Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/92

82 the myth here alluded to has a Christian origin. He points out that there is no certain reference in the passages that deal with the World Tree to its having served as Woden's gallows. But such a connection is necessary to Dr. Bugge's hypothesis. He shows further that in the Upsala Evergreen Tree as described by Adam of Bremen (or his scholiast) standing by the Sacrificial Spring, and the Stettin oak and spring, and others known to us among Lithuanians and Prussians, we have exact parallels to Mim's tree and the Weirds' Burn. He suggests very ingeniously that from the "community-tree," an index of the prosperity of the set of people it belonged to (a cult and belief of which there are plenty of traces even in the modern folktales that Grimm collected), the development of the "world-tree" idea was easy; for just as the Upsala tree, at first a local tree, became the national tree when the Swedish confederacy arose, so when Walhall began to be conceived of (in the ninth century) as a great all-embracing heaven, the tree then became a world-tree, and its fate bound up with the fate of the whole universe visible and invisible. I think it possible we have in the sacer lucus, qui proximus est templo of Adam of Bremen a transitional state, when each of the trees in the grove near the temple stood for its own clan or small tribe, and was honoured and venerated precisely as the local tribe-tree (of which it was no doubt a seedling) had been, though the Upsala big tree had now been chosen to be the "national" or "confederal tree" for the whole folk of the Swedes. Mr. Chadwick is inclined to accept Dr. Bugge's identification of the story of Woden's death in Ynglinga (10) with the above passage in Hava-mal, but not his inferences from this identification. He regards it as a myth arising out of "the desire to explain the ritual of sacrifice," and he rejects any connection between the hanging story in Gautrec's Saga and this myth.

In discussing the Starcad story he brings out its importance better than any one else has yet done. He shows how Woden's gifts explain the god's character and attributes—they are length of days (cf. Án. Ynglinga saga, 29), choice weapons, clothes, and riches (cf. Hyndla's lay)—