Teutonic Mythology: Gods and Goddesses of the Northland, Vol. 1
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Title: Teutonic Mythology: Gods and Goddesses of the Northland, Vol. 1
Author: Viktor Rydberg
Translator: Rasmus Björn Anderson
Release date: October 29, 2011 [eBook #37876]
Language: English
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Teutonic Mythology
Gods and Goddesses
of the Northland
IN
THREE VOLUMES
By VIKTOR RYDBERG, Ph.D.,
MEMBER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY; AUTHOR OF THE "THE LAST ATHENIAN"
AND OTHER WORKS.
_AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE SWEDISH_
BY
RASMUS B. ANDERSON, LL.D.,
EX-UNITED STATES MINISTER TO DENMARK; AUTHOR OF "NORSE
MYTHOLOGY," "VIKING TALES," ETC.
HON. RASMUS B. ANDERSON, LL.D., Ph.D.,
EDITOR IN CHIEF.
J. W. BUEL, Ph.D.,
MANAGING EDITOR.
VOL. I.
PUBLISHED BY THE
NORROENA SOCIETY,
LONDON COPENHAGEN STOCKHOLM BERLIN NEW YORK
1906
[Illustration]
_OF THE_
Viking Edition
_There are but six hundred and fifty sets made for the world,
of which this is_
_No._ 99
[Illustration: NORROENA]
COPYRIGHT,
T. H. SMART,
1905.
[Illustration: IDUN, HEIMDAL, LOKE, AND BRAGE.
(_From an etching by Lorenz Froelich._)]
Idun was the beautiful goddess who in Asgard was keeper of the apples
which the gods ate to preserve eternal youth. She is most generally
regarded as the wife of Brage.
Heimdal, the son of nine mothers, was guardian against the giants of the
bridge of the gods, Bifroest. With a trumpet he summoned all the gods
together at Ragnarok when he and Loke slew each other. He was the god of
light.
Loke though beautiful in form was like Lucifer in character and was
hence called the god of destruction. By the giantess Angerboda he had
three offspring, viz: the Midgard serpent, the Fenris-wolf, and Hela,
the latter becoming goddess of Hel.
Brage was the son of Odin and being represented as the chief skald in
Valhalla he is called the god of poetry.
TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY.
* * * * *
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
VOLUME ONE.
PART I.
Page
Introduction--The Ancient Aryans 1
(a) The Aryan Family of Languages 3
Hypothesis of Asiatic Origin of the Aryans 5
Hypothesis of European Origin of the Aryans 15
The Aryan Land of Europe 20
(b) Ancient Teutondom 26
PART II.
(a) Mediaeval Migration Sagas 32
The Troy Saga and Prose Edda 44
Saxo's Relation to the Story of Troy 47
Older Periods of the Troy Saga 50
Story of the Origin of Trojan Descent of the Franks 60
Odin as Leader of the Trojan Emigration 67
Materials of the Icelandic Troy Saga 83
Result of Foregoing Investigations 96
(b) Popular Traditions of the Middle Ages 99
Saxon and Swabian Migration Saga 107
The Frankish Migration Saga 111
Migration Saga of the Burgundians 113
Teutonic Emigration Saga 119
PART III.
Myths Concerning the Creation of Man 126
Scef, the Original Patriarch 135
Borgar-Skjold, the Second Patriarch 143
Halfdan, the Third Patriarch 147
Halfdan's Enmity with Orvandel and Svipdag 151
Halfdan's Identity with Mannus 153
Sacred Runes Learned from Heimdal 159
Sorcery, the Reverse of Sacred Runes 165
Heimdal and the Sun Goddess 167
Loke Causes Enmity Between Gods and Creators 171
Halfdan Identical with Helge 180
The End of the Age of Peace 185
War with the Heroes from Svarin's Mound 194
Review of the Svipdag Myth 200
The World-War and its Causes 204
Myth Concerning the Sword Guardian 213
Breach Between Asas Vans. Siege of Asgard 235
Significance of the World-War 252
The War in Midgard. Hadding's Adventures 255
Position of the Divine Clans to the Warriors 262
Hadding's Defeat 268
Loke's Punishment 273
Original Model of the Bravalla Battle 281
The Dieterich Saga 285
PART IV.
Myth in Regard to the Lower World 306
Gudmund, King of the Glittering Plains 309
Ruler of the Lower World 312
Fjallerus and Hadingus in the Low World 317
A Frisian Saga, Adam of Bremen 319
Odainsaker and the Glittering Plains 321
Identification of Odainsaker 336
Gudmund's Identity with Mimer 339
Mimer's Grove 341
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURES.
VOL. I.
* * * * *
Frontispiece--Idun, Heimdal, Loke, and Brage.
Page
Thor the Thunder God 120
Giant Thjasse in the Guise of an Eagle Carries off Loke 174
Odin Punishes the Monstrous Progeny of Loke 300
STOCKHOLM, NOVEMBER 20, 1887.
HON. RASMUS B. ANDERSON,
United States Minister,
Copenhagen, Denmark.
DEAR SIR,
It gives me pleasure to authorise you to translate into English my work
entitled "Researches in Teutonic Mythology," being convinced that no one
could be found better qualified for this task than yourself. Certainly
no one has taken a deeper interest than you in spreading among our
Anglo-Saxon kinsmen, not only a knowledge of our common antiquity, but
also of what modern Scandinavia is contributing to the advancement of
culture--a work in which England and the United States of America are
taking so large a share.
Yours faithfully,
VIKTOR RYDBERG.
I.
INTRODUCTION.
* * * * *
A. THE ANCIENT ARYANS.
1.
THE WORDS GERMAN AND GERMANIC.
Already at the beginning of the Christian era the name Germans was
applied by the Romans and Gauls to the many clans of people whose main
habitation was the extensive territory east of the Rhine, and north of
the forest-clad Hercynian Mountains. That these clans constituted one
race was evident to the Romans, for they all had a striking similarity
in type of body; moreover, a closer acquaintance revealed that their
numerous dialects were all variations of the same parent language, and
finally, they resembled each other in customs, traditions, and religion.
The characteristic features of the physical type of the Germans were
light hair, blue eyes, light complexion, and tallness of stature as
compared with the Romans.
Even the saga-men, from whom the Roman historian Tacitus gathered the
facts for his _Germania_--an invaluable work for the history of
civilisation--knew that in the so-called Svevian Sea, north of the
German continent, lay another important part of Germany, inhabited by
Sviones, a people divided into several clans. Their kinsmen on the
continent described them as rich in weapons and fleets, and in warriors
on land and sea (Tac., _Germ._, 44). This northern sea-girt portion of
Germany is called Scandinavia--Scandeia by other writers of the Roman
Empire; and there can be no doubt that this name referred to the
peninsula which, as far back as historical monuments can be found, has
been inhabited by the ancestors of the Swedes and the Norwegians. I
therefore include in the term Germans the ancestors of both the
Scandinavian and Gothic and German (_tyske_) peoples. Science needs a
sharply-defined collective noun for all these kindred branches sprung
from one and the same root, and the name by which they make their first
appearance in history would doubtless long since have been selected for
this purpose had not some of the German writers applied the terms
_German_ and _Deutsch_ as synonymous. This is doubtless the reason why
Danish authors have adopted the word "Goths" to describe the Germanic
nation. But there is an important objection to this in the fact that the
name _Goths_ historically is claimed by a particular branch of the
family--that branch, namely, to which the East and West Goths belonged,
and in order to avoid ambiguity, the term should be applied solely to
them. It is therefore necessary to re-adopt the old collective name,
even though it is not of Germanic origin, the more so as there is a
prospect that a more correct use of the words German and Germanic is
about to prevail in Germany itself, for the German scholars also feel
the weight of the demand which science makes on a precise and rational
terminology.[1]
[Footnote 1: Viktor Rydberg styles his work _Researches in Germanic
Mythology_, but after consultation with the Publishers, the Translator
decided to use the word _Teutonic_ instead of _Germanic_ both in the
title and in the body of the work. In English, the words German,
Germany, and Germanic are ambiguous. The Scandinavians and Germans have
the words _Tyskland_, _tysk_, _Deutschland_, _deutsch_, when they wish
to refer to the present Germany, and thus it is easy for them to adopt
the words _German_ and _Germanisk_ to describe the Germanic or Teutonic
peoples collectively. The English language applies the above word
_Dutch_ not to Germany, but to Holland, and it is necessary to use the
words _German_ and _Germany_ in translating _deutsch_, _Deutschland_,
_tysk_, and _Tyskland_. Teutonic has already been adopted by Max Mueller
and other scholars in England and America as a designation of all the
kindred branches sprung from one and the same root, and speaking
dialects of the same original tongue. The words Teuton, Teutonic, and
Teutondom also have the advantage over German and Germanic that they are
of native growth and not borrowed from a foreign language. In the
following pages, therefore, the word Teutonic will be used to describe
Scandinavians, Germans, Anglo-Saxons, &c., collectively, while German
will be used exclusively in regard to Germany proper.--TRANSLATOR.]
2.
THE ARYAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES.
It is universally known that the Teutonic dialects are related to the
Latin, the Greek, the Slavic, and Celtic languages, and that the kinship
extends even beyond Europe to the tongues of Armenia, Irania, and India.
The holy books ascribed to Zoroaster, which to the priests of Cyrus and
Darius were what the Bible is to us; Rigveda's hymns, which to the
people dwelling on the banks of the Ganges are God's revealed word, are
written in a language which points to a common origin with our own.
However unlike all these kindred tongues may have grown with the lapse
of thousands of years, still they remain as a sharply-defined group of
older and younger sisters as compared with all other language groups of
the world. Even the Semitic languages are separated therefrom by a chasm
so broad and deep that it is hardly possible to bridge it.
This language-group of ours has been named in various ways. It has been
called the Indo-Germanic, the Indo-European, and the Aryan family of
tongues. I have adopted the last designation. The Armenians, Iranians,
and Hindoos I call the Asiatic Aryans; all the rest I call the European
Aryans.
Certain it is that these sister-languages have had a common mother, the
ancient Aryan speech, and that this has had a geographical centre from
which it has radiated. (By such an ancient Aryan language cannot, of
course, be meant a tongue stereotyped in all its inflections, like the
literary languages of later times, but simply the unity of those
dialects which were spoken by the clans dwelling around this centre of
radiation.) By comparing the grammatical structure of all the daughters
of this ancient mother, and by the aid of the laws hitherto discovered
in regard to the transition of sounds from one language to another,
attempts have been made to restore this original tongue which many
thousand years ago ceased to vibrate. These attempts cannot, of course,
in any sense claim to reproduce an image corresponding to the lost
original as regards syntax and inflections. Such a task would be as
impossible as to reconstruct, on the basis of all the now spoken
languages derived from the Latin, the dialect used in Latium. The
purpose is simply to present as faithful an idea of the ancient tongue
as the existing means permit.
In the most ancient historical times Aryan-speaking people were found
only in Asia and Europe. In seeking for the centre and the earliest
conquests of the ancient Aryan language, the scholar may therefore keep
within the limits of these two continents, and in Asia he may leave all
the eastern and the most of the southern portion out of consideration,
since these extensive regions have from prehistoric times been inhabited
by Mongolian and allied tribes, and may for the present be regarded as
the cradle of these races. It may not be necessary to remind the reader
that the question of the original home of the ancient Aryan tongue is
not the same as the question in regard to the cradle of the Caucasian
race. The white race may have existed, and may have been spread over a
considerable portion of the old world, before a language possessing the
peculiarities belonging to the Aryan had appeared; and it is a known
fact that southern portions of Europe, such as the Greek and Italian
peninsulas, were inhabited by white people before they were conquered by
Aryans.
3.
THE HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE ASIATIC ORIGIN OF THE ARYANS.
When the question of the original home of the Aryan language and race
was first presented, there were no conflicting opinions on the main
subject.[2] All who took any interest in the problem referred to Asia as
the cradle of the Aryans. Asia had always been regarded as the cradle of
the human race. In primeval time, the yellow Mongolian, the black
African, the American redskin, and the fair European had there tented
side by side. From some common centre in Asia they had spread over the
whole surface of the inhabited earth. Traditions found in the
literatures of various European peoples in regard to an immigration from
the East supported this view. The progenitors of the Romans were said to
have come from Troy. The fathers of the Teutons were reported to have
immigrated from Asia, led by Odin. There was also the original home of
the domestic animals and of the cultivated plants. And when the
startling discovery was made that the sacred books of the Iranians and
Hindoos were written in languages related to the culture languages of
Europe, when these linguistic monuments betrayed a wealth of inflections
in comparison with which those of the classical languages turned pale,
and when they seemed to have the stamp of an antiquity by the side of
which the European dialects seemed like children, then what could be
more natural than the following conclusion: The original form has been
preserved in the original home; the farther the streams of emigration
got away from this home, the more they lost on the way of their language
and of their inherited view of the world; that is, of their mythology,
which among the Hindoos seemed so original and simple as if it had been
watered by the dews of life's dawn.
[Footnote 2: Compare O. Schrader, _Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_
(1883).]
To begin with, there was no doubt that the original tongue itself, the
mother of all the other Aryan languages, had already been found when
Zend or Sanscrit was discovered. Fr. v. Schlegel, in his work published
in 1808, on the _Language and Wisdom of the Hindoos_, regarded Sanscrit
as the mother of the Aryan family of languages, and India as the
original home of the Aryan family of peoples. Thence, it was claimed,
colonies were sent out in prehistoric ages to other parts of Asia and to
Europe; nay, even missionaries went forth to spread the language and
religion of the mother-country among other peoples. Schlegel's
compatriot Link looked upon Zend as the oldest language and mother of
Sanscrit, and the latter he regarded as the mother of the rest; and as
the Zend, in his opinion, was spoken in Media and surrounding countries,
it followed that the highlands of Media, Armenia, and Georgia were the
original home of the Aryans, a view which prevailed among the leading
scholars of the age, such as Anquetil-Duperron, Herder, and Heeren, and
found a place in the historical text-books used in the schools from 1820
to 1840.
