Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/122

90 BOOK 1.

Origin of all myths relating to charmed sleep of beautiful maidens.

assumes a form more closely akin to the imagery of Teutonic mythology ; and there we find a princess who declares that she will marry no one who has not leaped over her bath, which " has high marble walls all round, with a hedge of spikes at the top of the walls." In the story of Vicram Maharaja the parents of Anar Ranee "had caused her garden to be hedged round with seven hedges made of bayonets, so that none could go in nor out ; and they had published a decree that none should marry her but he who could enter the garden and gather the three pomegranates on which she and her maids slept." So, too, Panch Phul Ranee, the lovely Queen of the Five Flowers, " dwelt in a little house, round which were seven wide ditches, and seven great hedges made of spears." The seven hedges are, however, nothing more than the sevenfold coils of the dragon of the Glistening Heath, who lies twined round the beautiful Brynhild. But the maiden of the Teutonic tale is sunk in sleep which rather resembles death than life, just as Demeter mourned as if for the death of Persephone while her child sojourned in the dark kingdom of Hades. This idea is reproduced with wonderful fidelity in the story of Little Surya Bai, and the cause of her death is modified in a hundred legends both of the East and the West The little maiden is high up in the eagle's nest fast asleep, when an evil demon or Rakshas seeks to gain admission to her, and while vainly striving to force an entrance leaves one of his finger-nails sticking in the crack of the door. When on the following morning the maiden opened the doors of her dwelling to look down on the world below, the shaqD claw ran into her hand, and immediately she fell dead. The powers of winter, which had thus far sought in vain to wound her, have at length won the victory ; and at once we pass to other versions of the same myth, which tell us of Eurydike stung to death by the hidden serpent, of Sifrit smitten by Hagene (the Thorn), of Isfendiyar slain by the thorn or arrow of Rusten,^ of Achilleus vulnerable only in his heel, of Brynhild enfolded within the dragon's coils, of Meleagros dying as the torch of doom is burnt out, of Baldur the brave and pure smitten by the fatal mistletoe, of the sweet Briar Rose plunged in her slumber of a hundred years.

The idea that all these myths have been deliberately transferred from Hindus or Persians to Greeks, Germans, and Norsemen may be dismissed as a wild dream. Yet of their substantial identity in spite of all points of difference and under all the disguises thrown over them by individual fancies and local influences, there can be no question. The keynote of any one of the Deccan stories is the key-

' Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 323.