Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/530

498 BOOK II. The swan- shaped Zeus. Inchanted maidens.

nothing more than the power exercised by Herakles, who, whenever he desired it, could lay aside his robe of lion's skin. Then would follow the myth, that the only way to capture these beings was to seize their garment of swan's or eagle's feathers, without which they were powerless ; and this myth has been reflected in a thousand tales which relate how men, searching for something lost, have reached some peaceful lake (the blue heaven) on which were floating the silver swans, birds only in outward seeming, and so long as they were suffered to wear their feathery robes.^ Some specimens of Turanian myths belonging to this class are noteworthy as containing not only this idea but all the chief incidents belonging to the Teutonic story of the Giant who had no Heart in his Body, and the Hindu tale of Punchkin. Among the Minussinian Tartars these maidens appear, like the Hellenic Harpyiai, as beings which scourge themselves into action with a sword, and fly gorged with blood, through the heavens forty in number, yet running into one, like the many clouds absorbed into a single mass. The vapour in this, its less inviting aspect, is seen in the myth of Kyknos, the swan son of Ares, or Sthenelos, or Poseidon (for all these versions are found), who after a hard fight is slain by Herakles.

In the legend of Helen and the Dioskouroi Zeus himself comes to Leda in the guise of a swan, as to Danae he appears in the form of a golden shower ; and hence from the two eggs sprung severally, according to one of many versions, Kastor and Helen, Polydeukes and Klytaimnestra, while others say that the brothers were the sons of Zeus, and Helen the child of the mortal Tyndareos.^ When the notion which regarded Helen as doomed to bring ruin on her kins- folk and friends had been more fully developed, the story ran that the egg came not from Leda but from Nemesis, the power which, like the Norns, gives to each man his portion.

The ideas of inchantment and transformation once awakened ran riot in a crowd of stories which resemble in some of their features the myths of which the tale of Psyche and Eros is a type ; in others, the legends in which the youngest brother or sister. Boots or Cinder- ella, is in the end exalted over those who had thought little of him in times past, and, in others again, the narratives of jealous wives or stepmothers, found in the mythology of all the Aryan tribes. Thus the ship and the swan are both prominent in the mediaeval romance

' These robes in other tales become fair)' garments, without which the Per- sian Peri cannot leave the human hus- band to whom she is wedded. — Keight- ley, Fairy Mytholog)', 21. With these legends we may also compare the stories of mermaids who unite them- selves with human lovers. Tyndareos is the thunderer.
 * But, as we have seen, p. 414,