Since Bopp published his epoch-making Comparative Grammar the illusion
that the Aryan mother-tongue had been discovered had, of course,
gradually to give place to the conviction that all the Aryan languages,
Zend and Sanscrit included, were relations of equal birth. This also
affected the theory that the Persians or Hindoos were the original
people, and that the cradle of our race was to be sought in their homes.
On the other hand, the Hindooic writings were found to contain evidence
that, during the centuries in which the most of the Rigveda songs were
produced, the Hindooic Aryans were possessors only of Kabulistan and
Pendschab, whence, either expelling or subjugating an older black
population, they had advanced toward the Ganges. Their social condition
was still semi-nomadic, at least in the sense that their chief property
consisted in herds, and the feuds between the clans had for their object
the plundering of such possessions from each other. Both these facts
indicated that these Aryans were immigrants to the Indian peninsula, but
not the aborigines, wherefore their original home must be sought
elsewhere. The strong resemblance found between Zend and Sanscrit, and
which makes these dialects a separate subdivision in the Aryan family of
languages, must now, since we have learned to regard them as
sister-tongues, be interpreted as a proof that the Zend people or
Iranians and the Sanscrit people or Hindoos were in ancient times one
people with a common country, and that this union must have continued to
exist long after the European Aryans were parted from them and had
migrated westwards. When, then, the question was asked where this
Indo-Iranian cradle was situated, the answer was thought to be found in
a chapter of Avesta, to which the German scholar Rhode had called
attention already in 1820. To him it seemed to refer to a migration from
a more northerly and colder country. The passage speaks of sixteen
countries created by the fountain of light and goodness, Ormuzd (Ahura
Mazda), and of sixteen plagues produced by the fountain of evil, Ahriman
(Angra Mainyu), to destroy the work of Ormuzd. The first country was a
paradise, but Ahriman ruined it with cold and frost, so that it had ten
months of winter and only two of summer. The second country, in the name
of which Sughda Sogdiana was recognised, was rendered uninhabitable by
Ahriman by a pest which destroyed the domestic animals. Ahriman made the
third (which by the way, was recognised as Merv) impossible as a
dwelling on account of never-ceasing wars and plunderings. In this
manner thirteen other countries with partly recognisable names are
enumerated as created by Ormuzd, and thirteen other plagues produced by
Ahriman. Rhode's view, that these sixteen regions were stations in the
migration of the Indo-Iranian people from their original country became
universally adopted, and it was thought that the track of the migration
could now be followed back through Persia, Baktria and Sogdiana, up to
the first region created by Ormuzd, which, accordingly, must have been
situated in the interior highlands of Asia, around the sources of the
Jaxartes and Oxus. The reason for the emigration hence was found in the
statement that, although Ormuzd had made this country an agreeable
abode, Ahriman had destroyed it with frost and snow. In other words,
this part of Asia was supposed to have had originally a warmer
temperature, which suddenly or gradually became lower, wherefore the
inhabitants found it necessary to seek new homes in the West and South.
The view that the sources of Oxus and Jaxartes are the original home of
the Aryans is even now the prevailing one, or at least the one most
widely accepted, and since the day of Rhode it has been supported and
developed by several distinguished scholars. Then Julius v. Klaproth
pointed out, already in 1830, that, among the many names of various
kinds of trees found in India, there is a single one which they have in
common with other Aryan peoples, and this is the name of the birch.
India has many kinds of trees that do not grow in Central Asia, but the
birch is found both at the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes, and on the
southern spurs of the Himalaya mountains. If the Aryan Hindoos
immigrated from the highlands of Central Asia to the regions through
which the Indus and Ganges seek their way to the sea, then it is
natural, that when they found on their way new unknown kinds of trees,
then they gave to these new names, but when they discovered a tree with
which they had long been acquainted, then they would apply the old
familiar name to it. Mr. Lassen, the great scholar of Hindooic
antiquities, gave new reasons for the theory that the Aryan Hindoos were
immigrants, who through the western pass of Hindukush and through
Kabulistan came to Pendschab, and thence slowly occupied the Indian
peninsula. That their original home, as well as that of their Iranian
kinsmen, was that part of the highlands of Central Asia pointed out by
Rhode, he found corroborated by the circumstance, that there are to be
found there, even at the present time, remnants of a people, the
so-called Tadchiks, who speak Iranian dialects. According to Lassen,
these were to be regarded as direct descendants of the original Aryan
people, who remained in the original home, while other parts of the same
people migrated to Baktria or Persia and became Iranians, or migrated
down to Pendschab and became Hindoos, or migrated to Europe and became
Celts, Greco-Italians, Teutons, and Slavs. Jacob Grimm, whose name will
always be mentioned with honour as the great pathfinder in the field of
Teutonic antiquities, was of the same opinion; and that whole school of
scientists who were influenced by romanticism and by the philosophy of
Schelling made haste to add to the real support sought for the theory in
ethnological and philological facts, a support from the laws of natural
analogy and from poetry. A mountain range, so it was said, is the
natural divider of waters. From its fountains the streams flow in
different directions and irrigate the plains. In the same manner the
highlands of Central Asia were the divider of Aryan folk-streams, which
through Baktria sought their way to the plains of Persia, through the
mountain passes of Hindukush to India, through the lands north of the
Caspian Sea to the extensive plains of modern Russia, and so on to the
more inviting regions of Western Europe. The sun rises in the east, _ex
oriente lux_; the highly-gifted race, which was to found the European
nations, has, under the guidance of Providence, like the sun, wended its
way from east to west. In taking a grand view of the subject, a mystic
harmony was found to exist between the apparent course of the sun and
the real migrations of people. The minds of the people dwelling in
Central and Eastern Asia seemed to be imbued with a strange instinctive
yearning. The Aryan folk-streams, which in prehistoric times deluged
Europe, were in this respect the forerunners of the hordes of Huns which
poured in from Asia, and which in the fourth century gave the impetus to
the Teutonic migrations, and of the Mongolian hordes which in the
thirteenth century invaded our continent. The Europeans themselves are
led by this same instinct to follow the course of the sun: they flow in
great numbers to America, and these folk-billows break against each
other on the coasts of the Pacific Ocean. "At the breast of our Asiatic
mother," thus exclaimed, in harmony with the romantic school, a scholar
with no mean linguistic attainments--"at the breast of our Asiatic
mother, the Aryan people of Europe have rested; around her as their
mother they have played as children. There or nowhere is the playground;
there or nowhere is the gymnasium of the first physical and intellectual
efforts on the part of the Aryan race."
The theory that the cradle of the Aryan race stood in Central Asia near
the sources of the Indus and Jaxartes had hardly been contradicted in
1850, and seemed to be secured for the future by the great number of
distinguished and brilliant names which had given their adhesion to it.
The need was now felt of clearing up the order and details of these
emigrations. All the light to be thrown on this subject had to come from
philology and from the geography of plants and animals. The first author
who, in this manner and with the means indicated, attempted to furnish
proofs in detail that the ancient Aryan land was situated around the
Oxus river was Adolphe Pictet. There, he claimed, the Aryan language had
been formed out of older non-Aryan dialects. There the Aryan race, on
account of its spreading over Baktria and neighbouring regions, had
divided itself into branches of various dialects, which there, in a
limited territory, held the same geographical relations to each other
as they hold to each other at the present time in another and immensely
larger territory. In the East lived the nomadic branch which later
settled in India; in the East, too, but farther north, that branch
herded their flocks, which afterwards became the Iranian and took
possession of Persia. West of the ancestors of the Aryan Hindoos dwelt
the branch which later appears as the Greco-Italians and north of the
latter the common progenitors of Teutons and Slavs had their home. In
the extreme West dwelt the Celts, and they were also the earliest
emigrants to the West. Behind them marched the ancestors of the Teutons
and Slavs by a more northern route to Europe. The last in this
procession to Europe were the ancestors of the Greco-Italians, and for
this reason their languages have preserved more resemblance to those of
the Indo-Iranians who migrated into Southern Asia than those of the
other European Aryans. For this view Pictet gives a number of reasons.
According to him, the vocabulary common to more or less of the Aryan
branches preserves names of minerals, plants, and animals which are
found in those latitudes, and in those parts of Asia which he calls the
original Aryan country.
The German linguist Schleicher has to some extent discussed the same
problem as Pictet in a series of works published in the fifties and
sixties. The same has been done by the famous German-English scientist
Max Mueller. Schleicher's theory, briefly stated, is the following: The
Aryan race originated in Central Asia. There, in the most ancient Aryan
country, the original Aryan tongue was spoken for many generations. The
people multiplied and enlarged their territory, and in various parts of
the country they occupied, the language assumed various forms, so that
there were developed at least two different languages before the great
migrations began. As the chief cause of the emigrations, Schleicher
regards the fact that the primitive agriculture practised by the Aryans,
including the burning of the forests, impoverished the soil and had a
bad effect on the climate. The principles he laid down and tried to
vindicate were: (1) The farther East an Aryan people dwells, the more it
has preserved of the peculiarities of the original Aryan tongue. (2) The
farther West an Aryan-derived tongue and daughter people are found, the
earlier this language was separated from the mother-tongue, and the
earlier this people became separated from the original stock. Max Mueller
holds the common view in regard to the Asiatic origin of the Aryans. The
main difference between him and Schleicher is that Mueller assumes that
the Aryan tongue originally divided itself into an Asiatic and an
European branch. He accordingly believes that all the Aryan-European
tongues and all the Aryan-European peoples have developed from the same
European branch, while Schleicher assumes that in the beginning the
division produced a Teutonic and Letto-Slavic branch on the one hand,
and an Indo-Iranian, Greco-Italic, and Celtic on the other.
This view of the origin of the Aryans had scarcely met with any
opposition when we entered the second half of our century. We might add
that it had almost ceased to be questioned. The theory that the Aryans
were cradled in Asia seemed to be established as an historical fact,
supported by a mass of ethnographical, linguistic, and historical
arguments, and vindicated by a host of brilliant scientific names.
4.
THE HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING THE EUROPEAN ORIGIN OF
THE ARYANS.
In the year 1854 was heard for the first time a voice of doubt. The
sceptic was an English ethnologist, by name Latham, who had spent many
years in Russia studying the natives of that country. Latham was
unwilling to admit that a single one of the many reasons given for the
Asiatic origin of our family of languages was conclusive, or that the
accumulative weight of all the reasons given amounted to real evidence.
He urged that they who at the outset had treated this question had lost
sight of the rules of logic, and that in explaining a fact it is a
mistake to assume too many premises. The great fact which presents
itself and which is to be explained is this: There are Aryans in Europe
and there are Aryans in Asia. The major part of Aryans are in Europe,
and here the original language has split itself into the greatest number
of idioms. From the main Aryan trunk in Europe only two branches extend
into Asia. The northern branch is a new creation, consisting of Russian
colonisation from Europe; the southern branch, that is, the
Iranian-Hindooic, is, on the other hand, prehistoric, but was still
growing in the dawn of history, and the branch was then growing from
West to East, from Indus toward Ganges. When historical facts to the
contrary are wanting, then the root of a great family of languages
should naturally be looked for in the ground which supports the trunk
and is shaded by the crown, and not underneath the ends of the
farthest-reaching branches. The mass of Mongolians dwell in Eastern
Asia, and for this very reason Asia is accepted as the original home of
the Mongolian race. The great mass of Aryans live in Europe, and have
lived there as far back as history sheds a ray of light. Why, then, not
apply to the Aryans and to Europe the same conclusions as hold good in
the case of the Mongolians and Asia? And why not apply to ethnology the
same principles as are admitted unchallenged in regard to the geography
of plants and animals? Do we not in botany and zoology seek the original
home and centre of a species where it shows the greatest vitality, the
greatest power of multiplying and producing varieties? These questions,
asked by Latham, remained for some time unanswered, but finally they led
to a more careful examination of the soundness of the reasons given for
the Asiatic hypothesis.
The gist of Latham's protest is, that the question was decided in favour
of Asia without an examination of the other possibility, and that in
such an examination, if it were undertaken, it would appear at the very
outset that the other possibility, that is, the European origin of the
Aryans--is more plausible, at least from the standpoint of methodology.
This objection on the part of an English scholar did not even produce an
echo for many years, and it seemed to be looked upon simply as a
manifestation of that fondness for eccentricity which we are wont to
ascribe to his nationality. He repeated his protest in 1862, but it
still took five years before it appeared to have made any impression. In
1867, the celebrated linguist Whitney came out, not to defend Latham's
theory that Europe is the cradle of the Aryan race, but simply to clear
away the widely spread error that the science of languages had
demonstrated the Asiatic origin of the Aryans. As already indicated, it
was especially Adolphe Pictet who had given the first impetus to this
illusion in his great work _Origines indo-europeennes_. Already, before
Whitney, the Germans Weber and Kuhn had, without attacking the Asiatic
hypothesis, shown that the most of Pictet's arguments failed to prove
that for which they were intended. Whitney now came and refuted them all
without exception, and at the same time he attacked the assumption made
by Rhode, and until that time universally accepted, that a record of an
Aryan emigration from the highlands of Central Asia was to be found in
that chapter of Avesta which speaks of the sixteen lands created by
Ormuzd for the good of man, but which Ahriman destroyed by sixteen
different plagues. Avesta does not with a single word indicate that the
first of these lands which Ahriman destroyed with snow and frost is to
be regarded as the original home of the Iranians, or that they ever in
the past emigrated from any of them. The assumption that a migration
record of historical value conceals itself within this geographical
mythological sketch is a mere conjecture, and yet it was made the very
basis of the hypothesis so confidently built upon for years about
Central Asia as the starting-point of the Aryans.
