and the race of Trolls was there a perpetual feud. As the gods were men magnified and exaggerated, so were the Trolls diminished Frost Giants; far superior to man in strength and stature, but inferior to man in wit and invention. Like the Frost Giants, they inhabit the rough and rugged places of the earth, and, historically speaking, in all probability represent the old aboriginal races who retired into the mountainous fastnesses of the land, and whose strength was exaggerated, because the intercourse between the races was small. In almost every respect they stand in the same relations to men as the Frost Giants stand to the Gods.

There is nothing, perhaps, more characteristic of a true, as compared with a false religion, than the restlessness of the one when brought face to face with the quiet dignity and majesty of the other. Under the Christian dispensation, our blessed Lord, his awful sacrifice once performed, “ascended up on high”, having “led captivity captive”, and expects the hour that shall make his foes “his footstool”; but false gods, Jupiter, Vishnu, Odin, Thor, must constantly keep themselves, as it were, before the eyes of men, lest they should lose respect. Such gods being invariably what the philosophers call _subjective_, that is to say, having no existence except in the minds of those who believe in them; having been created by man in his own image, with his own desires and passions, stand in constant need of being recreated. They change as the habits and temper of the race which adores them alter; they are ever bound to do something fresh, lest man should forget them, and new divinities usurp their place. Hence came endless avatars in Hindoo mythology, reproducing all the dreamy monstrosities of that passive Indian mind. Hence came Jove’s adventures, tinged with all the lust and guile which the wickedness of the natural man planted on a hot-bed of iniquity is capable of conceiving. Hence bloody Moloch, and the foul abominations of Chemosh and Milcom. Hence, too, Odin’s countless adventures, his journeys into all parts of the world, his constant trials of wit and strength, with his ancient foes the Frost Giants, his hair-breadth escapes. Hence Thor’s labours and toils, his passages beyond the sea, girt with his strength-belt, wearing his iron gloves, and grasping his hammer which split the skulls of so many of the Giant’s kith and kin. In the Norse gods, then, we see the Norseman himself, sublimed and elevated beyond man’s nature, but bearing about with him all his bravery and endurance, all his dash and spirit of adventure, all his fortitude and resolution to struggle against a certainty of doom which, sooner or later, must overtake him on that dread day, the “twilight of the gods”, when the wolf was to break loose, when the great snake that lay coiled round the world should lash himself into wrath, and the whole race of the Aesirs and their antagonists were to perish in internecine strife.

Such were the gods in whom the Norseman believed—exaggerations of himself, of all his good and all his bad qualities. Their might and their adventures, their domestic quarrels and certain doom, were sung in venerable lays, now collected in what we call the Elder, or Poetic Edda; simple majestic songs, whose mellow accents go straight to the heart through the ear, and whose simple severity never suffers us to mistake their meaning. But, besides these gods, there were heroes of the race whose fame and glory were in every man’s memory, and whose mighty deeds were in every minstrel’s mouth. Helgi, Sigmund, Sinfjötli, Sigurd, Signy, Brynhildr, Gudrun; champions and shield-maidens, henchmen and corse-choosers, now dead and gone, who sat round Odin’s board in Valhalla. Women whose beauty, woes, and sufferings were beyond those of all women; men whose prowess had never found an equal. Between these, love and hate; all that can foster passion or beget revenge. Ill assorted marriages; the right man to the wrong woman, and the wrong man to the right woman; envyings, jealousies, hatred, murders, all the works of the natural man, combine together to form that marvellous story which begins with a curse—the curse of ill-gotten gold—and ends with a curse, a widow’s curse, which drags down all on whom it falls, and even her own flesh and blood, to certain doom. Such was the theme of the wondrous Volsung Tale, the far older, simpler and grander original of that Nibelungen Need of the thirteenth century, a tale which begins with the slaughter of Fafnir by Sigurd, and ends with Hermanaric, “that fierce faith-breaker”, as the Anglo-Saxon minstrel calls him, when he is describing, in rapid touches, the mythic glories of the Teutonic race.