Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/314

 290 Notes oil Orendel and other Stories.

appellation), which, like the rest of his tribe, whatever their language, he is ready to confess at the most thrilling moment by stopping to ask for a drink (1. 2791).

Orendel has been the subject of learned commentaries far out of proportion to the author's claims as a poet. One of the best reasons for this is the attraction of the name. Orendel corresponds to a name of some importance in Teutonic mythology : Aurvendill, Orvendill, the husband of Groa ; he was brought back by Thor in a basket when Thor came back from the land of the giants ; one of his toes was frost- bitten on the journey, and Thor flung it at the sky, where it is a star, Orvendils td. The story is one that lends itself to the interpreters of solar and summer myths, and naturally the German Orendel has been compared with the Icelandic story as told by Snorri. The name is found elsewhere ; Horvendillus in Saxo is the name of Hamlet's father, and the Anglo-Saxon Earendel is a name by which Cynewulf addresses the Lord in a passage where Christ is the "bright- est of angels," "the radiance of the sun above the stars ; " it is evidently in this case an old mythical or poetical name capable of meaning the sun, or the light of the sun {Crist, 1. 103).

Besides these mythological associations and possibilities in Orendel, there is the other motive, of the Gray Coat, and its association with the legend of the Invention of the Cross.

The story is so indefinite, and so full of repetitions and commonplaces, that it is difificult to say what its main design is, if it has any, and very easy to support different theories of its origin. It may be regarded as a clumsy mixture of an old German heroic tradition with the legendary story of the Seamless Coat. Or again, the legendary part of it, the part resembling the Saints' Lives, may be considered as the foundation of the whole, the suggestions of the name Orendel being dismissed as merely fortuitous, and the hero's adventures being taken, not as a survival of old mytho- logy, but merely as a mass of commonplaces, which lay ready