The following year, 1868, a prominent German linguist--Mr. Benfey--came
forward and definitely took Latham's side. He remarked at the outset
that hitherto geological investigations had found the oldest traces of
human existence in the soil of Europe, and that, so long as this is the
case, there is no scientific fact which can admit the assumption that
the present European stock has immigrated from Asia after the quaternary
period. The mother-tongues of many of the dialects which from time
immemorial have been spoken in Europe may just as well have originated
on this continent as the mother-tongues of the Mongolian dialects now
spoken in Eastern Asia have originated where the descendants now dwell.
That the Aryan mother-tongue originated in Europe, not in Asia, Benfey
found probably on the following grounds: In Asia, lions are found even
at the present time as far to the north as ancient Assyria, and the
tigers make depredations over the highlands of Western Iran, even to the
coasts of the Caspian Sea. These great beasts of prey are known and
named even among Asiatic people who dwell north of their habitats. If,
therefore, the ancient Aryans had lived in a country visited by these
animals, or if they had been their neighbours, they certainly would have
had names for them; but we find that the Aryan Hindoos call the lion by
a word not formed from an Aryan root, and that the Aryan Greeks borrowed
the word lion (_lis_, _leon_) from a Semitic language. (There is,
however, division of opinion on this point.) Moreover, the Aryan
languages have borrowed the word camel, by which the chief beast of
burden in Asia is called. The home of this animal is Baktria, or
precisely that part of Central Asia in the vicinity of which an effort
has been made to locate the cradle of the Aryan tongue. Benfey thinks
the ancient Aryan country has been situated in Europe, north of the
Black Sea, between the mouth of the Danube and the Caspian Sea.
Since the presentation of this argument, several defenders of the
European hypothesis have come forward, among them Geiger, Cuno, Friedr.
Mueller, Spiegel, Poesche, and more recently Schrader and Penka.
Schrader's work, _Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_, contains an
excellent general review of the history of the question, original
contributions to its solution, and a critical but cautious opinion in
regard to its present position. In France, too, the European hypothesis
has found many adherents. Geiger found, indeed, that the cradle of the
Aryan race was to be looked for much farther to the west than Benfey and
others had supposed. His hypothesis, based on the evidence furnished by
the geography of plants, places the ancient Aryan land in Germany. The
cautious Schrader, who dislikes to deal with conjectures, regards the
question as undecided, but he weighs the arguments presented by the
various sides, and reaches the conclusion that those in favour of the
European origin of the Aryans are the stronger, but that they are not
conclusive. Schrader himself, through his linguistic and historical
investigations, has been led to believe that the Aryans, while they
still were one people, belonged to the stone age, and had not yet become
acquainted with the use of metals.
5.
THE ARYAN LAND OF EUROPE.
On _one_ point--and that is for our purpose the most important one--the
advocates of both hypotheses have approached each other. The leaders of
the defenders of the Asiatic hypothesis have ceased to regard Asia as
the cradle of all the dialects into which the ancient Aryan tongue has
been divided. While they cling to the theory that the Aryan inhabitants
of Europe have immigrated from Asia, they have well-nigh entirely ceased
to claim that these peoples, already before their departure from their
Eastern home, were so distinctly divided linguistically that it was
necessary to imagine certain branches of the race speaking Celtic,
others Teutonic, others, again, Greco-Italian, even before they came to
Europe. The prevailing opinion among the advocates of the Asiatic
hypothesis now doubtless is, that the Aryans who immigrated to Europe
formed one homogeneous mass, which gradually on our continent divided
itself definitely into Celts, Teutons, Slavs, and Greco-Italians. The
adherents of both hypotheses have thus been able to agree that there has
been _a European-Aryan country_. And the question as to where it was
located is of the most vital importance, as it is closely connected with
the question of the _original home of the Teutons_, since the ancestors
of the Teutons must have inhabited this ancient European-Aryan country.
Philology has attempted to answer the former question by comparing all
the words of all the Aryan-European languages. The attempt has many
obstacles to overcome; for, as Schrader has remarked, the ancient words
which to-day are common to all or several of these languages are
presumably a mere remnant of the ancient European-Aryan vocabulary.
Nevertheless, it is possible to arrive at important results in this
manner, if we draw conclusions from the words that remain, but take care
not to draw conclusions from what is wanting.
The view gained in this manner is, briefly stated, as follows:
The Aryan country of Europe has been situated in latitudes where snow
and ice are common phenomena. The people who have emigrated thence to
more southern climes have not forgotten either the one or the other name
of those phenomena. To a comparatively northern latitude points also the
circumstance that the ancient European Aryans recognised only three
seasons--winter, spring, and summer. This division of the year continued
among the Teutons even in the days of Tacitus. For autumn they had no
name.
Many words for mountains, valley, streams, and brooks common to all the
languages show that the European-Aryan land was not wanting in
elevations, rocks, and flowing waters. Nor has it been a treeless plain.
This is proven by many names of trees. The trees are fir, birch, willow,
elm, elder, hazel, and a beech called _bhaga_, which means a tree with
eatable fruit. From this word _bhaga_ is derived the Greek _phegos_, the
Latin _fagus_, the German _Buche_, and the Swedish _bok_. But it is a
remarkable fact that the Greeks did not call the beech but the oak
_phegos_, while the Romans called the beech _fagus_. From this we
conclude that the European Aryans applied the word _bhaga_ both to the
beech and the oak, since both bear similar fruit; but in some parts of
the country the name was particularly applied to the beech, in others to
the oak. The beech is a species of tree which gradually approaches the
north. On the European continent it is not found east of a line drawn
from Koenigsberg across Poland and Podolia to Crimea. This leads to the
conclusion that the Aryan country of Europe must to a great extent have
been situated west of this line, and that the regions inhabited by the
ancestors of the Romans, and north of them by the progenitors of the
Teutons, must be looked for west of this botanical line, and between the
Alps and the North Sea.
Linguistic comparisons also show that the Aryan territory of Europe was
situated near an ocean or large body of water. Scandinavians, Germans,
Celts, and Romans have preserved a common name for the ocean--the Old
Norse _mar_, the Old High German _mari_, the Latin _mare_. The names of
certain sea-animals are also common to various Aryan languages. The
Swedish _hummer_ (lobster) corresponds to the Greek _kamaros_, and the
Swedish _sael_ (seal) to the Greek _selachos_.
In the Aryan country of Europe there were domestic animals--cows, sheep,
and goats. The horse was also known, but it is uncertain whether it was
used for riding or driving, or simply valued on account of its flesh
and milk. On the other hand, the ass was not known, its domain being
particularly the plains of Central Asia.
The bear, wolf, otter, and beaver certainly belonged to the fauna of
Aryan Europe.
The European Aryans must have cultivated at least one, perhaps two kinds
of grain; also flax, the name of which is preserved in the Greek _linon_
(linen), the Latin _linum_, and in other languages.
The Aryans knew the art of brewing mead from honey. That they also
understood the art of drinking it even to excess may be taken for
granted. This drink was dear to the hearts of the ancient Aryans, and
its name has been faithfully preserved both by the tribes that settled
near the Ganges, and by those who emigrated to Great Britain. The
Brahmin by the Ganges still knows this beverage as _madhu_, the Welchman
has known it as _medu_, the Lithuanian as _medus_; and when the Greek
Aryans came to Southern Europe and became acquainted with wine, they
gave it the name of mead (_methu_).
It is not probable that the European Aryans knew bronze or iron, or, if
they did know any of the metals, had any large quantity or made any
daily use of them, so long as they linguistically formed one homogeneous
body, and lived in that part of Europe which we here call the Aryan
domain. The only common name for metal is that which we find in the
Latin _aes_ (copper), in the Gothic _aiz_, and in the Hindooic _ayas_.
As is known, the Latin _aes_, like the Gothic _aiz_, means both copper
and bronze. That the word originally meant copper, and afterwards came
to signify bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin, seems to be a
matter of course, and that it was applied only to copper and not to
bronze among the ancient Aryans seems clear not only because a common
name for tin is wanting, but also for the far better and remarkable
reason particularly pointed out by Schrader, that all the Aryan European
languages, even those which are nearest akin to each other and are each
other's neighbours, lack a common word for the tools of a smith and the
inventory of a forge, and also for the various kinds of weapons of
defence and attack. Most of all does it astonish us, that in respect to
weapons the dissimilarity of names is so complete in the Greek and Roman
tongues. Despite this fact, the ancient Aryans have certainly used
various kinds of weapons--the club, the hammer, the axe, the knife, the
spear, and the crossbow. All these weapons are of such a character that
they could be made of stone, wood, and horn. Things more easily change
names when the older materials of which they were made give place to new
hitherto unknown materials. It is, therefore, probable that the European
Aryans were in the stone age, and at best were acquainted with copper
before and during the period when their language was divided into
several dialects.
Where, then, on our continent was the home of this Aryan European people
in the stone age? Southern Europe, with its peninsulas extending into
the Mediterranean, must doubtless have been outside of the boundaries of
the Aryan land of Europe. The Greek Aryans have immigrated to Hellas,
and the Italian Aryans are immigrants to the Italian peninsula. Spain
has even within historical times been inhabited by Iberians and
Basques, and Basques dwell there at present: If, as the linguistic
monuments seem to prove, the European Aryans lived near an ocean, this
cannot have been the Mediterranean Sea. There remain the Black and
Caspian Sea on the one hand, the Baltic and the North Sea on the other.
But if, as the linguistic monuments likewise seem to prove, the European
Aryans for a great part, at least, lived west of a botanical line
indicated by the beech in a country producing fir, oak, elm, and elder,
then they could not have been limited to the treeless plains which
extend along the Black Sea from the mouth of the Danube, through
Dobrudscha, Bessarabia, and Cherson, past the Crimea. Students of early
Greek history do not any longer assume that the Hellenic immigrants
found their way through these countries to Greece, but that they came
from the north-west and followed the Adriatic down to Epirus; in other
words, they came the same way as the Visigoths under Alarik, and the
Eastgoths under Theodoric in later times. Even the Latin tribes came
from the north. The migrations of the Celts, so far as history sheds any
light on the subject, were from the north and west toward the south and
east. The movements of the Teutonic races were from north to south, and
they migrated both eastward and westward. Both prehistoric and historic
facts thus tend to establish the theory that the Aryan domain of Europe,
within undefinable limits, comprised the central and north part of
Europe; and as one or more seas were known to these Aryans, we cannot
exclude from the limits of this knowledge the ocean penetrating the
north of Europe from the west.
On account of their undeveloped agriculture, which compelled them to
depend chiefly on cattle for their support, the European Aryans must
have occupied an extensive territory. Of the mutual position and of the
movements of the various tribes within this territory nothing can be
stated, except that sooner or later, but already away back in
prehistoric times, they must have occupied precisely the position in
which we find them at the dawn of history and which they now hold. The
Aryan tribes which first entered Gaul must have lived west of those
tribes which became the progenitors of the Teutons, and the latter must
have lived west of those who spread an Aryan language over Russia. South
of this line, but still in Central Europe, there must have dwelt another
body of Aryans, the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, the latter west
of the former. Farthest to the north of all these tribes must have dwelt
those people who afterwards produced the Teutonic tongue.
B. ANCIENT TEUTONDOM (GERMANIEN).
6.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION OF ANCIENT TEUTONDOM.
THE STONE AGE OF PREHISTORIC TEUTONDOM.
The northern position of the ancient Teutons necessarily had the effect
that they, better than all other Aryan people, preserved their original
race-type, as they were less exposed to mixing with non-Aryan elements.
In the south, west, and east, they had kinsmen, separating them from
non-Aryan races. To the north, on the other hand, lay a territory which,
by its very nature, could be but sparsely populated, if it was inhabited
at all, before it was occupied by the fathers of the Teutons. The
Teutonic type, which doubtless also was the Aryan in general before much
spreading and consequent mixing with other races had taken place, has,
as already indicated, been described in the following manner: Tall,
white skin, blue eyes, fair hair. Anthropological science has given them
one more mark--they are dolicocephalous, that is, having skulls whose
anterior-posterior diameter, or that from the frontal to the occipital
bone, exceeds the transverse diameter. This type appears most pure in
the modern Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and to some extent the Dutch, in
the inhabitants of those parts of Great Britain that are most densely
settled by Saxon and Scandinavian emigrants; and in the people of
certain parts of North Germany. Welcker's craniological measurements
give the following figures for the breadth and length of Teutonic
skulls:
Swedes and Hollanders, 75--71
Icelanders and Danes, 76--71
Englishmen, 76--73
Holsteinians, 77--71
Hanoverians, The vicinity of Jena, Bonn, and Cologne, 77--72
Hessians, 79--72
Swabians, 79--73
Bavarians, 80--74
Thus the dolicocephalous form passes in Middle and Southern Germany into
the brachycephalous. The investigations made at the suggestion of
Virchow in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria, in regard to
blonde and brunette types, are of great interest. An examination of more
than nine million individuals showed the following result:
Germany, 31.80% blonde, 14.05% brunette, 54.15% mixed.
Austria, 19.79% blonde, 23.17% brunette, 57.04% mixed.
Switzerland, 11.10% blonde, 25.70% brunette, 61.40% mixed.
Thus the blonde type has by far a greater number of representatives in
Germany than in the southern part of Central Europe, though the latter
has German-speaking inhabitants. In Germany itself the blonde type
decreases and the brunette increases from north to south, while at the
same time the dolicocephalous gives place to the brachycephalous.
Southern Germany has 25% of brunettes, North Germany only 7%.
If we now, following the strict rules of methodology which Latham
insists on, bear in mind that the cradle of a race- or language-type
should, if there are no definite historical facts to the contrary,
especially be looked for where this type is most abundant and least
changed, then there is no doubt that the part of Aryan Europe which the
ancestors of the Teutons inhabited when they developed the Aryan tongue
into the Teutonic must have included the coast of the Baltic and the
North Sea. This theory is certainly not contradicted, but, on the other
hand, supported by the facts so far as we have any knowledge of them.
