Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/96

 86 Reviews.

The warworn Foe of the Wolf hath given me the blameless art, Yea the poets' song by which I may turn Open foes into wellwishers.

Egil also marks Woden as the Patron of the Gauts, and this association is confirmed by other poets ; and it is along the border between the great lakes that the worshippers of Frey and Woden, Swedes and Gauts, two neighbouring and often hostile confedera- cies, frequently came into collision in wars of which faint echoes have reached us in Beowulfs Lay, in Ynglinga-tal, and in the Fornaldar Sogur. P. 19, the lines from Hava-mal of the corpse- conjuring of Woden ought to read, " so that the man walks and talks with me." There are medieval and classic punishments for kin-killers that probably led to Saxo's remark (viii.) on larmenric's hanging of men and wolves together ; and we need not suppose that Woden was the god charged specially with the protection of family ties. The suggestion that the original Walcyries (meta- morphosed by the Wicking poets into " fair, weaponed angels of death ") were the sacrificial priestesses is ingenious, though the Walcyrior are not represented as gray-haired and linen-clad and bare-footed as the Cimbric sacrificers and sibyls are, and as the " repulsive death-angels " of the oft-cited Ibn Fozlan and of Beowulf's Lay. That Woden was the favourite god and epony- mous ancestor of the ruling clan of the Cheruscans is clear, and both his titles of Sig-tivi, Sig-gautr, Sig-pror, Sig-faodr, and the name of his son Siggi (Thulor) witness to this fact ; and it is worth remark, because the sudden and splendid rise of the Cheruscans and their gigantic success against, and more than hecatombal sacrifice of, the invading Romans must have made their special god a god of victory in a special sense, a god whose fame and glory would spread wherever the news of the mighty deliverance came. This would give a date, a.d. 9, to the beginning of the expansion in Germany of the cult of Woden, replacing very probably to some extent the cult of Tew, the sword-god, which appears to have been widely spread before. We must not forget the enigmatic story of the enigmatic Herem6d the keen, also a hero-son of Woden's, most famous of exiles and wanderers, who left the Scioldung court after slaying his messmates, raised a mighty and lengthy war, and finally disappeared from men's eyes (possibly in dragon shape), being slain by a Wolsung. Rydberg has pointed out his