Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/256

224 BOOK wealth and splendour. Still her abode is full of a strange mystery. Its magnificence is not the magnificence of the open sunshine, its pleasures are not the wholesome pleasures of the outer air. If then the sun tarries in her chambers, it is because he is under a spell, because Selene has cast her deep sleep upon Endymion, and Zeus has not yet sent Hermes to bid Kalypso let Odysseus go. Thus in these Greek myths we have the germ and the groundwork of all those countless stories which speak of mortal men carried away from their homes to dwell with unseen beings beneath the earth. These beings are in each story headed by a beautiful queen, whose will it is impos- sible to resist. This power is prominent in the myth which tells us that Thomas the Rimer was carried off in his youth to Fairyland, where he became possessed of vast and mysterious knowledge. At the end of seven years he was suffered to go back to the upper earth on condition of obeying the summons to return to Elfland whenever it might be given. The bidding came while Thomas was making merry with some friends in the Tower of Ercildoune. A hart and a hind, it was said, had come from the neighbouring forest and were slowly moving up the street of the village. Thomas immediately rose, left the house, and following the animals to the wood was never seen again. ^ The story of Thomas is substantially identical with Chaucer's Rime of Sir Thopas, in whom the beauty of the Fairy Queen excites the same desire which the sight of Helen awakened in the Athenian Peirithoos.'^ This fairy queen sometimes assumes the

Mr. Gould, in his chapter on the Moun- tracts, De Defect. Orae. 21, a certain tain of Venus, notices among other Cleombrotus entertains the company stories that of the Norse Helgi, Thorir's with an account of an Eastern traveller son, who is invited by Ingebjorg the whose character and fortunes are still Troll queen to come and live with her. more remarkable than those of the His absence, however, is confined to Scottish seer. Of this man we are told three days, at the end of which he re- that he only appeared among his fellow turns home laden with treasure. His mortals once a year. The rest of his second visit was extended over many time was spent in the society of nymphs years, and from this he returned blind. and demons who had granted him an The story told by Gervase of Tilbury, unusual share of personal beauty, had the scene of which is the mountain of rendered him proof against disease, and Cavargum in Catalonia, is cited by Sir supplied him with a fruit which was to Walter Scott in his introduction to the satisfy his hunger, and of which he Ballad of Tamlane, Border Minstrelsy. partook only once a month. He was,
 * 'icon, Border Minstrelsy, iv. 114. such fictions. "In one of Plutarch's

ton's History of English Poetiy, 49) gift of tongues ; his conversation resem- comparcs the journey of Thomas to Elf- bled a continuous flow of verse; his land, in the .ScoUish ballad, witii /Elian's knowledge was universal, and an un- story (^Var. Hist. iii. 18) respecting usual visitation of prophetic fervour Anostos "the bourne from which no enabled him to unfold the hidden secrets traveller returns," and remarks that the of futurity." This is practically the prophetic power acquired by the Rimer story of the Thrakian Zalmoxis, which during his sojourn with the Eairy Queen Herodotos refuses to believe, iv. 94. is no novel feature in the history of
 * Mr. Price (introduction to War- moreover, endowed with a miraculous