Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/371

Rh meet the queen who was on her way to join him, — it seems impossible to admit that he was swallowing in silence an affront inflicted on him " • ' by insolent peasants, and which an inexplicable impunity could only render all the more mortifying to his self-love and compromising to his authority."

The myth is thus driven off the soil of the Helvetian republic. Other ver- We find it growing as congenially in almost every Aryan land, and t^e myth in some regions which are not Aryan at all. It is the story of the ballad of Clym of the Clough, in which Cloudeslee performs not only the exploits assigned to Locksley in Sir Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe," but this very deed of Tell. Here the archer is made to say:

"I have a Sonne seven years old ; Hee is to me full deere : I will tye him to a stake — All shall see him that bee here— And lay an apple upon his head. And goe six paces him froe, And I myself with a broad arrowe Shall cleave the apple in towe."

Hanging is to be the penalty in case of failure. The result is of course as in the myth of Tell; but the sequel which involves the actual death of the Vogt in that legend is represented in the English ballad by the hope which the king expresses that he may never serve as a mark for Cloudeslee's arrows. Here also Cloudeslee, whose very name attests his birth and abode in the cloud-land, is one of a trio (along with Adam Bell and Clym of the Clough), which answers to the Swiss triumvirate ; and Grimm is fully justified in remarking that Cloudeslee's Christian name and Bell's surname exhibit the two naines of the great Swiss hero.^ By Saxo Gramma- ticus, a writer of the twelfth century, the story is told of Palnatoki, who performs the same exploit at the bidding of King Harold Gormson, and who when asked by the king why he had taken three arrows from his quiver when he was to have only one shot, replies, " That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first by the points of the rest." In the Vilkina Saga the tale is related, and almost in the same terms, of Egill, " the fairest of men," the brother of Volundr, our Wayland Smith, while in the Malleus Maleficarum it is told of

' "Ausser den angefiihrten deut- dessen Vorname, wie der Zuname des schen und nordischen Erzahlungen liisst ersten, Bell, an Tell gemahnt, erbietet sich noch eine altenglische in dem nor- sich vor dem Konig, seinem sieben- thumbrischen Liede von den drei Wild- jahrigen Sohn einen Apfel auss haupt zu schlitzen Adam Bell, Clym, und rr///«a;« legcn und 120 Schrilte weit herab zu of Cloudesle aufweisen; der letzte, schiessen."— Grimm, D. Myth. 355.