Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/553

Rh and come back with him; for the Norse nature myth pictured darkness as brother to light, and death as following in the track of life; but the touching picture of the murdered and his murderer returning together to live in peace and amity in the new order of things, betrays the influence of the notion that the story of Balder's death was a sort of account of Abel's and the first fratricide. As to Höᵭr, he was a blind god of great might; and taken in conjunction with these two attributes, his name Höᵭr, genitive Haᵭar, is a remarkable one, as it is the same word which we have in the Anglo-Saxon heaᵭu, 'war or battle,' also in Irish and Welsh cath and câd respectively of the same meaning. From this it seems to follow that he was chiefly a personification of promiscuous death, such as would be suggested to the primitive mind by the startling incidents of battle, in which it was frequently thought that the wrong man fell, while he who ought to succumb escaped; and with this agrees the fact also that there was a feminine Höᵭ, who was a Valkyria or chooser of the slain. This approach to a blending in the god Höᵭr's person of Mars and Pluto has its parallels in Celtic myths, where the god of death, always present in the battle-field, may be easily mistaken for a god of battle in the proper sense of the word: witness, for example, a poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen, where Gwyn ab Nûᵭ is made to enumerate the great battles in which he had been present; but Gwyn is not so much a war-god as a god of the dead and king of the other world, who fetches the fallen to his own realm.