Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/598

566 BOOK Fiilgentius, it was met by the passive resistance of men whose super- stitions were less harsh and oppressive. " The Aryan Nations," says Professor Max Miiller, "had no devil. Pluto, though of a sombre character, was a very respectable personage : and Loki, though a mischievous person, was not a fiend. The German goddess, Hel, too — like Proserpine — had seen better days." ^ It was thus no easy task to imbue them with an adequate horror of a being of whose absolute malignity they could form no clear conception.

The Teu- But these tribes had their full share of that large inheritance of phrases which had described originally the covering or strangling snake, Vritra or Ahi, who shuts up the rain-clouds in his prison-house. Probably not one of the phrases which furnished the groundwork of Iranian dualism had been lost or forgotten by any other of the Arj-an tribes ; but like Vritra or Ahi, like the Sphinx or the Python, like Belleros or Chimaira, or Echidna, the beings to whom the German tribes applied these phrases had already been overcome. The phrases also had varied in character from grave solemnity to comedy or burlesque, from the type of the Herakles whom we see in the apologue of Prodikos to the Herakles who jests with Thanatos (Death) after he has stolen away Alkestis. To the people at large the latter mode of thinking and speaking on the subject was more congenial ; and to it the ideas of the old gods were more readily adapted. Hel had been, like Persephone, the queen of the unseen land, — in the ideas of the northern tribes, a land of bitter cold and icy walls. She now became not the queen of Niflheim ; but Niflheim itself, while her abode, though, gloomy enough, was not wholly destitute of material comforts. It became the Hell where the old man hews wood for the Christmas fire, and where the Devil in his eagerness to buy the flitch of bacon yields up the marvellous quern which is "good to grind almost anything." ^ It was not so pleasant, indeed, as heaven, or the old Valhalla ; but it was better to be there

' Chips, &c., vol. ii. p. 235. Sir G. Church to prepare the soil for its recep- Dasent's words are not less explicit. tion." — Popular Tales froin the Ahorse,

" The notion of an Arch-enemy of God introduction, p. xcviii. and man, a fallen angel, to whom power ^ " Why the Sea is Salt." Dasent, was permitted at certain times for an Norse Tales, ii. This inexhaustible all-wise purpose by the Great Ruler of quern is only another form of the trea- the universe, was as foreign to the sures of Helen or Brynhild. But though heathendom of our ancestors as his the snow may veil all the wealth of name was outlandish and strange to fruits and vegetables, this wealth is of their tongue. This notion Christianity no use to the chill beings who have laid brought with it from the east ; and their grasp upon it. These beings must though it is a plant which has struck be therefore so hard pressed for hunger deep roots, grown distorted and awry, that, like Esau, they may be ready to and borne a bitter crop of superstition, part with anything or everything for a it required all the authority of the mess of pottage or a flitch of bacon.