Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/128

 120 Eugene Anichkof.

high antiquity, being found in all chief dialects";^ but the repeated occurrence of the name in the whole of the Teutonic world can also be explained by the expansion of the Christian legend. Grimm derived the word from the root nig (Gr. i/i^ft)) = "to grow".- Dr. Kluge offers the form niq (Gr. j/tTrrfo) = " to wash oneself" "Thus," says he, 'Wz!r would mean originally a sea-monster that delights in bathing, a sea-spirit."^ E. H. Meyer'* proposes the form ur-gerni. Jineigjan = '' to bend"; but in what way the notion of a sea-deity could develop itself out of the ideas of washing, or growing, or bending, is not explained by either of the investigators just quoted.

It is, then, most probable that St. Nicolas, represented by all his popular nicknames — Klaus, Nickel, Nielsen, and Nick — penetrated into the Teutonic mythology, and gave his own name to the water-deity, the sea-monster, and even the devil.

But the etymology of proper names is a difficult problem, and Kuhn himself seems to have sometimes failed to solve it.^

1 Z. <:., p. 158. 2 Worterbuch, S. 861. ^ L. c.


 * Germ. Mythen., S. 105.

'° Gruppe, Die griecJiiscJicn Ciilte und My then in ihrer Beziehicugen zii den orientalische?i Religionen, Leipzig, 1887, i, S. 103.

Professor Anichkof has not quite seized my point. I was struck by the fact that it is the final portion of the saint's name which has furnished the forms under which the name is now popularly known in the West (Klaus, Colas), for the assumption that the English Nick (in " Old Nick") is a shortened form of Nicolas is a purely question- begging one. Obviously, if this was the case formerly, Professor Anichkof's contention that the Germanic water-god derived his name (and part of his attributes ?) from the Christian saint goes by the board. Klaus could not have furnished Nichus. What is the historico-philological evidence as to the spread of the Greek name in Western Europe, and what in especial is the historico-ecclesiastical evidence as to the spread of his cult? If he was popular enough in the 5th-8th centuries to rebaptise and transform a heathen water- deity — and Professor Anichkof's theory postulates this — there must be many other evidences of that popularity in the West. — A. N.