Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/129

Rh chap. of which she had given a portion to each of his beasts, and which is, in fact, the necklace of Freya and the Kestos or cestus of Aphrodite. But the tale is not told out yet, and it enters on another cycle of the sun's career. The youth is no sooner married to the princess than, like Odysseus or Sigurd, he is separated from her. Following a white doe into a forest, he is there deceived by a witch, at whose bidding he touches his beasts with a twig, and turns them into stones, and is then changed into a stone himself. Just at this time the younger brother returns to the place where the knife, now partially covered with rust, remained fixed in the tree. He becomes, of course, as in the myth of Baldur, the avenger of his brother, and the witch under- goes the doom of Punchkin or of the Giant who had no heart in his body ; but when he tells the younger brother that even his wife had taken him to be her husband, and admitted him into her chamber, the latter cuts off the elder's head. The magic root is again brought into use, and he learns how faithful his brother had been when his wife asks him why, on the two previous nights, he had placed a sword in the bed between them. The story thus, in its last incident, runs into the tales of Sigurd and the Arabian Allah-ud-deen.^

If we sought to prove the absolute identity of the great mass of Myths of Hindu, Greek, Norse, and German legends, we surely need go no the Mwn,' further. Yet there are other points of likeness, at least as striking: as ^. ° btars. any that have been already noticed, between the stories which in the East and West alike relate to the phenomena of night. In the Hindu tale the disguised wife of Logedas Raja finds Tara Bai on a gold and ivory throne. " She was tall and of a commanding aspect. Her black hair was bound by long strings of pearls, her dress was of fine-spun gold, and round her waist was clasped a zone of restless, throbbing, light-giving diamonds. Her neck and her arms were covered with a profusion of costly jewels, but brighter than all shone her bright eyes, which looked full of gentle majesty." But Tara Bai is the star (boy; child, or maiden, the Asteropaios of the Iliad, of whom the Greek myth said only that he was the tallest of all their men, and that he was slain after fierce fight by Achilleus, whom he had wounded. "* Elsewhere she reappears as Polydeukes, the glittering twm brother of Kastor, and more particularly as the fairy Melusina, who IS married to Raymond of Toulouse. This beautiful being, who has a fish's tail, as representing the moon which rises and sets in the sea, vanishes away when her full form is seen by her husband.^ Jn

' The Norse tale of .Shortshanks ^ //. xxi. i66, &c. (Dasent) is made up in great part of * The name IMclusiiia is identified by the materials of this story. Mr. Gould with that of the Babylonian