Page:Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race.djvu/253

Rh Anglo-Saxon tribal people, the East Willa and West Willa, whose districts are mentioned in the Tribal Hidage. The name Wilte Scira occurs in the Exon Domesday, and the name Wilsæte was probably at first only that of the settlers in the south of the county.

The traces that survive of a mythological or legendary kind in the counties that formed the early kingdom of Wessex find their parallels in similar survivals in Rügen and Pomerania. The most remarkable is that of Hertha, or Mother Earth, a goddess with somewhat similar attributes to the Norse Frige and the Saxon Frea. The name Frige survives in that of Freefolk in Hampshire, the Frigefolc of Domesday Book. In Wiltshire the mythological name which can be most clearly traced during the Anglo-Saxon period is that of Hertha.

Latham has pointed out that there is no word beginning with ‘H’ in any German equivalent denoting terra or earth. The name Hertha, although mentioned by Tacitus, appears to have come from another source. Herkja and Herche are among its variants. Hertha is still remembered in the folk-lore of North-Eastern Germany, the old borderland between the Teutonic and Slavonic tribes, where she goes by the name of Frau Harke, the same as our Mother Earth, but in England she has lost her personality. In the old mythology the personified Mother Earth embodied also the attributes of Ceres, and in that capacity Hertha was much honoured in the Wendish parts of Germany. Kine were yoked to her car, and her image was conducted through fields on her annual festival with much solemnity. We find that Hertha as the name for this goddess was used by the people of Rügen and the Baltic countries near it from time immemorial. The survival of the name and the folk-lore