Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/112

80 BOOK

lights to pour contempt ; he is Cinderella sitting in the dust, while her sisters flaunt their finery abroad ; he is the Oidipous who knows nothing,^ yet reads the mysterious riddle of the Sphinx ; he is the Phoibos who serves in the house of Admetos and the palace of Laomedon ; he is the Psyche who seeks her lost love almost in de- spair, and yet with the hope still living in her that her search shall not be unsuccessful ; above all, he is the Ithakan chief, clothed in beggar's rags, flouted by the suitors, putting forth his strength for one moment to crush the insolent Arnaios, then sitting down humbly on the thres- hold,^ recognised only by an old nurse and his dog, waiting patiently till the time comes that he shall bend the unerring bow, and having slain his enemies appear once more in glorious garb by the side of a wife as radiant in beauty as when he left her years ago for a long and a hard warfare far away. Nay, he even becomes an idiot, but even in this his greatest humiliation the memory of his true greatness is never forgotten. Thus the Gaelic " Lay of the Great Fool " relates the

Tale of wonder, that was heard without He, Of the idiot to whom hosts yield, A haughty son who yields not to arms. Whose name was the mighty fool.

The might of the world he had seized In his hands, and it was no rude deed ; It was not the strength of his blade or shield, But that the mightiest was in his grasp.'

He becomes, of course, the husband of Helen,

The mighty fool is his name, And his wife is the young Fairfine ; The men of the world are at his beck, And the yielding to him was mine ;

and the Helen of the story has, of course, her Paris. The fool goes to sleep, and as he slumbers a Gruagach gives her a kiss, and like Helen " the lady was not ill-pleased that he came." But his coming

of Light (Excalibur, or the spear of who is wheedled of his three wish-gifs, Achillcus), and who rides a dun filly, but recovering them in the end is seen gifted like the horse Xanthos with the in his native majesty. power of speech. He is the "bald ' & /x-nSev' dSws OlSlwovs. rough-skinned gillie " of the smithy in vSophoklcs, Ott/. Tyr. 397. the Highland tale of " The Brown Bear So again of Odysseus, &<ppova t' of the Green Glen," on whose head the atVcos. — //. iii. 220. mysterious bird alights to point him out * Odyssey, xviii. IIO. as the father of the dawn-child. In the ' Campbell, Tales of the West High- story of the "Three Soldiers" in the lands, iii. 154. same collection, he is the poor soldier