Roman history supplies evidence that the same parts of Europe in which
the Teutonic type predominates at the present time were Teutonic already
at the beginning of our era, and that then already the Scandinavian
peninsula was inhabited by a North Teutonic people, which, among their
kinsmen on the Continent, were celebrated for their wealth in ships and
warriors. Centuries must have passed ere the Teutonic colonisation of
the peninsula could have developed into so much strength--centuries
during which, judging from all indications, the transition from the
bronze to the iron age in Scandinavia must have taken place. The
painstaking investigations of Montelius, conducted on the principle of
methodology, have led him to the conclusion that Scandinavia and North
Germany formed during the bronze age one common domain of culture in
regard to weapons and implements. The manner in which the other domains
of culture group themselves in Europe leaves no other place for the
Teutonic race than Scandinavia and North Germany, and possibly
Austria-Hungary, which the Teutonic domain resembles most. Back of the
bronze age lies the stone age. The examinations, by v. Dueben, Gustaf
Retzius, and Virchow, of skeletons found in northern graves from the
stone age prove the existence at that time of a race in the North which,
so far as the characteristics of the skulls are concerned, cannot be
distinguished from the race now dwelling there. Here it is necessary to
take into consideration the results of probability reached by
comparative philology, showing that the European Aryans were still in
the stone age when they divided themselves into Celts, Teutons, etc.,
and occupied separate territories, and the fact that the Teutons, so far
back as conclusions may be drawn from historical knowledge have
occupied a more northern domain than their kinsmen. Thus all tends to
show that when the Scandinavian peninsula was first settled by
Aryans--doubtless coming from the South by way of Denmark--these Aryans
belonged to the same race, which, later in history, appear with a
Teutonic physiognomy and with Teutonic speech, and that their
immigration to and occupation of the southern parts of the peninsula
took place in the time of the Aryan stone age.
For the history of civilisation, and particularly for mythology, these
results are important. It is a problem to be solved by comparative
mythology what elements in the various groups of Aryan myths may be the
original common property of the race while the race was yet undivided.
The conclusions reached gain in trustworthiness the further the Aryan
tribes, whose myths are compared, are separated from each other
geographically. If, for instance, the Teutonic mythology on the one hand
and the Asiatic Aryan (Avesta and Rigveda) on the other are made the
subject of comparative study, and if groups of myths are found which are
identical not only in their general character and in many details, but
also in the grouping of the details and the epic connection of the
myths, then the probability that they belong to an age when the
ancestors of the Teutons and those of the Asiatic Aryans dwelt together
is greater, in the same proportion as the probability of an intimate and
detailed exchange of ideas after the separation grows less between these
tribes on account of the geographical distance. With all the certainty
which it is possible for research to arrive at in this field, we may
assume that these common groups of myths--at least the centres around
which they revolve--originated at a time when the Aryans still formed,
so to speak, a geographical and linguistic unity--in all probability at
a time which lies far back in a common Aryan stone age. The discovery of
groups of myths of this sort thus sheds light on beliefs and ideas that
existed in the minds of our ancestors in an age of which we have no
information save that which we get from the study of the finds. The
latter, when investigated by painstaking and penetrating archaeological
scholars, certainly give us highly instructive information in other
directions. In this manner it becomes possible to distinguish between
older and younger elements of Teutonic mythology, and to secure a basis
for studying its development through centuries which have left us no
literary monuments.
II.
A. MEDIAEVAL MIGRATION SAGAS.
THE LEARNED SAGA IN REGARD TO THE EMIGRATION FROM
TROY-ASGARD.
7.
THE SAGA IN HEIMSKRINGLA AND THE PROSE EDDA.
In the preceding pages we have given the reasons which make it appear
proper to assume that ancient Teutondom, within certain indefinable
limits, included the coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea, that the
Scandinavian countries constituted a part of this ancient Teutondom, and
that they have been peopled by Teutons since the days of the stone age.
The subject which I am now about to discuss requires an investigation in
reference to what the Teutons themselves believed, in regard to this
question, in the earliest times of which we have knowledge. Did they
look upon themselves as aborigines or as immigrants in Teutondom? For
the mythology, the answer to this question is of great weight. For
pragmatic history, on the other hand, the answer is of little
importance, for whatever they believed gives no reliable basis for
conclusions in regard to historical facts. If they regarded themselves
as aborigines, this does not hinder their having immigrated in
prehistoric times, though their traditions have ceased to speak of it.
If they regarded themselves as immigrants, then it does not follow that
the traditions, in regard to the immigration, contain any historical
kernel. Of the former we have an example in the case of the Brahmins and
the higher castes in India: their orthodoxy requires them to regard
themselves as aborigines of the country in which they live, although
there is evidence that they are immigrants. Of the latter the Swedes are
an example: the people here have been taught to believe that a greater
or less portion of the inhabitants of Sweden are descended from
immigrants who, led by Odin, are supposed to have come here about one
hundred years before the birth of Christ, and that this immigration,
whether it brought many or few people, was of the most decisive
influence on the culture of the country, so that Swedish history might
properly begin with the moment when Odin planted his feet on Swedish
soil.
The more accessible sources of the traditions in regard to Odin's
immigration to Scandinavia are found in the Icelandic works,
Heimskringla and the Prose Edda. Both sources are from the same time,
that is, the thirteenth century, and are separated by more than two
hundred years from the heathen age in Iceland.
We will first consider Heimskringla's story. A river, by name Tanakvisl,
or Vanakvisl, empties into the Black Sea. This river separates Asia from
Europe. East of Tanakvisl, that is to say, then in Asia, is a country
formerly called Asaland or Asaheim, and the chief citadel or town in
that country was called Asgard. It was a great city of sacrifices, and
there dwelt a chief who was known by the name Odin. Under him ruled
twelve men who were high-priests and judges. Odin was a great chieftain
and conqueror, and so victorious was he, that his men believed that
victory was wholly inseparable from him. If he laid his blessing hand on
anybody's head, success was sure to attend him. Even if he was absent,
if called upon in distress or danger, his very name seemed to give
comfort. He frequently went far away, and often remained absent
half-a-year at a time. His kingdom was then ruled by his brothers Vile
and Ve. Once he was absent so long that the Asas believed that he would
never return. Then his brothers married his wife Frigg. Finally he
returned, however, and took Frigg back again.
The Asas had a people as their neighbours called the Vans. Odin made war
on the Vans, but they defended themselves bravely. When both parties had
been victorious and suffered defeat, they grew weary of warring, made
peace, and exchanged hostages. The Vans sent their son Njord and his son
Frey, and also Kvaser, as hostages to the Asas; and the latter gave in
exchange Honer and Mimer. Odin gave Njord and Frey the dignity of
priests. Frey's sister, too, Freyja, was made a priestess. The Vans
treated the hostages they had received with similar consideration, and
created Honer a chief and judge. But they soon seemed to discover that
Honer was a stupid fellow. They considered themselves cheated in the
exchange, and, being angry on this account, they cut off the head, not
of Honer, but of his wise brother Mimer, and sent it to Odin. He
embalmed the head, sang magic songs over it, so that it could talk to
him and tell him many strange things.
Asaland, where Odin ruled is separated by a great mountain range from
Tyrkland, by which Heimskringla means Asia Minor, of which the
celebrated Troy was supposed to have been the capital. In Tyrkland, Odin
also had great possessions. But at that time the Romans invaded and
subjugated all lands, and many rulers fled on that account from their
kingdoms. And Odin, being wise and versed in the magic art, and knowing,
therefore, that his descendants were to people the northern part of the
world, he left his kingdom to his brothers Vile and Ve, and migrated
with many followers to Gardarike, Russia. Njord, Frey, and Freyja, and
the other priests who had ruled under him in Asgard, accompanied him,
and sons of his were also with him. From Gardarike he proceeded to
Saxland, conquered vast countries, and made his sons rulers over them.
From Saxland he went to Funen, and settled there. Seeland did not then
exist. Odin sent the maid Gefion north across the water to investigate
what country was situated there. At that time ruled in Svithiod a chief
by name Gylfe. He gave Gefion a ploughland,[3] and, by the help of four
giants changed into oxen, Gefion cut out with the plough, and dragged
into the sea near Funen that island which is now called Seeland. Where
the land was ploughed away there is now a lake called Logrin. Skjold,
Odin's son, got this land, and married Gefion. And when Gefion informed
Odin that Gylfe possessed a good land, Odin went thither, and Gylfe,
being unable to make resistance, though he too was a wise man skilled in
witchcraft and sorcery, a peaceful compact was made, according to which
Odin acquired a vast territory around Logrin; and in Sigtuna he
established a great temple, where sacrifices henceforth were offered
according to the custom of the Asas. To his priests he gave
dwellings--Noatun to Njord, Upsala to Frey, Himminbjorg to Heimdal,
Thrudvang to Thor, Breidablik to Balder, &c. Many new sports came to the
North with Odin, and he and the Asas taught them to the people. Among
other things, he taught them poetry and runes. Odin himself always
talked in measured rhymes. Besides, he was a most excellent sorcerer. He
could change shape, make his foes in a conflict blind and deaf; he was a
wizard, and could wake the dead. He owned the ship Skidbladner, which
could be folded as a napkin. He had two ravens, which he had taught to
speak, and they brought him tidings from all lands. He knew where all
treasures were hid in the earth, and could call them forth with the aid
of magic songs. Among the customs he introduced in the North were
cremation of the dead, the raising of mounds in memory of great men, the
erection of bauta-stones in commemoration of others; and he introduced
the three great sacrificial feasts--for a good year, for good crops, and
for victory. Odin died in Svithiod. When he perceived the approach of
death, he suffered himself to be marked with the point of a spear, and
declared that he was going to Gudheim to visit his friends and receive
all fallen in battle. This the Swedes believed. They have since
worshipped him in the belief that he had an eternal life in the ancient
Asgard, and they thought he revealed himself to them before great
battles took place. On Svea's throne he was followed by Njord, the
progenitor of the race of Ynglings. Thus Heimskringla.
We now pass to the Younger Edda,[4] which in its Foreword gives us in
the style of that time a general survey of history and religion.
First, it gives from the Bible the story of creation and the deluge.
Then a long story is told of the building of the tower of Babel. The
descendants of Noah's son, Ham, warred against and conquered the sons of
Sem, and tried in their arrogance to build a tower which should aspire
to heaven itself. The chief manager in this enterprise was Zoroaster,
and seventy-two master-masons and joiners served under him. But God
confounded the tongues of these arrogant people so that each one of the
seventy-two masters with those under him got their own language, which
the others could not understand, and then each went his own way, and in
this manner arose the seventy-two different languages in the world.
Before that time only one language was spoken, and that was Hebrew.
Where they tried to build the tower a city was founded and called
Babylon. There Zoroaster became a king and ruled over many Assyrian
nations, among which he introduced idolatry, and which worshiped him as
Baal. The tribes that departed with his master-workmen also fell into
idolatry, excepting the one tribe which kept the Hebrew language. It
preserved also the original and pure faith. Thus, while Babylon became
one of the chief altars of heathen worship, the island Crete became
another. There was born a man, by name Saturnus, who became for the
Cretans and Macedonians what Zoroaster was for the Assyrians. Saturnus'
knowledge and skill in magic, and his art of producing gold from red-hot
iron, secured him the power of a prince on Crete; and as he, moreover,
had control over all invisible forces, the Cretans and Macedonians
believed that he was a god, and he encouraged them in this faith. He had
three sons--Jupiter, Neptunus, and Plutus. Of these, Jupiter resembled
his father in skill and magic, and he was a great warrior who conquered
many peoples. When Saturnus divided his kingdom among his sons, a feud
arose. Plutus got as his share hell, and as this was the least desirable
part he also received the dog named Cerberus. Jupiter, who received
heaven, was not satisfied with this, but wanted the earth too. He made
war against his father, who had to seek refuge in Italy, where he, out
of fear of Jupiter, changed his name and called himself Njord, and where
he became a useful king, teaching the inhabitants, who lived on nuts and
roots, to plough and plant vineyards.
Jupiter had many sons. From one of them, Dardanus, descended in the
fifth generation Priamus of Troy. Priamus' son was Hektor, who in
stature and strength was the foremost man in the world. From the Trojans
the Romans are descended; and when Rome had grown to be a great power it
adopted many laws and customs which had prevailed among the Trojans
before them. Troy was situated in Tyrkland, near the centre of the
earth. Under Priamus, the chief ruler, there were twelve tributary
kings, and they spoke twelve languages. These twelve tributary kings
were exceedingly wise men; they received the honour of gods, and from
them all European chiefs are descended. One of these twelve was called
Munon or Mennon. He was married to a daughter of Priamus, and had with
her the son Tror, "whom we call Thor." He was a very handsome man, his
hair shone fairer than gold, and at the age of twelve he was full-grown,
and so strong that he could lift twelve bear-skins at the same time. He
slew his foster-father and foster-mother, took possession of his
foster-father's kingdom Thracia, "which we call Thrudheim," and
thenceforward he roamed about the world, conquering berserks, giants,
the greatest dragon, and other prodigies. In the North he met a
prophetess by name Sibil (Sibylla), "whom we call Sif," and her he
married. In the twentieth generation from this Thor, Vodin descended,
"whom we call Odin," a very wise and well-informed man, who married
Frigida, "whom we call Frigg."
At that time the Roman general Pompey was making wars in the East, and
also threatened the empire of Odin. Meanwhile Odin and his wife had
learned through prophetic inspiration that a glorious future awaited
them in the northern part of the world. He therefore emigrated from
Tyrkland, and took with him many people, old and young, men and women,
and costly treasures. Wherever they came they appeared to the
inhabitants more like gods than men. And they did not stop before they
came as far north as Saxland. There Odin remained a long time. One of
his sons, Veggdegg, he appointed king of Saxland. Another son, Beldegg,
"whom we call Balder," he made king in Westphalia. A third son, Sigge,
became king in Frankland. Then Odin proceeded farther to the north and
came to Reidgothaland, which is now called Jutland, and there took
possession of as much as he wanted. There he appointed his son Skjold as
king; then he came to Svithiod.
