Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/457

 In Hephaistos, the ever-young/ we see an image of fire, not as CHAP, the symbol and pledge of faith and honour, of law and equity, but like Asrni, dark and stunted in its first beginnings but able to do niaimeu wonders in its power over earths and metals. He is the mighty Hephais- workman who, at the prayer of Thetis, forges for Achilleus the irresistible armour in which he is to avenge the death of Patroklos, as Regin the smith of Hialprek the king of Denmark fashions a new sword for Sigurd which is brought to him by his mother Hjordis. But in spite of all his power he himself is subject to great weakness, the result, according to one version, of his mother's harshness, in another, of the cruelty of Zeus. The former relates that Here was so horrified by his deformity and limping gait that she cast him forth from Olympos, and left him to find a refuge with the Ocean nymphs Thetis and Eurynome. The other tells how when once he was taking his mother's part in one of her quarrels with her husband, Zeus, indignant at his interference, seized him by the leg and hurled him out of heaven. Throughout the livelong day he continued to fall, and as the sun went down he lay stunned on the soil of Lemnos, where the Sintians took him up and tended him in his weakness.^ The myth also ran that he had no father, as Athene has no mother, and that he was the child of Here alone, who in like manner is called the solitary parent of Typhon. The mystery of his birth perplexed Hephaistos : and the stratagem in which he discovered it reappears in the Norse story of the Master Smith, who, like Hephaistos, possesses a chair from which none can rise against the owner's will. In the one case it is Here, in the other it is the devil who is thus entrapped, but in both the device is successful

The Olympian dwelling of Hephaistos is a palace gleaming with The forgi the splendour of a thousand stars. At his huge anvils mighty bellows phaistos. keep up a stream of air of their own accord; and giant forms, Brontes, Steropes, Pyrakmon (the thunders, lightnings and flames) aid him in

• See note *, p. 421. always halting, and so furnishing the

incident as the cause of his lameness laughter, as they see him puffing and refers probably to the weakened powers panting in his ministrations as the cup- of fire when either materials or draught bearer. The golden supports which fail it. The N'edic hymn speaks of hold him up as he walks arc the glitter- Agni as clothed or hindered by smoke ing flames which curl upward beneath only at his birth; but with a feeling not the volumes of smoke which rise above less true to the phenomena of fire, the them. poets of the //iad represent him as
 * The tradition which assigns this gods with a source of inextinguishable