Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/317

 The European Sky-god. 293

therefore, not surprising to find that the mid-European and south-European equivalent of Yggdrasill's ash was an oak. Throughout Finland, Esthonia, and other parts of Russia folk-songs and folk-tales tell of an oak the top of which reaches the sky and supports the sun, who lives on it or goes to rest on it.-°^ Thus the Finns believe in an oak with golden branches, which cover the sky. The Estho- nians, in an oak on which is built a bath-house : the window of this bath-house is the moon, and on its roof the sun and stars disport themselves. Other Russian stories tell how an old man once climbed an oak that towered up to the sky, and found on it a bird, which could not be burnt with fire or drowned in water : how in the island of Bujan grows an oak on which the sun passes the night : &c., &c. In Anjou certain tree-shaped cloud-formations are known as "le chene de Montsabran" and "le chene marin": they portend a rain- storm and fine weather respectively. -""^ That in the Greek area also the oak was at one time a world-tree is far from improbable. The fleece of the golden ram ( = the sun ~°^) hung on an oak in Colchis and guarded by a sleepless snake^°^ certainly recalls the Russian oak on which the sun goes to rest guarded by the dragon Garafena.^^'^' But more direct evidence is available. Clement of Alexandria-^^ has pre- served a fragment of a work by Isidorus, son of Basilides, in which he says : " I would have our would-be philosophers learn the meaning of the winged oak-tree and the em- broidered mantle tipon it, in fact of the whole allegory which Pherecydes took from the prophecy of Cham and

^"^ A. de Gubernatis, Myth, des Plantes, i., 94, ii.. 76 f.. Ralston, Songs of the Russimt People, p. 375 f.

^"^ P. Sebillot, Le Folk-lore de France, i. 128.

^"^ Supra, p. 271. -"^ Apollod., i. 9. 16.

^"^ A. de Gubernatis, Myth, des Plantes, ii. 77, after Mannhardt.

^"' Clem. Alex, sti'om., 6. 6, p. 767, 32 ff. Potter, Ka\ yap fioi SoKsi tovq TrpocnroiovfikvovQ (piXouoipelv., 'Iva fia6(oai ri iariv rj vvoTTTepoc Spvc koi to iir' avTy ireTTOHciX/ikvov (pdpog, iravra offa ^epsKv^ijg aWjjyoptjcrag WeoXoyrjasv \al3wv cnrb rijo tov Xa/i 7rpo0j/retac.