Here ruled king Gylfe. When he heard of the expedition of Odin and his
Asiatics he went to meet them, and offered Odin as much land and as much
power in his kingdom as he might desire. One reason why people
everywhere gave Odin so hearty a welcome and offered him land and power
was that wherever Odin and his men tarried on their journey the people
got good harvests and abundant crops, and therefore they believed that
Odin and his men controlled the weather and the growing grain. Odin went
with Gylfe up to the lake "Logrin" and saw that the land was good; and
there he chose as his citadel the place which is called Sigtuna,
founding there the same institutions as had existed in Troy, and to
which the Turks were accustomed. Then he organised a council of twelve
men, who were to make laws and settle disputes. From Svithiod Odin went
to Norway, and there made his son Saeming king. But the ruling of
Svithiod he had left to his son Yngve, from whom the race of Ynglings
are descended. The Asas and their sons married the women of the land of
which they had taken possession, and their descendants, who preserved
the language spoken in Troy, multiplied so fast that the Trojan language
displaced the old tongue and became the speech of Svithiod, Norway,
Denmark, and Saxland, and thereafter also of England.
The Prose Edda's first part, Gylfaginning, consists of a collection of
mythological tales told to the reader in the form of a conversation
between the above-named king of Sweden, Gylfe, and the Asas. Before the
Asas had started on their journey to the North, it is here said Gylfe
had learned that they were a wise and knowing people who had success in
all their undertakings. And believing that this was a result either of
the nature of these people, or of their peculiar kind of worship, he
resolved to investigate the matter secretly, and therefore betook
himself in the guise of an old man to Asgard. But the foreknowing Asas
knew in advance that he was coming, and resolved to receive him with all
sorts of sorcery, which might give him a high opinion of them. He
finally came to a citadel, the roof of which was thatched with golden
shields, and the hall of which was so large that he scarcely could see
the whole of it. At the entrance stood a man playing with sharp tools,
which he threw up in the air and caught again with his hands, and seven
axes were in the air at the same time. This man asked the traveller his
name. The latter answered that he was named Ganglere, that he had made a
long journey over rough roads, and asked for lodgings for the night. He
also asked whose the citadel was. The juggler answered that it belonged
to their king, and conducted Gylfe into the hall, where many people
were assembled. Some sat drinking, others amused themselves at games,
and still others were practising with weapons. There were three
high-seats in the hall, one above the other, and in each high-seat sat a
man. In the lowest sat the king; and the juggler informed Gylfe that the
king's name was Har; that the one who sat next above him was named
Jafnhar; and that the one who sat on the highest throne was named Thride
(_thridi_). Har asked the stranger what his errand was, and invited him
to eat and drink. Gylfe answered that he first wished to know whether
there was any wise man in the hall. Har replied that the stranger should
not leave the hall whole unless he was victorious in a contest in
wisdom. Gylfe now begins his questions, which all concern the worship of
the Asas, and the three men in the high-seats give him answers. Already
in the first answer it appears that the Asgard to which Gylfe thinks he
has come is, in the opinion of the author, a younger Asgard, and
presumably the same as the author of Heimskringla places beyond the
river Tanakvisl, but there had existed an older Asgard identical with
Troy in Tyrkland, where, according to Heimskringla, Odin had extensive
possessions at the time when the Romans began their invasions in the
East. When Gylfe with his questions had learned the most important facts
in regard to the religion of Asgard, and had at length been instructed
concerning the destruction and regeneration of the world, he perceived a
mighty rumbling and quaking, and when he looked about him the citadel
and hall had disappeared, and he stood beneath the open sky. He returned
to Svithiod and related all that he had seen and heard among the Asas;
but when he had gone they counselled together, and they agreed to call
themselves by those names which they used in relating their stories to
Gylfe. These sagas, remarks Gylfaginning, were in reality none but
historical events transformed into traditions about divinities. They
described events which had occurred in the older Asgard--that is to say,
Troy. The basis of the stories told to Gylfe about Thor were the
achievements of Hektor in Troy, and the Loke of whom Gylfe had heard
was, in fact, none other than Ulixes (Ulysses), who was the foe of the
Trojans, and consequently was represented as the foe of the gods.
Gylfaginning is followed by another part of the Prose Edda called
_Bragaroedur_ (Brage's Talk), which is presented in a similar form. On
Lessoe, so it is said, dwelt formerly a man by name _AEgir_. He, like
Gylfe, had heard reports concerning the wisdom of the Asas, and resolved
to visit them. He, like Gylfe, comes to a place where the Asas receive
him with all sorts of magic arts, and conduct him into a hall which is
lighted up in the evening with shining swords. There he is invited to
take his seat by the side of Brage, and there were twelve high-seats in
which sat men who were called Thor, Njord, Frey, &c., and women who were
called Frigg, Freyja, Nanna, &c. The hall was splendidly decorated with
shields. The mead passed round was exquisite, and the talkative Brage
instructed the guest in the traditions concerning the Asas' art of
poetry. A postscript to the treatise warns young skalds not to place
confidence in the stories told to Gylfe and _AEgir_. The author of the
postscript says they have value only as a key to the many metaphors
which occur in the poems of the great skalds, but upon the whole they
are deceptions invented by the Asas or Asiamen to make people believe
that they were gods. Still, the author thinks these falsifications have
an historical kernel. They are, he thinks, based on what happened in the
ancient Asgard, that is, Troy. Thus, for instance, Ragnarok is
originally nothing else than the siege of Troy; Thor is, as stated,
Hektor; the Midgard-serpent is one of the heroes slain by Hektor; the
Fenris-wolf is Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who slew Priam (Odin); and
Vidar, who survives Ragnarok, is AEneas.
[Footnote 3: As much land as can be ploughed in a day.]
[Footnote 4: A translation of the Younger or Prose Edda was edited by R.
B. Anderson and published by S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago, in 1881.]
8.
THE TROY SAGA IN HEIMSKRINGLA AND THE PROSE EDDA
(_continued_).
The sources of the traditions concerning the Asiatic immigration to the
North belong to the Icelandic literature, and to it alone. Saxo's
_Historia Danica_, the first books of which were written toward the
close of the twelfth century, presents on this topic its own peculiar
view, which will be discussed later. The Icelandic accounts disagree
only in unimportant details; the fundamental view is the same, and they
have flown from the same fountain vein. Their contents may be summed up
thus:
Among the tribes who after the Babylonian confusion of tongues emigrated
to various countries, there was a body of people who settled and
introduced their language in Asia Minor, which in the sagas is called
Tyrkland; in Greece, which in the sagas is called Macedonia; and in
Crete. In Tyrkland they founded the great city which was called Troy.
This city was attacked by the Greeks during the reign of the Trojan king
Priam. Priam descended from Jupiter and the latter's father Saturnus,
and accordingly belonged to a race which the idolaters looked upon as
divine. Troy was a very large city; twelve languages were spoken there,
and Priam had twelve tributary kings under him. But however powerful the
Trojans were, and however bravely they defended themselves under the
leadership of the son of Priam's daughter, that valiant hero Thor, still
they were defeated. Troy was captured and burned by the Greeks, and
Priam himself was slain. Of the surviving Trojans two parties emigrated
in different directions. They seem in advance to have been well informed
in regard to the quality of foreign lands; for Thor, the son of Priam's
daughter, had made extensive expeditions in which he had fought giants
and monsters. On his journeys he had even visited the North, and there
he had met Sibil, the celebrated prophetess, and married her. One of the
parties of Trojan emigrants embarked under the leadership of AEneas for
Italy, and founded Rome. The other party, accompanied by Thor's son,
Loride, went to Asialand, which is separated from Tyrkland by a mountain
ridge, and from Europe by the river Tanais or Tanakvisl. There they
founded a new city called Asgard, and there preserved the old customs
and usages brought from Troy. Accordingly, there was organised in
Asgard, as in Troy, a council of twelve men, who were high priests and
judges. Many centuries passed without any political contact between the
new Trojan settlements in Rome and Asgard, though both well remembered
their Trojan origin, and the Romans formed many of their institutions
after the model of the old fatherland. Meanwhile, Rome had grown to be
one of the mightiest empires in the world, and began at length to send
armies into Tyrkland. At that time there ruled in Asgard an exceedingly
wise, prophetic king, Odin, who was skilled in the magic arts, and who
was descended in the twentieth generation from the above-mentioned Thor.
Odin had waged many successful wars. The severest of these wars was the
one with a neighbouring people, the Vans; but this had been ended with
compromise and peace. In Tyrkland, the old mother country, Odin had
great possessions, which fell into the hands of the Romans. This
circumstance strengthened him in his resolution to emigrate to the north
of Europe. The prophetic vision with which he was endowed had told him
that his descendants would long flourish there. So he set out with his
many sons, and was accompanied by the twelve priests and by many people,
but not by all the inhabitants of the Asia country and of Asgard. A part
of the people remained at home; and among them Odin's brothers Vile and
Ve. The expedition proceeded through Gardarike to Saxland; then across
the Danish islands to Svithiod and Norway. Everywhere this great
multitude of migrators was well received by the inhabitants. Odin's
superior wisdom and his marvellous skill in sorcery, together with the
fact that his progress was everywhere attended by abundant harvests,
caused the peoples to look upon him as a god, and to place their thrones
at his disposal. He accordingly appointed his sons as kings in Saxland,
Denmark, Svithiod, and Norway. Gylfe, the king of Svithiod, submitted to
his superiority and gave him a splendid country around Lake Maelar to
rule over. There Odin built Sigtuna, the institutions of which were an
imitation of those in Asgard and Troy. Poetry and many other arts came
with Odin to the Teutonic lands, and so, too, the Trojan tongue. Like
his ancestors, Saturnus and Jupiter, he was able to secure divine
worship, which was extended even to his twelve priests. The religious
traditions which he scattered among the people, and which were believed
until the introduction of Christianity, were misrepresentations spun
around the memories of Troy's historical fate and its destruction, and
around the events of Asgard.
9.
SAXO'S RELATION OF THE STORY OF TROY.
Such is, in the main, the story which was current in Iceland in the
thirteenth century, and which found its way to Scandinavia through the
Prose Edda and Heimskringla, concerning the immigration of Odin and the
Asas. Somewhat older than these works is _Historia Danica_, by the
Danish chronicler Saxo. Sturlason, the author of Heimskringla, was a lad
of eight years when Saxo began to write his history, and he (Sturlason)
had certainly not begun to write history when Saxo had completed the
first nine books of his work, which are based on the still-existing
songs and traditions found in Denmark, and of heathen origin. Saxo
writes as if he were unacquainted with Icelandic theories concerning an
Asiatic immigration to the North, and he has not a word to say about
Odin's reigning as king or chief anywhere in Scandinavia. This is the
more remarkable, since he holds the same view as the Icelanders and the
chroniclers of the Middle Ages in general in regard to the belief that
the heathen myths were records of historical events, and that the
heathen gods were historical persons, men changed into divinities; and
our astonishment increases when we consider that he, in the heathen
songs and traditions on which he based the first part of his work,
frequently finds Odin's name, and consequently could not avoid
presenting him in Danish history as an important character. In Saxo, as
in the Icelandic works, Odin is a human being, and at the same time a
sorcerer of the greatest power. Saxo and the Icelanders also agree that
Odin came from the East. The only difference is that while the Icelandic
hypothesis makes him rule in Asgard, Saxo locates his residence in
Byzantium, on the Bosphorus; but this is not far from the ancient Troy,
where the Prose Edda locates his ancestors. From Byzantium, according to
Saxo, the fame of his magic arts and of the miracles he performed
reached even to the north of Europe. On account of these miracles he was
worshipped as a god by the peoples, and to pay him honour the kings of
the North once sent to Byzantium a golden image, to which Odin by magic
arts imparted the power of speech. It is the myth about Mimer's head
which Saxo here relates. But the kings of the North knew him not only by
report; they were also personally acquainted with him. He visited
Upsala, a place which "pleased him much." Saxo, like the Heimskringla,
relates that Odin was absent from his capital for a long time; and when
we examine his statements on this point, we find that Saxo is here
telling in his way the myth concerning the war which the Vans carried on
successfully against the Asas, and concerning Odin's expulsion from the
mythic Asgard, situated in heaven (_Hist. Dan._, pp. 42-44; _vid._ No.
36). Saxo also tells that Odin's son, Balder, was chosen king by the
Danes "on account of his personal merits and his respect-commanding
qualities." But Odin himself has never, according to Saxo, had land or
authority in the North, though he was there worshipped as a god, and, as
already stated, Saxo is entirely silent in regard to any immigration of
an Asiatic people to Scandinavia under the leadership of Odin.
A comparison between him and the Icelanders will show at once that,
although both parties are Euhemerists, and make Odin a man changed into
a god, Saxo confines himself more faithfully to the popular myths, and
seeks as far as possible to turn them into history; while the
Icelanders, on the other hand, begin with the learned theory in regard
to the original kinship of the northern races with the Trojans and
Romans, and around this theory as a nucleus they weave about the same
myths told as history as Saxo tells.
10.
THE OLDER PERIODS OF THE TROY SAGA.
How did the belief that Troy was the original home of the Teutons arise?
Does it rest on native traditions? Has it been inspired by sagas and
traditions current among the Teutons themselves, and containing as
kernel "a faint reminiscence of an immigration from Asia," or is it a
thought entirely foreign to the heathen Teutonic world, introduced in
Christian times by Latin scholars? These questions shall now be
considered.
