Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/458

426 BOOK II. Hephais- tos and Athene. The T^tin Vulcan. The fire- god Loki.

his labours. With him dwells his wife, who in the Iliad, as we have seen, is Charis, in the Odyssey Aphrodite. In its reference to Hephaistos the lay of Demodokos which relates the faithlessness of Aphrodite is worthy of note chiefly as it attributes to him the powers of Daidalos. The thin chains which, catching the eye scarcely more than spiders' webs, entrap Ares and Aphrodite in a network from which there is no escape, at once suggest a comparison with the tortuous labyrinth made for Pasiphae in the land of Minos.

In our Homeric poems no children of Hephaistos are mentioned. In Apollodoros we have the strange story which makes him and Athene the parents of Erichthonios, and the legend which represents him as the father of the robber Periphetes, who is slain by Theseus — myths transparent enough to render any detailed explanation super- fluous. The Christian missionaries converted Hephaistos into a demon, and thus he became the limping devil known in Berkshire tradition as Wayland the Smith.

Of the Latin Vulcan htde more needs to be said than that he too is a god of fire, whose name also denotes his office, for it points to the Sanskrit ulka, a firebrand, and to the kindred words fulgur and fulmen, names for the flashing lightning.^ Like most other Latin gods, he has in strictness of speech no mythology ; but it pleased the later Roman taste to attribute to him all that Greek legends related of Hephaistos.

The name Loki, like that of the Latin Vulcanus, denotes the light or blaze of fire, and in such phrases as Locke dricker vand, Loki drinks water, described the phenomena of the sun drinking when its light streams in shafts from the cloud-rifts to the earth or the waters beneath. The word thus carries us to the old verb liuhan, the Latin lucere, to shine, and to Logi as its earlier form, the modern German lohe, glow ; but as the Greek tradition referred the name Oidipous to the two words oT8a and oXlim, to know and to swell, so a supposed connexion with the verb lukan, to shut or lock, substituted the name Loki for Logi, and modified his character accordingly.* He thus becomes the being who holds the keys of the prison-house, like the malignant Grendel in Beowulf, or the English fire-demon Grant mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury, a name connected with the Old Norse grind, a grating, and the modern German grenz, a boundary.

' In the Gaelic Lay of Magnus, the smith or forging god appears under the rame Balcan, his son being the sailor. This looks as if the Latin name had been borrowed. In this stcjry the twelve ruddy daughters of the King of Light marry the twelve foster-brothers of Magnus the hero — the months of the year. — Campbell, iii. 347 ; Gubernatis, Zoological Mytlioh^y, i. 326.


 * Grimm, D. J/. 221.