Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/113

Rh V. is for evil luck, and the deceiver shall be well repaid when the fool chap. comes to take vengeance.

Still will I give my vows, Though thou thinkest much of thy speech ; ^Yhen comes the Gruagach of the tissue cloak, He will repay thee for his wife's kiss.

Boots then acts the part of Balna's son in the Hindu story, while Mythical the sorcerer reappears in the Norse tale as a giant, who turns the an'd com-^ six princes and their wives into stone. The incident is by no means bmatioas. peculiar to this tale, and the examples already adduced would alone warrant the assertion that the whole mass of folk-lore in every country may be resolved into an endless series of repetitions, com- binations, and adaptations of a few leading ideas or of their develope- ments, all sufficiently resembling each other to leave no doubts of their fundamental identity, yet so unlike in outward garb and colour- ing, so thoroughly natural and vigorous under all their changes, as to leave no room for any other supposition than that of a perfectly independent growth from one common stem. If, speaking of the marvels Avrought by musical genius, Dr. Newman could say, "There are seven notes in the scale ; make them thirteen, yet how slender an outfit for so vast an enterprise,"^ we may well feel the same astonishment as we see the mighty harvest of mythical lore which a few seeds have yielded, and begin to understand how it is that ideas so repeated, disguised, or travestied never lost their charm, but find us as ready to listen when they are brought before us for the hundredth time in a new dress, as when we first made acquaintance with them.

In the modified machinery of the Norse tale, the remonstrances Agency of addressed to Balna's son in the Hindu story are here addressed to thes^e^ '" Boots/ whose kindness to the brute creatures who become his stories.

' University Sermons, p. 34S. In these two stories the Magician Punchkin and the Heartless Giant are manifestly only other forms of the dark beings, the Panis, who steal away the bright treasures, whether cows, maidens, or youths, from the gleaming west. In each case there is a long search for them ; and as Troy cannot fall without Achilleus, so here there is only one who can achieve the exploit of rescuing the beings who have been turned into stone, as Niobe is hardened into rock. The youthful son of Balna in his disguise is the womanlike Theseus, Dionysos, or Achilleus. Balna herself imprisoned in the tower with the sorcerer whom she hates is Helen shut up in Ilion with the seducer whom she loathes ; and as Helen calls herself the dog-faced, so Balna is transformed into a dog when Punchkin leads her away. The eagles whose young he saves, like the heroes of so many popular tales, are the bright clouds who bear off little Surya Bai to the nest on the tree-top.

ella lead us to a vast family of kindred myths. In all of these the beauty of the hero or heroine is disfigured by a squalid dress, and sometimes by a dark-brown staining of the face and arms. In each case, while the heroine carries away in nutshells or in other tiny receptacles dresses gleaming with the splendour of the stars, the moon,
 * The stories of Boots and Cinder-