Already in the seventh century--that is to say, more than five hundred
years before Heimskringla and the Prose Edda were written--a Teutonic
people were told by a chronicler that they were of the same blood as the
Romans, that they had like the Romans emigrated from Troy, and that they
had the same share as the Romans in the glorious deeds of the Trojan
heroes. This people were the Franks. Their oldest chronicler, Gregorius,
bishop of Tours, who, about one hundred years before that time--that is
to say, in the sixth century--wrote their history in ten books, does not
say a word about it. He, too, desires to give an account of the original
home of the Franks (_Hist. Franc._, ii. 9), and locates it quite a
distance from the regions around the lower Rhine, where they first
appear in the light of history; but still not farther away than to
Pannonia. Of the coming of the Franks from Troy neither Gregorius knows
anything nor the older authors, Sulpicius Alexander and others, whose
works he studied to find information in regard to the early history of
the Franks. But in the middle of the following century, about 650, an
unknown author, who for reasons unknown, is called Fredegar, wrote a
chronicle, which is in part a reproduction of Gregorius' historical
work, but also contains various other things in regard to the early
history of the Franks, and among these the statement that they emigrated
from Troy. He even gives us the sources from which he got this
information. His sources are, according to his own statement, not
Frankish, not popular songs or traditions, but two Latin authors--the
Church father Hieronymus and the poet Virgil. If we, then, go to these
sources in order to compare Fredegar's statement with his authority, we
find that Hieronymus once names the Franks in passing, but never refers
to their origin from Troy, and that Virgil does not even mention Franks.
Nevertheless, the reference to Virgil is the key to the riddle, as we
shall show below. What Fredegar tells about the emigration of the Franks
is this: A Frankish king, by the name Priam, ruled in Troy at the time
when this city was conquered by the cunning of Ulysses. Then the Franks
emigrated, and were afterwards ruled by a king named Friga. Under his
reign a dispute arose between them, and they divided themselves into two
parties, one of which settled in Macedonia, while the other, called
after Friga's name Frigians (Phrygians), migrated through Asia and
settled there. There they were again divided, and one part of them
migrated under king Francio into Europe, travelled across this
continent, and settled, with their women and children, near the Rhine,
where they began building a city which they called Troy, and intended
to organise in the manner of the old Troy, but the city was not
completed. The other group chose a king by name Turchot, and were called
after him Turks. But those who settled on the Rhine called themselves
Franks after their king Francio, and later chose a king named Theudemer,
who was descended from Priam, Friga, and Francio. Thus Fredegar's
chronicle.
About seventy years later another Frankish chronicle saw the light of
day--the _Gesta regum Francorum_. In it we learn more of the emigration
of the Franks from Troy. _Gesta regum Francorum_ (i) tells the following
story: In Asia lies the city of the Trojans called Ilium, where king
AEneas formerly ruled. The Trojans were a strong and brave people, who
waged war against all their neighbours. But then the kings of the Greeks
united and brought a large army against AEneas, king of the Trojans.
There were great battles and much bloodshed, and the greater part of the
Trojans fell. AEneas fled with those surviving into the city of Ilium,
which the Greeks besieged and conquered after ten years. The Trojans who
escaped divided themselves into two parties. The one under king AEneas
went to Italy, where he hoped to receive auxiliary troops. Other
distinguished Trojans became the leaders of the other party, which
numbered 12,000 men. They embarked in ships and came to the banks of the
river Tanais. They sailed farther and came within the borders of
Pannonia, near the Moeotian marshes (_navigantes pervenerunt intra
terminos Pannoniarum juxta Moeotidas paludes_), where they founded a
city, which they called Sicambria, and here they remained many years
and became a mighty people. Then came a time when the Roman emperor
Valentinianus got into war with that wicked people called Alamanni (also
Alani). He led a great army against them. The Alamanni were defeated,
and fled to the Moeotian marshes. Then said the emperor, "If anyone
dares to enter those marshes and drive away this wicked people, I shall
for ten years make him free from all burdens." When the Trojans heard
this they went, accompanied by a Roman army, into the marshes, attacked
the Alamanni, and hewed them down with their swords. Then the Trojans
received from the emperor Valentinianus the name _Franks_, which, the
chronicle adds, in the Attic tongue means the _savage_ (_feri_), "for
the Trojans had a defiant and indomitable character."
For ten years afterwards the Trojans or Franks lived undisturbed by
Roman tax-collectors; but after that the Roman emperor demanded that
they should pay tribute. This they refused, and slew the tax-collectors
sent to them. Then the emperor collected a large army under the command
of Aristarcus, and strengthened it with auxiliary forces from many
lands, and attacked the Franks, who were defeated by the superior force,
lost their leader Priam, and had to take flight. They now proceeded
under their leaders Markomir, Priam's son, and Sunno, son of Antenor,
away from Sicambria through Germany to the Rhine, and located there.
Thus this chronicle.
About fifty years after its appearance--that is, in the time of
Charlemagne, and, to be more accurate, about the year 787--the
well-known Longobardian historian Paulus Diaconus wrote a history of the
bishops of Metz. Among these bishops was the Frank Arnulf, from whom
Charlemagne was descended in the fifth generation. Arnulf had two sons,
one of whom was named Ansgisel, in a contracted form Ansgis. When Paulus
speaks of this he remarks that it is thought that the name Ansgis comes
from the father of AEneas, Anchises, who went from Troy to Italy; and he
adds that according to evidence of older date the Franks were believed
to be descendants of the Trojans. These evidences of older date we have
considered above--Fredegar's _Chronicle_ and _Gesta regum Francorum_.
Meanwhile this shows that the belief that the Franks were of Trojan
descent kept spreading with the lapse of time. It hardly needs to be
added that there is no good foundation for the derivation of Ansgisel or
Ansgis from Anchises. Ansgisel is a genuine Teutonic name. (See No. 123
concerning Ansgisel, the emigration chief of the Teutonic myth.)
We now pass to the second half of the tenth century, and there we find
the Saxon chronicler Widukind. When he is to tell the story of the
origin of the Saxon people, he presents two conflicting accounts. The
one is from a Saxon source, from old native traditions, which we shall
discuss later; the other is from a scholastic source, and claims that
the Saxons are of Macedonian descent. According to this latter account
they were a remnant of the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great,
which, as Widukind had learned, after Alexander's early death, had
spread over the whole earth. The Macedonians were at that time regarded
as Hellenicised Trojans. In this connection I call the reader's
attention to Fredegar's _Chronicle_ referred to above, which tells that
the Trojans, in the time of king Friga, disagreed among themselves, and
that a part of them emigrated and settled in Macedonia. In this manner
the Saxons, like the Franks, could claim a Trojan descent; and as
England to a great extent was peopled by Saxon conquerors, the same
honour was of course claimed by her people. In evidence of this, and to
show that it was believed in England during the centuries immediately
following Widukind's time, that the Saxons and Angles were of Trojan
blood, I will simply refer here to a pseudo-Sibylline manuscript found
in Oxford and written in very poor Latin. It was examined by the French
scholar Alexandre (_Excursus ad Sibyllina_, p. 298), and in it Britain
is said to be an island inhabited by the survivors of the Trojans
(_insulam reliquiis Trojanorum inhabitatam_). In another British
pseudo-Sibylline document it is stated that the Sibylla was a daughter
of king Priam of Troy; and an effort has been made to add weight and
dignity to this document by incorporating it with the works of the well
known Church historian Beda, and thus date it at the beginning of the
eighth century, but the manuscript itself is a compilation from the time
of Frederick Barbarossa (_Excurs. ad Sib._, p. 289). Other
pseudo-Sibylline documents in Latin give accounts of a Sibylla who lived
and prophesied in Troy. I make special mention of this fact, for the
reason that in the Foreword of the Prose Edda it is similarly stated
that Thor, the son of Priam's daughter, was married to Sibil (Sibylla).
Thus when Franks and Saxons had been made into Trojans--the former into
full-blooded Trojans and the latter into Hellenicised Trojans--it could
not take long before their northern kinsmen received the same descent as
a heritage. In the very nature of things the beginning must be made by
those Northmen who became the conquerors and settlers of Normandy in the
midst of "Trojan" Franks. About a hundred years after their settlement
there they produced a chronicler, Dudo, deacon of St. Quentin. I have
already shown that the Macedonians were regarded as Hellenicised
Trojans. Together with the Hellenicising they had obtained the name
Danai, a term applied to all Greeks. In his Norman Chronicle, which goes
down to the year 996, Dudo relates (_De moribus et gestis_, &c., lib.
i.) that the Norman men regarded themselves as Danai, for Danes (the
Scandinavians in general) and Dania was regarded as the same race name.
Together with the Normans the Scandinavians also, from whom they were
descended accordingly had to be made into Trojans. And thus the matter
was understood by Dudo's readers; and when Robert Wace wrote his rhymed
chronicle, _Roman de Rou_, about the northern conquerors of Normandy,
and wanted to give an account of their origin, he could say, on the
basis of a common tradition:
"When the walls of Troy in ashes were laid,
And the Greeks exceedingly glad were made,
Then fled from flames on the Trojan strand
The race that settled old Denmark's land;
And in honour of the old Trojan reigns,
The people called themselves the Danes."
I have now traced the scholastic tradition about the descent of the
Teutonic races from Troy all the way from the chronicle where we first
find this tradition recorded, down to the time when Are, Iceland's first
historian, lived, and when the Icelander, Saemund, is said to have
studied in Paris, the same century in which Sturlason, Heimskringla's
author, developed into manhood. Saxo rejected the theory current among
the scholars of his time, that the northern races were Danai-Trojans. He
knew that Dudo in St. Quentin was the authority upon which this belief
was chiefly based, and he gives his Danes an entirely different origin,
_quanquam Dudo, rerum Aquitanicarum scriptor, Danos a Danais ortos
nuncupatosque recenseat_. The Icelanders on the other hand, accepted and
continued to develop the belief, resting on the authority of five
hundred years, concerning Troy as the starting-point for the Teutonic
race; and in Iceland the theory is worked out and systematised as we
have already seen, and is made to fit in a frame of the history of the
world. The accounts given in Heimskringla and the Prose Edda in regard
to the emigration from Asgard form the natural denouement of an era
which had existed for centuries, and in which the events of antiquity
were able to group themselves around a common centre. All peoples and
families of chiefs were located around the Mediterranean Sea, and every
event and every hero was connected in some way or other with Troy.
In fact, a great part of the lands subject to the Roman sceptre were in
ancient literature in some way connected with the Trojan war and its
consequences: Macedonia and Epirus through the Trojan emigrant Helenus;
Illyria and Venetia through the Trojan emigrant Antenor; Rhetia and
Vindelicia through the Amazons, allies of the Trojans, from whom the
inhabitants of these provinces were said to be descended (_Servius ad
Virg._, i. 248); Etruria through Dardanus, who was said to have
emigrated from there to Troy; Latium and Campania through the AEneids;
Sicily, the very home of the AEnean traditions, through the relation
between the royal families of Troy and Sicily; Sardinia (see Sallust);
Gaul (see Lucanus and Ammianus Marcellinus); Carthage through the visit
of AEneas to Dido; and of course all of Asia Minor. This was not all.
According to the lost Argive History by Anaxikrates, Scamandrius, son of
Hektor and Andromache, came with emigrants to Scythia and settled on the
banks of the Tanais; and scarcely had Germany become known to the
Romans, before it, too, became drawn into the cycle of Trojan stories,
at least so far as to make this country visited by Ulysses on his many
journeys and adventures (Tac., _Germ._). Every educated Greek and Roman
person's fancy was filled from his earliest school-days with Troy, and
traces of Dardanians and Danaians were found everywhere, just as the
English in our time think they have found traces of the ten lost tribes
of Israel both in the old and in the new world.
In the same degree as Christianity, Church learning, and Latin
manuscripts were spread among the Teutonic tribes, there were
disseminated among them knowledge of and an interest in the great Trojan
stories. The native stories telling of Teutonic gods and heroes
received terrible shocks from Christianity, but were rescued in another
form on the lips of the people, and continued in their new guise to
command their attention and devotion. In the class of Latin scholars
which developed among the Christianised Teutons, the new stories learned
from Latin literature, telling of Ilium, of the conflicts between
Trojans and Greeks, of migrations, of the founding of colonies on
foreign shores and the creating of new empires, were the things which
especially stimulated their curiosity and captivated their fancy. The
Latin literature which was to a greater or less extent accessible to the
Teutonic priests, or to priests labouring among the Teutons, furnished
abundant materials in regard to Troy both in classical and
pseudo-classical authors. We need only call attention to Virgil and his
commentator Servius, which became a mine of learning for the whole
middle age, and among pseudo-classical works to Dares Phrygius'
_Historia de Excidio Trojae_ (which was believed to have been written by
a Trojan and translated by Cornelius Nepos!), to Dictys Cretensis'
_Ephemeris belli Trojani_ (the original of which was said to have been
Phoenician, and found in Dictys' alleged grave after an earthquake in
the time of Nero!), and to "Pindari Thebani," _Epitome Iliados Homeri_.
Before the story of the Trojan descent of the Franks had been created,
the Teuton Jordanes, active as a writer in the middle of the sixth
century, had already found a place for his Gothic fellow-countrymen in
the events of the great Trojan epic. Not that he made the Goths the
descendants either of the Greeks or Trojans. On the contrary, he
maintained the Goths' own traditions in regard to their descent and
their original home, a matter which I shall discuss later. But according
to Orosius, who is Jordanes' authority, the Goths were the same as the
_Getae_, and when the identity of these was accepted, it was easy for
Jordanes to connect the history of the Goths with the Homeric stories. A
Gothic chief marries Priam's sister and fights with Achilles and Ulysses
(Jord., c. 9), and Ilium, having scarcely recovered from the war with
Agamemnon, is destroyed a second time by Goths (c. 20).
11.
THE ORIGIN OF THE STORY IN REGARD TO THE TROJAN
DESCENT OF THE FRANKS.
We must now return to the Frankish chronicles, to Fredegar's and _Gesta
regum Francorum_, where the theory of the descent from Troy of a
Teutonic tribe is presented for the first time, and thus renews the
agitation handed down from antiquity, which attempted to make all
ancient history a system of events radiating from Troy as their centre.
