Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/496

464 BOOK II.

given to some one else. The horn of Oberon in the romance of Huon of Bordeaux has the same powers, while it further becomes, like the Sangreal, a test of good and evil, for only those of blameless character dance when its strains are heard. Still more marvellous are the properties of the lyre of Glenkundie :

He'd harpit a fish out o' saut water. Or water out o' a stane, Or milk out o' a maiden's breast That bairn had never nane.*

The harp of Waina- moinen. The instrument reappears in the pipe of the Irish Maurice Connor, which could waken the dead as well as stir the living ; but Maurice is himself enticed by a mermaid, and vanishes with her beneath the waters. It is seen again in the magic lyre which the ghost of Zoray- hayda gives to the Rose of the Alhambra in the charming legend related by Washington Irving, and which rouses the mad Philip V. from his would-be coffin to a sudden outburst of martial vehemence. In Slavonic stories the harp exhibits only the lulling qualities of the lyre of Hermes. It comes before us again in the story of Jack the Giant-Killer, in which the Giant, who in the unchristianised myth was Wuotan himself, possessed an inchanting harp, bags of gold and diamonds, and a hen which daily laid a golden egg. " The harp," says Mr. Gould, " is the wind, the bags are the clouds dropping the sparkling rain, and the golden egg, laid every morning by the red hen, is the dawn-produced Sun." ^ This magic lyre is further found where perhaps we should little look for it, in the grotesque myths of the Quiches of Guatemala. It is seen in its full might in the song of the Finnish Wainamoinen, and in the wonderful effects produced by the chanting of the sons of Kalew on the woods, which burst instantly into flowers and fruit, before the song is ended. The close parallelism between the myth of Wainamoinen and the legends of Hermes and Orpheus cannot be better given than in the words ot Mr. Gould.

"Wainamoinen went to a waterfall and killed a pike which swam below it Of the bones of this fish he constructed a harp, just as Hermes made his lyre of the tortoiseshell. But he dropped this instrument into the sea, and thus it fell into the power of the sea- gods, which accounts for the music of the ocean on the beach. The hero then made another from the forest wood, and with it descended to Pohjola, the realm of darkness, in quest of the mystic Sampo, just

' Jamieson's Scottish Ballads, i. 98 ; Poetry, Ixiv. Price, hitrod. to Wartoti's Hist. Eng. * Curious Myths, ii. 160.