Page:Beside the Fire - Douglas Hyde.djvu/41

Rh is the remains of a (probably Aryan) sun-myth, and personifies the action of the warm sun in drying up a lake and making it a marsh, killing the fishes, and leaving the boats stranded. But this story, like many others, is suggestive of more than this, since it would supply an argument for those who, like Professor Rhys, see in Hercules a sun-god. The descent of our hero into hell, and his frightening the spirits with his club, the impossible tasks which the king gives him to perform in the hopes of slaying him, and his successful accomplishment of them, seem to identify him with the classic Hercules. But the Irish tradition preserves the incident of drying the lake, which must have been the work of a sun-god, the very thing that Hercules—but on much slighter grounds—is supposed to have been. If this story is not the remains of a nature myth, it is perfectly unintelligible, for no rational person could hope to impose upon even a child by saying that a man drank up a lake, ships, and all; and yet this story has been with strange conservatism repeated from father to son for probably thousands of years, and must have taken its rise at a time when our ancestors were in much the same rude and mindless