I believe I am able to point out the sources of all the statements made
in these chronicles in reference to this subject, and also to find the
very kernel out of which the illusion regarding the Trojan birth of the
Franks grew.
As above stated, Fredegar admits that Virgil is the earliest authority
for the claim that the Franks are descended from Troy. Fredegar's
predecessor, Gregorius of Tours, was ignorant of it, and, as already
shown, the word Franks does not occur anywhere in Virgil. The discovery
that he nevertheless gave information about the Franks and their origin
must therefore have been made or known in the time intervening between
Gregorius' chronicle and Fredegar's. Which, then, can be the passage in
Virgil's poems in which the discoverer succeeded in finding the proof
that the Franks were Trojans? A careful examination of all the
circumstances connected with the subject leads to the conclusion that
the passage is in _AEneis_, lib. i., 242ff.:
"Antenor potuit, mediis elapsus Achivis,
Illyricos penetrare sinus atque intima tutus
Regna Liburnorum, et fontem superare Timavi:
Unde per ora novem vasto cum murmere montis
It mare proruptum, et pelago premit arva sonanti.
Hic tamen ille urbem Patavi sedesque locavit
Teucrorum."
"Antenor having escaped from amidst the Greeks, could with safety
penetrate the Illyrian Gulf and the inmost realms of Liburnia, and
overpass the springs of Timavus, whence, through nine months, with loud
echoing from the mountain, it bursts away, a sea impetuous, and sweeps
the fields with a roaring deluge. Yet there he built the city of Padua
and established a Trojan settlement."
The nearest proof at hand, that this is really the passage which was
interpreted as referring to the ancient history of the Franks, is based
on the following circumstances:
Gregorius of Tours had found in the history of Sulpicius Alexander
accounts of violent conflicts, on the west bank of the Rhine, between
the Romans and Franks, the latter led by the chiefs Markomir and Sunno
(Greg., _Hist._, ii. 9).
From Gregorius, _Gesta regum Francorum_ has taken both these names.
According to _Gesta_, the Franks, under the command of Markomir and
Sunno, emigrate from Pannonia, near the Moeotian marshes, and settle on
the Rhine. The supposition that they had lived in Pannonia before their
coming to the Rhine, the author of _Gesta_ had learned from Gregorius.
In _Gesta_, Markomir is made a son of the Trojan Priam, and Sunno _a son
of the Trojan Antenor_.
From this point of view, Virgil's account of Antenor's and his Trojans'
journey to Europe from fallen Troy refers to the emigration of the
father of the Frankish chief Sunno at the head of a tribe of Franks. And
as _Gesta's_ predecessor, the so-called Fredegar, appeals to Virgil as
his authority for this Frankish emigration, and as the wanderings of
Antenor are nowhere else mentioned by the Roman poet, there can be no
doubt that the lines above quoted were the very ones which were regarded
as the Virgilian evidence in regard to a Frankish emigration from Troy.
But how did it come to be regarded as an evidence?
Virgil says that Antenor, when he had escaped the Achivians, succeeded
in penetrating _Illyricos sinus_, the very heart of Illyria. The name
Illyricum served to designate all the regions inhabited by kindred
tribes extending from the Alps to the mouth of the Danube and from the
Danube to the Adriatic Sea and Haemus (cp. _Marquardt Roem.
Staatsverwalt_, 295). To Illyricum belonged the Roman provinces
Dalmatia, Pannonia, and Moesia, and the Pannonians were an Illyrian
tribe. In Pannonia Gregorius of Tours had located the Franks in early
times. Thus Antenor, with his Trojans, on their westward journey,
traverses the same regions from which, according to Gregorius, the
Franks had set out for the Rhine.
Virgil also says that Antenor extended his journeys to the Liburnian
kingdoms (_regna Liburnorum_). From Servius' commentary on this passage,
the middle age knew that the Liburnian kingdoms were Rhetia and
Vindelicia (_Rhetia Vindelici ipsi sunt Liburni_). Rhetia and Vindelicia
separate Pannonia from the Rhine. Antenor, accordingly, takes the same
route toward the West as the Franks must have taken if they came from
Pannonia to the Rhine.
Virgil then brings Antenor to a river, which, it is true, is called
Timavus, but which is described as a mighty stream, coming thundering
out of a mountainous region, where it has its source, carrying with it a
mass of water which the poet compares with a sea, forming before it
reaches the sea a delta, the plains of which are deluged by the billows,
and finally emptying itself by many outlets into the ocean. Virgil says
_nine_; but Servius interprets this as meaning _many_: "_finitus est
numerus pro infinito_."
We must pardon the Frankish scribes for taking this river to be the
Rhine; for if a water-course is to be looked for in Europe west of the
land of the Liburnians, which answers to the Virgilian description, then
this must be the Rhine, on whose banks the ancestors of the Franks for
the first time appear in history.
Again, Virgil tells us that Antenor settled near this river and founded
a colony--Patavium--on the low plains of the delta. The Salian Franks
acquired possession of the low and flat regions around the outlets of
the Rhine (_Insula Batavorum_) about the year 287, and also of the land
to the south as far as to the Scheldt; and after protracted wars the
Romans had to leave them in control of this region. By the very
occupation of this low country, its conquerors might properly be called
Batavian Franks. It is only necessary to call attention to the
similarity of the words _Patavi_ and _Batavi_, in order to show at the
same time that the conclusion could scarcely be avoided that Virgil had
reference to the immigration of the Franks when he spoke of the
wanderings of Antenor, the more so, since from time out of date the
pronunciation of the initials _B_ and _P_ have been interchanged by the
Germans. In the conquered territory the Franks founded a city (Ammian.
Marc., xvii. 2, 5).
Thus it appears that the Franks were supposed to have migrated to the
Rhine under the leadership of Antenor. The first Frankish chiefs
recorded, after their appearance there, are Markomir and Sunno. From
this the conclusion was drawn that Sunno was Antenor's son; and as
Markomir ought to be the son of some celebrated Trojan chief, he was
made the son of Priam. Thus we have explained Fredegar's statement that
Virgil is his authority for the Trojan descent of these Franks. This
seemed to be established for all time.
The wars fought around the Moeotian marshes between the emperor
Valentinianus, the Alamanni, and the Franks, of which _Gesta_ speaks,
are not wholly inventions of the fancy. The historical kernel in this
confused semi-mythical narrative is that Valentinianus really did fight
with the Alamanni, and that the Franks for some time were allies of the
Romans, and came into conflict with those same Alamanni (Ammian. Marc.,
libs, xxx., xxxi.). But the scene of these battles was not the Moeotian
marshes and Pannonia, as _Gesta_ supposes, but the regions on the Rhine.
The unhistorical statement of Gregorius that the Franks came from
Pannonia is based only on the fact that Frankish warriors for some time
formed a _Sicambra cohors_, which about the year 26 was incorporated
with the Roman troops stationed in Pannonia and Thracia. The cohort is
believed to have remained in Hungary and formed a colony, where Buda now
is situated. _Gesta_ makes Pannonia extend from the Moeotian marshes to
Tanais, since according to Gregorius and earlier chroniclers, these
waters were the boundary between Europe and Asia, and since Asia was
regarded as a synonym of the Trojan empire. Virgil had called the Trojan
kingdom Asia: _Postquam res Asiae Priamique evertere gentem_, &c.,
(_AEneid_, iii. 1).
Thus we have exhibited the seed out of which the fable about the Trojan
descent of the Franks grew into a tree spreading its branches over all
Teutonic Europe, in the same manner as the earlier fable, which was at
least developed if not born in Sicily, in regard to the Trojan descent
of the Romans had grown into a tree overshadowing all the lands around
the Mediterranean, and extending one of its branches across Gaul to
Britain and Ireland. The first son of the Britons, "Brutus," was,
according to Galfred, great-grandson of AEneas, and migrated from Alba
Longa to Ireland.
So far as the Gauls are concerned, the incorporation of Cis-Alpine Gaul
with the Roman Empire, and the Romanising of the Gauls dwelling there,
had at an early day made way for the belief that they had the same
origin and were of the same blood as the Romans. Consequently they too
were Trojans. This view, encouraged by Roman politics, gradually found
its way to the Gauls on the other side of the Rhine; and even before
Caesar's time the Roman senate had in its letters to the AEduans, often
called them the "brothers and kinsmen" of the Romans (_fratres
consanguineique_--Caesar, _De Bell. Gall._, i. 33, 2). Of the Avernians
Lucanus sings (i. 427): _Averni ... ausi Latio se fingere fratres,
sanguine ab Iliaco populi_.
Thus we see that when the Franks, having made themselves masters of the
Romanised Gaul, claimed a Trojan descent, then this was the repetition
of a history of which Gaul for many centuries previously had been the
scene. After the Frankish conquest the population of Gaul consisted for
the second time of two nationalities unlike in language and customs, and
now as before it was a political measure of no slight importance to
bring these two nationalities as closely together as possible by the
belief in a common descent. The Roman Gauls and the Franks were
represented as having been one people in the time of the Trojan war.
After the fall of the common fatherland they were divided into two
separate tribes, with separate destinies, until they refound each other
in the west of Europe, to dwell together again in Gaul. This explains
how it came to pass that, when they thought they had found evidence of
this view in Virgil, this was at once accepted, and was so eagerly
adopted that the older traditions in regard to the origin and migrations
of the Franks were thrust aside and consigned to oblivion. History
repeats itself a third time when the Normans conquered and became
masters of that part of Gaul which after them is called Normandy. Dudo,
their chronicler, says that they regarded themselves as being _ex
Antenore progenitos_, descendants of Antenor. This is sufficient proof
that they had borrowed from the Franks the tradition in regard to their
Trojan descent.
12.
WHY ODIN WAS GIVEN ANTENOR'S PLACE AS LEADER OF
THE TROJAN EMIGRATION.
So long as the Franks were the only ones of the Teutons who claimed
Trojan descent, it was sufficient that the Teutonic-Trojan immigration
had the father of a Frankish chief as its leader. But in the same degree
as the belief in a Trojan descent spread among the other Teutonic tribes
and assumed the character of a statement equally important to all the
Teutonic tribes, the idea would naturally present itself that the leader
of the great immigration was a person of general Teutonic importance.
There was no lack of names to choose from. Most conspicuous was the
mythical Teutonic patriarch, whom Tacitus speaks of and calls _Mannus_
(_Germania_, 2), the grandson of the goddess Jord (Earth). There can be
no doubt that he still was remembered by this (Mann) or some other name
(for nearly all Teutonic mythic persons have several names), since he
reappears in the beginning of the fourteenth century in Heinrich
Frauenlob as Mennor, the patriarch of the German people and German
tongue.[5] But Mannus had to yield to another universal Teutonic mythic
character, Odin, and for reasons which we shall now present.
As Christianity was gradually introduced among the Teutonic peoples, the
question confronted them, what manner of beings those gods had been in
whom they and their ancestors so long had believed. Their Christian
teachers had two answers, and both were easily reconcilable. The common
answer, and that usually given to the converted masses, was that the
gods of their ancestors were demons, evil spirits, who ensnared men in
superstition in order to become worshipped as divine beings. The other
answer, which was better calculated to please the noble-born Teutonic
families, who thought themselves descended from the gods, was that these
divinities were originally human persons--kings, chiefs, legislators,
who, endowed with higher wisdom and secret knowledge, made use of these
to make people believe that they were gods, and worship them as such.
Both answers could, as stated, easily be reconciled with each other, for
it was evident that when these proud and deceitful rulers died, their
unhappy spirits joined the ranks of evil demons, and as demons they
continued to deceive the people, in order to maintain through all ages a
worship hostile to the true religion. Both sides of this view we find
current among the Teutonic races through the whole middle age. The one
which particularly presents the old gods as evil demons is found in
popular traditions from this epoch. The other, which presents the old
gods as mortals, as chiefs and lawmakers with magic power, is more
commonly reflected in the Teutonic chronicles, and was regarded among
the scholars as the scientific view.
Thus it followed of necessity that Odin, the chief of the Teutonic gods,
and from whom their royal houses were fond of tracing their descent,
also must have been a wise king of antiquity and skilled in the magic
arts, and information was of course sought with the greatest interest in
regard to the place where he had reigned, and in regard to his origin.
There were two sources of investigation in reference to this matter. One
source was the treasure of mythic songs and traditions of their own
race. But what might be history in these seemed to the students so
involved in superstition and fancy, that not much information seemed
obtainable from them. But there was also another source, which in regard
to historical trustworthiness seemed incomparably better, and that was
the Latin literature to be found in the libraries of the convents.
During centuries when the Teutons had employed no other art than poetry
for preserving the memory of the life and deeds of their ancestors, the
Romans, as we know, had had parchment and papyrus to write on, and had
kept systematic annals extending centuries back. Consequently this
source _must_ be more reliable. But what had this source--what had the
Roman annals or the Roman literature in general to tell about Odin?
Absolutely nothing, it would seem, inasmuch as the name Odin, or Wodan,
does not occur in any of the authors of the ancient literature. But this
was only an apparent obstacle. The ancient king of our race, Odin, they
said, has had many names--one name among one people, and another among
another, and there can be no doubt that he is the same person as the
Romans called Mercury and the Greeks Hermes.
The evidence of the correctness of identifying Odin with Mercury and
Hermes the scholars might have found in Tacitus' work on Germany, where
it is stated in the ninth chapter that the chief god of the Germans is
the same as Mercury among the Romans. But Tacitus was almost unknown in
the convents and schools of this period of the middle age. They could
not use this proof, but they had another and completely compensating
evidence of the assertion.
Originally the Romans did not divide time into weeks of seven days.
