Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/150

118 BOOK I. Sigurd, Siegfried, and Baldxir.

The points of difference between the Norse and the German traditions are simply such as the comparison of one Greek myth with another would lead us to expect. Phoibos may be called the child of the darkness, as strictly as he may be said to be born in Delos or Ortygia. The offsprmg of Chrysaor, the lord of the golden sword of day, is the three-headed Geryoneus; and Echidna, the throttUng snake, who is united with Herakles, is the daughter of Kallirhoe, the fair-flowing stream of the ocean. Hence there is nothing surprising in the fact that in the one set of myths Sigurd fights with, or is slain by, the Niflungs, while in the other he is said to be a Niflung him- self^ The real difference between the Teutonic and the Greek epics lies, not so much in the fact that a complex poem exhibits a being like Paris, sometimes in the garb of the Panis, sometimes with the attributes of Surya, as in the greater compass of the northern poems. The Iliad relates the incidents only of a portion of a single year in the Trojan war; the Nibelung lay adds two or three complete histories to the already completed history of Siegfried. The antiquity of these several portions of a poem, which by the confession of all has certainly been pieced together, is a question into which we need not enter. It is possible that the portion which relates to Siegfried may have been added at a later time to explain the intense hatred of Kriemhild for her brothers, and that this may be the most modern addition to the Nibelungenlied ; but it is not less certain that the myth of Siegfried is the myth of Baldur, and has existed in many shapes in every Aryan land. The Volsung story may represent the rougher songs of Norse sea-rovers, while the Nibelung song may introduce us to the more stately life and elaborate pageants of German kings and princes ; but the heroes have changed simply their conditions, not their mind and temper, by crossing the sea or passing into another land. The doom of perpetual pilgrimage is laid on Perseus, Theseus, Bcllerophon, Herakles, Odysseus; and Sigurd and Siegfried are not more exempt from it.^ In their golden locks and

' Ludlow, Popular Epics, i. 137. ' This doom is brought out with singular clearness in the Gaelic story, where the Dame of the Fine Green Kirtle lays the Fair Gruagach under her spell, that he shall not rest by night or by day (Ixlwn, Sisiphos). " ' here thou takest thy breakfast that thou take not thy dinner, and where thou takest thy dinner that thou lake not thy su]i)-)er, in whatsoever place thou be, until thou findest out in what place I may be under the four brown quarters of the world.' "So it was in the morning of the morrow's day he went away without dog, without man, without calf, without child.

" He was going and going and jour- neying ; there was blackening on his soles, and holes in his shoes ; the black clouds of night coming, and the bright quiet clouds of the day going away, and without his finding a place of staying or rest for him." He is, in short, the wandering Vuotan (Wegtam), Savitar, Odysseus, Bcllerojihun, Phoibos, Dio-