Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/168

Rh 156 MYTHOLOGY in the memory of the reciters the lacuna was filled up in prose. &quot;As one goes through the poems, one is ever and anon face to face with a myth of the most childish and barbaric type,&quot; which &quot;carries one back to prse- Aryan days.&quot; Side by side with these old stories come fragments of a different stratum of thought, Christian ideas, the belief in a supreme God, the notion of Dooms day. The Scandinavian cosmogonic myth (with its par allels among races savage and civilized) is given elsewhere. The most important god is Odin, the son of Bestla and Bor, the husband of Frigg, the father of Balder and many other sons, the head of the ^sir stock of gods. Odin s name is connected with that of Wuotan, and referred to the Old High German verb watan wuot = meare, cum iinpetu fern (Grimm, Teut. Myth., Engl. transl., i. 131). Odin would thus (if we admit the etymology) be the swift goer, the &quot;ganger,&quot; and it seems superfluous to make him (with Grimm) &quot; the all-powerful, all-permeating being,&quot; a very abstract and scarcely an early conception. Odin s brethren (in GylfTs Mocking} are Vile and Ve, who with him slew Ymir the giant, and made all things out of the fragments of his body. They also made man out of two stocks. In the Hava-Mal Odin claims for himself most of the attributes of the medicine-man. In Loka Senna, Loki, the evil god, says that &quot; Odin dealt in magic in Samsey.&quot; The goddess Frigg remarks, &quot; Ye should never talk of your old doings before men, of what ye two ^sir went through in old times.&quot; But many relics of these &quot; old times,&quot; many traces of the medicine-man and the &quot;skin- shifter,&quot; survive in the myth of Odin. When he stole Suttung s mead (which answers somewhat to nectar and the Indian soma), he flew away in the shape of an eagle. 1 The hawk is sacred to Odin; one of his names is &quot;the Raven-god.&quot; He was usually represented as one-eyed, having left an eye in pawn that he might purchase a draught from Mimir s well. This one eye is often explained as the sun. Odin s wife was Frigg ; their sons were Thor (the thunder-god) and Balder, whose myth is well known in English poetry. The gods were divided into two, not always friendly, stocks, the ^Esir and Vanir. Their relations are, on the whole, much more amicable than those of the Asuras and Devas in Indian mythology. Not necessarily immortal, the gods restored their vigour by eating the apples of Iduna. Asa Loki was a being of * mixed race, half god, half giant, and wholly mischievous and evil. His legend includes animal metamorphoses of the most obscene character. In the shape of a mare he became the mother of the eight -legged horse of Odin. He borrowed the hawk-dress of Freya, when he recovered the apples of Iduna. Another Eddie god, Hcene, is described in phrases from lost poems as &quot;the long-legged one,&quot; &quot;lord of the ooze,&quot; and his name 1 is connected with that of the crane. The constant enemies of the gods, the giants, could also assume animal forms. Thus in Thiodolf s Haust-long (com posed after the settlement of Iceland) we read about a shield on which events from mythology were painted ; among these was the flight of &quot; giant Thiazzi in an ancient eagle s feathers.&quot; The god Herindal and Loki once fought a battle in the shapes of seals. On the whole, the Scan dinavian gods are a society on an early human model, of beings indifferently human, animal, and divine, some of them derived from elemental forces personified, holding sway over the elements, and skilled in sorcery. Probably after the viking days came in the conceptions of the last 1 Indra was a hawk when, &quot;being well-winged, he carried to men the food tasted by the gods &quot; (R.-V., iv. 26, 4). Yehl, the Thlinkeet god-hero, was a raven or a crane when he stole the water (Bancroft, iii. 100-102). The prevalence of animals, or of god-animals, in myths of the stealing of water, soma, and fire, is very remarkable. Among the Andaman Islanders, a kingfisher steals fire for men from the god Puluga (Anthrop. Journal, November 1882). war of gods, and the end of all, and the theory of Odin All-father as a kind of emperor in the heavenly world. The famous tree that lives through all the world is regarded as &quot; foreign, Christian, and confined to few poems.