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TEUTONIC MYTH AND LEGEND

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Author Topic: TEUTONIC MYTH AND LEGEND  (Read 1483 times)
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Tannhäuser
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« Reply #15 on: April 17, 2009, 01:15:36 pm »

literature. It haunts the Eddas and Sagas; it permeates Anglo-Saxon poetry. Dr. Clark Hall says of Beowulf, "There is undoubtedly less colour about the second part than the first, and more gloom. The habit of foreboding which is noticeable in Part I is so prominent in Part II as to give a general tone of fatalistic hopelessness to it. Sunshine and shadow no longer alternate shadow is over all." The same comment might be applied with equal force to the Nibelungenlied. Although "gloomy" and "Celtic" have become synonymous terms of late years, yet Celtic (Irish) Mythology and old Gaelic literature both in Scotland and in Ireland strike, in comparison with what is termed Teutonic, a brighter and more cheerful note. It may be that the gloom is aboriginal--pre-Celtic and pre-Teutonic--a shadow of primitive but persistent mental habits.

In Teutonic Mythology, as in Greek, there are evidences of remote race-memories. The Asiatic "broad-heads" who crossed Europe in "waves", which began to arrive in the vast periods of the late Stone Age, must have imported not only new customs and new weapons, but also fragments of immemorial myths. Superstitions survive longer than stone monuments, and they pass through language to language, and from land to land, with the buoyancy of American timber which drifts across the Atlantic to Hebridean shores. An instance may be noted in the northern "Story of Creation". The body of Ymer, the chaos-giant, is cut to pieces; his flesh and bones become soil and rocks; his skull is the sky dome; his progeny is engulfed in his blood, which is the sea. Babylonian tablets relate a similar story. In the beginning Bel-Merodach slew the chaos-giantess Tiawath; he cut up her body, and with one part he framed the earth and with the other the heavens. Her blood was forced

p. xxix

to flow southward by a strong north wind--it became the river which filled the sea.

Comparisons may also be drawn between Teutonic and Greek Mythologies. But these will be found to be of slighter character. Those elements, common to both, which are not Asiatic may be of early Mediterranean origin, for as ancient cities lie below ancient cities) so do ancient mythologies rest upon the wrecks of others of still greater antiquity. As Jubainville has shown in Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique, Greek and Celtic are closely related and mainly of common origin. They are children of one mother; but Scandinavian Mythology cannot be regarded as other than a distant relation.

In all three Mythologies there is a central Nature-myth tragedy. In Greek it is the slaying of Night by Dawn. Hermes, surnamed Argeiphontes, in his character as Dawn-god, slays Argus, the many-eyed, who is Night, with a round stone, which is the Sun. In Celtic (Irish) Mythology the Dawn-god, Lugh, kills Balor of the Evil-eye, who is Night, with the same round sun-stone. The myth also applies to the slaying of Winter by Summer and of Evil by Good. The tragedy of Scandinavian Mythology, on the other hand, is the slaying of Day (or Summer) by Night (or Winter). Blind Hoder shoots Balder (in his Edda character as Summer Sun-god) with the wintry mistletoe-arrow. He is prompted by Loke, the Scandinavian Mephistopheles, who plots to hasten the downfall of the gods. Light is thus overcome by Darkness, Summer by Winter, and Good by Evil.

Another broad and fundamental contrast is afforded by the conceptions of Night in the Northern and other European Mythologies. Instead of the tyrannical Balor of Ireland, or the monstrous Argus of Greece, we have

p. xxx

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