Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/484

318 played little part in history. In a backwater of civilization, retaining in extraordinary measure the primitive forms of their tribal organization, their mode of life, their religion, and their language,$5$ they were no match for those who sought to subdue them, though they fared less hardly at the hands of the Slavs than at those of the Germans.

If, then, we find a paucity of Baltic mythology, we are justified in assuming that it was destroyed by the oppressor. Undoubtedly it once flourished, in simple form, perhaps, as became a rude folk; and among the Letto-Lithuanians, where fate was less cruel than in Prussia, we still have a number of dáinos (folk-songs) of mythological content.$6$ For Baltic religion we have a fair amount of material, though recorded by hostile observers who utterly failed to comprehend its spirit and ignorantly misinterpreted it, and who, in all likelihood, omitted much of value that is now irretrievably lost;$7$ for Baltic mythology we have little more than fragments of sun-myths.

Prussian mythology has vanished, leaving not a trace behind. We are, therefore, restricted to the Lithuanians and the Letts. Even here our older sources record but two myths, both lamentably meagre. Drawing his information from the Camaldolite hermit Jerome, who had long been active as a missionary in Lithuania, Aeneas Sylvius de' Piccolomini (afterward Pope Pius II, who died in 1464) tells us $8$ of a Lithuanian people "who worshipped the sun and with a curious cult venerated an iron hammer of rare size. When the priests were asked what that veneration meant, they answered that once upon a time the sun was not seen for several months, because a most mighty king had imprisoned it in the dungeon of a tower right strongly fortified. Then the signs of the zodiac bore aid to the sun, broke the tower with a huge hammer, and restored to men the liberated sun, so that the instrument whereby mortals regained the light was worthy of veneration." This is probably, as Mannhardt suggested,$9$ a myth of the darkening of the sun in winter and his reappearance during the storms of spring. In