&quot; There is, almost undoubtedly, a touch of the Christian dawn on the figure and myth of the pure and beloved and ill-fated god Balder, and his descent into hell. The whole subject is beset with critical difficulties, and we have chiefly noted features which can hardly be regarded as late, and which correspond with widely-distributed mythical ideas. 2 It is now necessary to cast a hasty glance over the chief divisions of myths. These correspond to the chief problems which the world presents to the curiosity of untutored men. They ask themselves (and the answers are given in myths) the following questions : What is the Origin of the World? The Origin of Man 1 ? Whence came the Arts of Life 1 Whence the Stars ? Whence the Sun and Moon? What is the Origin of Death ? How was Fire procured by Man 1 The question of the origin of the marks and characteristics of various animals and plants has also pro duced a class of myths in which the marks are said to survive from some memorable adventure, or the plants and animals to be metamorphosed human beings. Examples of all these myths are found among savages and in the legends of the ancient civilizations. A few such examples may now be given. Myths of the Origin of the World. &quot;We have found it difficult to keep myths of the gods apart from myths of the origin of the world and of man, because gods are frequently regarded as creative powers. The origin of things is a problem which has everywhere exercised thought, and been rudely solved in myths. These vary in quality with the civilization of the races in which they are current, but the same ideas which we proceed to state pervade all cosmogonical myths, savage and civilized. All these legends waver between the theory of creation, or rather of manufacture, and the theory of evolution. The earth, as a rule, is supposed to have grown out of some original matter,. perhaps an animal, perhaps an egg which floated on the waters, perhaps a fragment of soil fished vip out of the floods by a beast or a god. But this conception does not exclude the idea that many of the things in the world, minerals, plants, people, and what not, are fragments of the frame of an animal or non-natural magnified man, or are excretions from the body of a god. We proceed to state briefly the various forms of these ideas. The most backward races usually assume the prior existence of the earth. The aborigines of the northern parts of Victoria (Australia) be lieve that the earth was made by Pund-jel, the bird-creator, who sliced the valleys with a knife. Another Australian theory is that the men of a previous race, the Nooralie (very old ones), made the earth. The problem of the origin of the world seems scarcely to have troubled the Bushmen. They know about &quot;men who brought the sun,&quot; but their doctrines are revealed in mysteries, and Qing, the informant of Mr Orpen (Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874), &quot;did not dance that dance,&quot; that is, had not been initiated into all the secret doctrines of his tribe. According to Qing, creation was the work of Cagn (the mantis insect), &quot;he gave orders and caused all things to appear.&quot; Elsewhere in the myth Cagn made or manufactured things by his skill. As a rule the most backward races, while rich in myths of the origin of men, animals, plants, stones, and stars, do not say much about the making of the world. Among people a little more ad vanced, the earth is presumed to have grown out of the waters. In the Iroquois myth (Lafitau, Mceurs des Sauvages, 1724), a heavenly woman was tossed out of heaven, and fell on a turtle, which developed into the world. Another North-American myth assumes a single 2 Dasent s Prose or Younger Edda (Stockholm, 1842), the Corpus Septentrionale already referred to, Mr Keary s Mythology of the Eddas, Pigott s Manual of Scandinavian Mythology (1838), and Laing s Early Kings of Noncay may be consulted by English students. For Germanic myths at large, Grimm s celebrated German Mythology, translated by Mr Stallybrass, may be studied, and Mr Keary s Outlines of Primitive Belief. German divine myths are necessarily scarce, owing to the early conversion of Germany before a pre-Christian literature, like the Eddas, was preserved. Obscure classical notices, and survivals in folk-lore, mediteval and modern, are the chief sources of information. The divine names, however, prove that the German was in form not alien to the Scandinavian mythology. The marchen in Grimm s and other collections belong rather to the heroic myths than to those con cerned with gods.