Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/408

384 explains the symbolism whereby a creature that had any right to be reckoned a frog could be called the daughter of a serpent-king.

When the stories of encounters of heroes with huge malevolent serpents, or crocodiles, passed into the mythology of Europe, these were generally replaced by "dragons," or monsters, such as "Grendel" in our Anglo-Saxon "Lay of Beowulf." There are some, however, in which a bonâ fide serpent figures. In parts of Tirol, a white serpent is spoken of as a "serpent-queen" and as more dangerous than the others; various are the legends in which the release of a spell-bound princess depends on the deliverer suffering himself to be three times encircled, and the third time, kissed by a serpent; the trial frequently fails at the third attempt. Sir Lancelot, if I remember right, accomplished it in the end.

Every collection of mediæval legends contains stories of combats with dragons, the groundwork probably brought from the East, and the detail made to fit the hero of some local deliverance; the mythology of Tirol is particularly rich in this class, almost every valley has its own; at Wilten, near Innsbruck, the sting of a dragon is shown as of that killed by the Christian giant Haymon; the one I have given in "Zovanin senza paura," from the Italian Tirol (p. 348, "Household Stories from the Land of Hofer"), has this similarity with Tales II. and V., that it is actually the water supply of the infested district which is stopped by the dragon. There is this great difference, however, between the Eastern and later Western versions of serpent myths. The Indians having deified the serpent, their heroic tales have no further aim than that of propitiating him. On the other hand, it was not long before the religious influence under which the Christian myths were moulded had connected and by degrees identified the serpent-exterior, under the parable of which they set forth their local plague, with that under which the adversary of souls is named in the sacred story of the garden of Eden; and thus it became a necessity of the case that the Christian hero should destroy or at least vanquish it.

Though the Indian serpent-gods seem to have been generally feared and hated, we have instances—and that even in this little volume—of their harmlessness also and even beneficence. An innocuous and benevolent phase of dragon-character seems to have been adopted also in the early heathen mythology of Europe. Nork (Mythologie der Volkssagen) tells us the dragon was held sacred to Wodin, and its image was placed over houses, town-gates, and towers, as a talisman against evil influences; and I have met with a popular superstition lingering yet in Tirol that to meet a crested adder (the European representative, I