Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/138

106 BOOK Hialprek, and the dragon Fafnir, which cannot be traced between Hephaistos and the Delphian Python, but which is fully explained by the differences of a northern and a mediterranean climate. In the Norse story, there is enmity between Fafnir and Regin, between the serpent who has coiled round the treasure of Brynhild (as the Panis hide the cows of Indra), and the faculties of life and growth repre- sented by the dwarfs to whose race Regin belongs.^ Regin, in short, is one of that class of beings who supply warmth and vigour to all living things ; Fafnir is the simple darkness or cold, which is the mere negation of life and light. Hence from Regin comes the bid- ding which charges Sigurd to slay Fafnir; but the mode in which this enmity is said to have been excited is singularly significant. In their wanderings, Odin, Loki, and Hahnir, the gods of the glistening heavens, come to a river where, nigh to a ford, an otter is eating a salmon with its eyes shut. Loki, slaying the beast with a stone, boasts that at one tlirow he has got both fish and flesh. This is the first blow dealt by the lords of light to the powers of cold and dark- ness : but the way is as yet by no means open before them. Many a day has yet to pass, and many a hero yet to fall, before the beauti- ful summer can be brought out from the prison-house hedged in by its outwork of spears or ice. The slain otter is a brother of Fafnir and Regin, and a son of Reidmar, in whose house the three gods ask shelter, showing at the same time their spoil. At Reidmar's bidding his two surviving sons bind Loki, Odin, and Hahnir, who are not set free until they promise to fill the otter's skin with gold, and so to cover it that not a white hair shall be seen — in other words, the powers of the bright heaven are pledged to loosen the ice-fetters of the earth, and destroy every sign of its long bondage. But the gold is the glistening treasure which has been taken away when Persephone was stolen from her mother Demeter and Brynhild left to sleep within the walls of flame. Hence Loki must discharge the office of Hermes when he goes to reclaim the maiden from the rugged lord of Hades; and thus Odin sends Loki to the dwelling of the dark elves, where he compels the dwarf Andvari (who reappears as Alberich in the Nibelung legend) to give up the golden treasures which

' " The dwarfs of Teutonic mylho- qualities." Bunsen (God in History, logy are distinguished from its giants, ii. 484) riglitly adds, " The word must because they do not, lilce the latter, be a simple Teutonic one, and we most represent the wild and lawless energies likely come on the traces of its primary of nature, but the contrivance and significance in our word Zwcrch, as wonderful properties present in the ecjuivalent to qiic> wicked or cross, mineral and vegetable kingdoms, and the intellectual ajiplication of which has shown in form ancl sha]ie, in colour survived in the tngli.->h queer." and growth, in various hurtful or useful