Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/224

192 BOOK II.

to stir or grow. Thus Grimm remarks that of Wuotan it may be said as Lucan says of Jupiter —

Est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris,

the pure spiritual deity. The word itself is therefore a participle of the old verb watan, whose cognate forms vata, 6d, account for the dialectical variations which converted it into the Saxon Wuodan, Wodan, Woden, Odin, the Frisian VVeda, the Norse O^inn. But the ideas thus expressed by the name were necessarily lost when the Christian missionaries taught the people to look on Wuotan or Odin as the archfiend ruling over troops of mahgnant demons ; nor is it improbable that the process may have begun at an earlier period. The name is connected closely with the German wuth, in which the notion of energy has been exaggerated into that of impulse uncon- trolled by will. Such a limitation of meaning was quite in harmony with the tendency of all the German tribes to identify energy with vehement strife, and thus Wuotan became essentially the armed deity, the god of war and of battles, the father of victory.^ As such, he looks down on the earth from his heavenly home through a window, sitting on his throne with Freya by his side, as Here sits by Zeus in Olympos. In the strange story which is to account for the change which converted the Winili into the Lombards, this attribute of Wuotan is connected with the rising of the sun, the great eye of day. As the giver of victory, the greatest of all blessings in Teutonic eyes, he was necessarily the giver of all other good things, like the Hermes of the Greeks with whose name his own is identical in meaning.^ As such, he is Osci, Oski, the power of Wish or Will, so often exhibited in the mythology of northern Europe, the Wunsch to whom the poets of the thirteenth century^ assign hands, eyes, knowledge, blood, with all the appetites and passions of humanity. This power of Wuotan is seen in the oska-stein, or wishing stone,

' Sigfadr, Siegfater, Grimm, il>. 122. Hence the phrases, Zu OcSinn fahrcn, 0(5innsheim suchen, denoted sinijily death. With the conversion to Christi- anity these expressions which spoke of men as going home to Odin became maledictions, consigning them to per- dition.

Grimm discovers in the titles Gibicho, Kipicho, makes him SwTwp iawv, i.e. Hermes, whose name denotes simply the motion of the air.
 * This attribute of Wuotan, which

' For a long series of passages in which Wunsch is clearly both a power and a person, see Grimm, D.M. 126-8. The instruments of Wish generally run in triplets, as in the story of King Tutraka (pp. 89, 93). In that of Cin- derella, they are three nuts, containing each a splendid robe. In the story of The Pink, Wish assumes the Protean power of transformation ; in that of Brother Lustig, it is a bag in which the possessor may see anything that he wishes to shut up in it, and by means of which he contrives, like the Master Smith, to find his way into heaven. In the tale of the Poor Man and the Rich Man, the three wishes which bring hapjiiness here and hereafter to the former, bring only " ve.ation, troubling,