Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/136

104 BOOK do Siggeir, the husband of Volsung's daughter SIgny, and the other guests at her marriage-feast, strive to draw the sword. It remains motionless in the trunk until it is touched by Sigmund/ the youngest and bravest of Volsung's sons — a reproduction in part of Volsung himself, as Odysseus is of Autolykos. To Sigmund's hand, as to Arthur, the sword yields itself at once, without an effort. Theseus lifts the huge stone beneath which Aigeus had placed his magic sword and sandals. The weapon of the Greek story is the sword of Chrysaor ; that of the Teutonic legend is the famous Gram, the Excalibur of Arthur and the Durandal of Roland, and Sigmund thus becomes, like Achilleus, the possessor of an irresistible arm. In truth, the whole myth of Volsung and his children is but a repetition, in all its phases, of that great drama of Greek mythology which begins •with the loss of the golden fleece and ends with the return of the Herakleidai. This drama represents the course or history of the sun in all its different aspects, as ever young or growing old, as dying or immortal, as shooting with poisoned weapons or as hating a lie like death, as conquering the powers of darkness or as smitten by their deadly weapons ; and thus in the defeat of Sigmund we have an incident belonging as strictly to the solar myth as the victory ot Achilleus over Hektor, or the discomfiture of the Sphinx by Oidipous. It could not be otherwise. Odin and Phoibos live while Baldur and Asklepios die, but these rise again themselves or live in their children. So, too, there must be a struggle between Siggeir and Sigmund for the possession of Gram, for Siggeir stands to Sigmund m the relation of Polydektes to Perseus, or of Paris to Menelaos. But he is the dark being regarded for the present as the conqueror, and Sigmund and his ten brothers, the hours of the sunlit day, are taken and bound. The ten brothers are slain ; Sigmund himself is saved by his sister Signy, and with his son Sinfiotli, now runs as a were- wolf through the forest, the Lykeian or wolf-god wandering through the dark forest of the night — a dreary picture which the mythology of sunnier lands represented under the softer image of the sleepmg Helios sailing in his golden cup from the western to the eastern ocean. But the beautiful Signy is no other than Penelope, and

' The .Sigmund of Beowulf and the many or most mythical champions, can Volsung Tale bears a name which is an be wounded only in one part of his epithet of Odin, the giver of victory. body. If again Fafnir, when dying by He is drawn by Regin from the trunk his hand, tells him of the things which of a poplar tree, he is loved by the sliall liappen hereafter, we must remem- Valkyrie IJrynhild, and instructed by ber that the Pythian dragon guarded the wise Gripir, as Achilleus and other the oracle of Delphi. — Grimm, Deutsche heroes are taught by Cheiron. He Myihologie, 343. W(Qrs the invisible helmet, and like