Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/162

130 BOOK As we approach the later legends or romances, we find, as we might expect, a strange outgrowth of fancies often utterly incon- Bern. gruous, and phrases which show that the meaning of the old myths was fast fading from men's minds. Still we cannot fail to see that the stories, while they cannot by any process be reduced into harmony with the real history of any age, are built up with the materials which the bards of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs found ready to their hand. Thus in the story of Dietrich and Ecke, the latter, who plays a part something like that of Hagen or Paris, is exhibited in more lustrous colours than the Trojan Alexandros in the Iliad, although his nature and his doom are those of the Vedic Panis. Three knights, discoursing at Koln of brave warriors, give the palm to Dietrich of Bern, and Ecke who hears his praise swears that he must search through all lands till he finds him, and that Dietrich must slay him or lose all his praise. The incidents which follow are a strange travesty of the Volsung myth. Three queens hear the three knights talking, and the beautiful Seburk is immediately smitten with a love as vehement and lasting as that of Kriemhild in the Nibelung Song. Her one longing is to see Dietrich of Bern and to have him as her husband ; but the means which she adopts to gain this end is to send Ecke in search of him, armed with a breastplate, which answers to the coat of mail wrought for Achilleus by Hephaistos. This breast- plate had belonged to the Lombard king Otnit, to whom it had been a fatal possession, for as he slept before a stone wall (the wall of glass in the Hindu fairy tale) a worm found him and carried him into the hollow mountain — the tower in which Dietrich is confined, in the story of the giant Sigenot. This breastplate was recovered by Wolf- dietrich ^ of Greece, in whom it is hard not to see a reflexion of the Lykeian god of Delos, the Lupercus of Latin mythology ; and it is now given by Seburk to Ecke on the condition that if he finds Dietrich he will let him live. It is the Dawn pleading for the life of the Sun. " Could I but see the hero, no greater boon could be bestowed upon me. His high name kills me. I know not what he hath done to me, that my heart so longs after him." It is the language of Selene and Echo as they look upon Endymion and Narkissos ; and all that is said of Dietrich recalls the picture of

the old story in another dress. It is so closely with the general character of unnecessary to say that although we the Volsung and Nibelung legends, that hear much of Constantinople and it is unnecessary here to speak of them. Babylon, not a grain of genuine history Some remarks on the subject will be is to be gleaned amidst this confused found in Mr. Ludlow's Popular Epics, i. tangle of popular traditions and fancies. 308, is:c. The form in which these myths are ' Tyler, Primitive Culture, i. 255. exhibited in the Danish ballads, agrees