Instead, they had weeks of eight days, and the farmer worked the seven
days and went on the eighth to the market. But the week of seven days
had been in existence for a very long time among certain Semitic
peoples, and already in the time of the Roman republic many Jews lived
in Rome and in Italy. Through them the week of seven days became
generally known. The Jewish custom of observing the sacredness of the
Sabbath, the first day of the week, by abstaining from all labour, could
not fail to be noticed by the strangers among whom they dwelt. The Jews
had, however, no special name for each day of the week. But the
Oriental, Egyptian, and Greek astrologers and astronomers, who in large
numbers sought their fortunes in Rome, did more than the Jews to
introduce the week of seven days among all classes of the metropolis,
and the astrologers had special names for each of the seven days of the
week. Saturday was the planet's and the planet-god Saturnus' day;
Sunday, the sun's; Monday, the moon's; Tuesday, Mars'; Wednesday,
Mercury's; Thursday, Jupiter's; Friday, Venus' day. Already in the
beginning of the empire these names of the days were quite common in
Italy. The astrological almanacs, which were circulated in the name of
the Egyptian Petosiris among all families who had the means to buy them
contributed much to bring this about. From Italy both the taste for
astrology and the adoption of the week of seven days, with the
above-mentioned names, spread not only into Spain and Gaul, but also
into those parts of Germany that were incorporated with the Roman
Empire, Germania superior and inferior, where the Romanising of the
people, with Cologne (_Civitas Ubiorum_) as the centre, made great
progress. Teutons who had served as officers and soldiers in the Roman
armies, and were familiar with the everyday customs of the Romans, were
to be found in various parts of the independent Teutonic territory, and
it is therefore not strange if the week of seven days, with a separate
name given to each day, was known and in use more or less extensively
throughout Teutondom even before Christianity had taken root east of the
Rhine, and long before Rome itself was converted to Christianity. But
from this introduction of the seven-day week did not follow the adoption
of the Roman names of the days. The Teutons translated the names into
their own language, and in so doing chose among their own divinities
those which most nearly corresponded to the Roman. The translation of
the names is made with a discrimination which seems to show that it was
made in the Teutonic border country, governed by the Romans, by people
who were as familiar with the Roman gods as with their own. In that
border land there must have been persons of Teutonic birth who
officiated as priests before Roman altars. The days of the sun and moon
were permitted to retain their names. They were called Sunday and
Monday. The day of the war-god Mars became the day of the war-god Tyr,
Tuesday. The day of Mercury became Odin's day, Wednesday. The day of the
lightning-armed Jupiter became the day of the thundering Thor, Thursday.
The day of the goddess of love Venus became that of the goddess of love
Freyja, Friday. Saturnus, who in astrology is a watery star, and has his
house in the sign of the waterman, was among the Romans, and before them
among the Greeks and Chaldaeans, the lord of the seventh day. Among the
North Teutons, or at least, among a part of them, his day got its name
from laug,[6] which means a bath, and it is worthy of notice in this
connection that the author of the Prose Edda's Foreword identifies
Saturnus with the sea-god Njord.
Here the Latin scholars had what seemed to them a complete proof that
the Odin of which their stories of the past had so much to tell was--and
was so recognised by their heathen ancestors--the same historical person
as the Romans worshipped by the name Mercury.
At first sight it may seem strange that Mercury and Odin were regarded
as identical. We are wont to conceive Hermes (Mercury) as the Greek
sculptors represented him, the ideal of beauty and elastic youth, while
we imagine Odin as having a contemplative, mysterious look. And while
Odin in the Teutonic mythology is the father and ruler of the gods,
Mercury in the Roman has, of course, as the son of Zeus, a high rank,
but his dignity does not exempt him from being the very busy messenger
of the gods of Olympus. But neither Greeks nor Romans nor Teutons
attached much importance to such circumstances in the specimens we have
of their comparative mythology. The Romans knew that the same god among
the same people might be represented differently, and that the local
traditions also sometimes differed in regard to the kinship and rank of
a divinity. They therefore paid more attention to what Tacitus calls
_vis numinis_--that is, the significance of the divinity as a symbol of
nature, or its relation to the affairs of the community and to human
culture. Mercury was the symbol of wisdom and intelligence; so was
Odin. Mercury was the god of eloquence; Odin likewise. Mercury had
introduced poetry and song among men; Odin also. Mercury had taught men
the art of writing; Odin had given them the runes. Mercury did not
hesitate to apply cunning when it was needed to secure him possession of
something that he desired; nor was Odin particularly scrupulous in
regard to the means. Mercury, with wings on his hat and on his heels,
flew over the world, and often appeared as a traveller among men; Odin,
the ruler of the wind, did the same. Mercury was the god of martial
games, and still he was not really the war-god; Odin also was the chief
of martial games and combats, but the war-god's occupation he had left
to Tyr. In all important respects Mercury and Odin, therefore, resembled
each other.
To the scholars this must have been an additional proof that this, in
their eyes, historical chief, whom the Romans called Mercury and the
Teutons Odin, had been one and the same human person, who had lived in a
distant past, and had alike induced Greeks, Romans, and Goths to worship
him as a god. To get additional and more reliable information in regard
to this Odin-Mercury than what the Teutonic heathen traditions could
impart, it was only necessary to study and interpret correctly what
Roman history had to say about Mercury.
As is known, some mysterious documents called the Sibylline books were
preserved in Jupiter's temple, on the Capitoline Hill, in Rome. The
Roman State was the possessor, and kept the strictest watch over them,
so that their contents remained a secret to all excepting those whose
position entitled them to read them. A college of priests, men in high
standing, were appointed to guard them and to consult them when
circumstances demanded it. The common opinion that the Roman State
consulted them for information in regard to the future is incorrect.
They were consulted only to find out by what ceremonies of penance and
propitiation the wrath of the higher powers might be averted at times
when Rome was in trouble, or when prodigies of one kind or another had
excited the people and caused fears of impending misfortune. Then the
Sibylline books were produced by the properly-appointed persons, and in
some line or passage they found which divinity was angry and ought to be
propitiated. This done, they published their interpretation of the
passage, but did not make known the words or phrases of the passage, for
the text of the Sibylline books must not be known to the public. The
books were written in the Greek tongue.
The story telling how these books came into the possession of the Roman
State through a woman who sold them to Tarquin--according to one version
Tarquin the Elder, according to another Tarquin the Younger--is found in
Roman authors who were well known and read throughout the whole middle
age. The woman was a Sibylla, according to Varro the Erythreian, so
called from a Greek city in Asia Minor; according to Virgil the Cumaean,
a prophetess from Cumae in southern Italy. Both versions could easily be
harmonised, for Cumae was a Greek colony from Asia Minor; and we read in
Servius' commentaries on Virgil's poems that the Erythreian Sibylla was
by many regarded as identical with the Cumaean. From Asia Minor she was
supposed to have come to Cumae.
In western Europe the people of the middle age claimed that there were
twelve Sibyllas: the Persian, the Libyan, the Delphian, the Cimmerinean,
the Erythreian, the Samian, the Cumaean, the Hellespontian or Trojan, the
Phrygian and Tiburtinian, and also the Sibylla Europa and the Sibylla
Agrippa. Authorities for the first ten of these were the Church father
Lactantius and the West Gothic historian Isodorus of Sevilla. The last
two, Europa and Agrippa, were simply added in order to make the number
of Sibyllas equal to that of the prophets and the apostles.
But the scholars of the middle ages also knew from Servius that the
Cumaean Sibylla was, in fact, the same as the Erythreian; and from the
Church father Lactantius, who was extensively read in the middle ages,
they also learned that the Erythreian was identical with the Trojan.
Thanks to Lactantius, they also thought they could determine precisely
where the Trojan Sibylla was born. Her birthplace was the town
Marpessus, near the Trojan Mount Ida. From the same Church father they
learned that the real contents of the Sibylline books had consisted of
narrations concerning Trojan events, of lives of the Trojan kings, &c.,
and also of prophecies concerning the fall of Troy and other coming
events, and that the poet Homer in his works was a mere plagiator, who
had found a copy of the books of the Sibylla, had recast and falsified
it, and published it in his own name in the form of heroic poems
concerning Troy.
This seemed to establish the fact that those books, which the woman from
Cumae had sold to the Roman king Tarquin, were written by a Sibylla who
was born in the Trojan country, and that the books which Trojan bought
off her contained accounts and prophecies--accounts especially in regard
to the Trojan chiefs and heroes afterwards glorified in Homer's poems.
As the Romans came from Troy, these chiefs and heroes were their
ancestors, and in this capacity they were entitled to the worship which
the Romans considered due to the souls of their forefathers. From a
Christian standpoint this was of course idolatry; and as the Sibyllas
were believed to have made predictions even in regard to Christ, it
might seem improper for them to promote in this manner the cause of
idolatry. But Lactantius gave a satisfactory explanation of this matter.
The Sibylla, he said, had certainly prophesied truthfully in regard to
Christ; but this she did by divine compulsion and in moments of divine
inspiration. By birth and in her sympathies she was a heathen, and when
under the spell of her genuine inspirations, she proclaimed heathen and
idolatrous doctrines.
In our critical century all this may seem like mere fancies. But careful
examinations have shown that an historical kernel is not wanting in
these representations. And the historical fact which lies back of all
this is that the Sibylline books which were preserved in Rome actually
were written in Asia Minor in the ancient Trojan territory; or, in
other words, that the oldest known collection of so-called Sibylline
oracles was made in Marpessus, near the Trojan mountain Ida, in the time
of Solon. From Marpessus the collection came to the neighbouring city
Gergis, and was preserved in the Apollo temple there; from Gergis it
came to Cumae, and from Cumae to Rome in the time of the kings. How it
came there is not known. The story about the Cumaean woman and Tarquin is
an invention, and occurs in various forms. It is also demonstrably an
invention that the Sibylline books in Rome contained accounts of the
heroes in the Trojan war. On the other hand, it is absolutely certain
that they referred to gods and to a worship which in the main were
unknown to the Romans before the Sibylline books were introduced there,
and that to these books must chiefly be attributed the remarkable change
which took place in Roman mythology during the republican centuries. The
Roman mythology, which from the beginning had but few gods of clear
identity with the Greek, was especially during this epoch enlarged, and
received gods and goddesses who were worshipped in Greece and in the
Greek and Hellenised part of Asia Minor where the Sibylline books
originated. The way this happened was that whenever the Romans in
trouble or distress consulted the Sibylline books they received the
answer that this or that Greek-Asiatic god or goddess was angry and must
be propitiated. In connection with the propitiation ceremonies the god
or goddess was received in the Roman pantheon, and sooner or later a
temple was built to him; and thus it did not take long before the
Romans appropriated the myths that were current in Greece concerning
these borrowed divinities. This explains why the Roman mythology, which
in its oldest sources is so original and so unlike the Greek, in the
golden period of Roman literature comes to us in an almost wholly Greek
attire; this explains why Roman and Greek mythology at that time might
be regarded as almost identical. Nevertheless the Romans were able even
in the later period of antiquity to discriminate between their native
gods and those introduced by the Sibylline books. The former were
worshipped according to a Roman ritual, the latter according to a Greek.
To the latter belonged Apollo, Artemis, Latona, Ceres, Hermes, Mercury,
Proserpina, Cybile, Venus, and Esculapius; and that the Sibylline books
were a Greek-Trojan work, whose original home was Asia Minor and the
Trojan territory, was well known to the Romans. When the temple of the
Capitoline Jupiter was burned down eighty-four years before Christ, the
Sibylline books were lost. But the State could not spare them. A new
collection had to be made, and this was mainly done by gathering the
oracles which could be found one by one in those places which the Trojan
or Erythreian Sibylla had visited, that is to say, in Asia Minor,
especially in Erythrae, and in Ilium, the ancient Troy.
So far as Hermes-Mercury is concerned, the Roman annals inform us that
he got his first lectisternium in the year 399 before Christ by order
from the Sibylline books. Lectisternium was a sacrifice: the image of
the god was laid on a bed with a pillow under the left arm, and beside
the image was placed a table and a meal, which as a sacrifice was
offered to the god. About one hundreds years before that time,
Hermes-Mercury had received his first temple in Rome.
Hermes-Mercury seemed, therefore, like Apollo, Venus, Esculapius, and
others, to have been a god originally unknown to the Romans, the worship
of whom the Trojan Sibylla had recommended to the Romans.
This was known to the scholars of the middle age. Now, we must bear in
mind that it was as certain to them as an undoubted scientific fact that
the gods were originally men, chiefs, and heroes, and that the deified
chief whom the Romans worshipped as Mercury, and the Greeks as Hermes,
was the same as the Teutons called Odin, and from whom distinguished
Teutonic families traced their descent. We must also remember that the
Sibylla who was supposed to have recommended the Romans to worship the
old king Odin-Mercurius was believed to have been a Trojan woman, and
that her books were thought to have contained stories about Troy's
heroes, in addition to various prophecies, and so this manner of
reasoning led to the conclusion that the gods who were introduced in
Rome through the Sibylline books were celebrated Trojans who had lived
and fought at a time preceding the fall of Troy. Another inevitable and
logical conclusion was that Odin had been a Trojan chief, and when he
appears in Teutonic mythology as the chief of gods, it seemed most
probable that he was identical with the Trojan king Priam, and that
Priam was identical with Hermes-Mercury.
Now, as the ancestors of the Romans were supposed to have emigrated from
Troy to Italy under the leadership of AEneas, it was necessary to assume
that the Romans were not the only Trojan emigrants, for, since the
Teutons worshipped Odin-Priamus-Hermes as their chief god, and since a
number of Teutonic families traced their descent from this Odin, the
Teutons, too, must have emigrated from Troy. But, inasmuch as the
Teutonic dialects differed greatly from the Roman language, the Trojan
Romans and the Trojan Teutons must have been separated a very long time.
They must have parted company immediately after the fall of Troy and
gone in different directions, and as the Romans had taken a southern
course on their way to Europe, the Teutons must have taken a northern.
It was also apparent to the scholars that the Romans had landed in
Europe many centuries earlier than the Teutons, for Rome had been
founded already in 754 or 753 before Christ, but of the Teutons not a
word is to be found in the annals before the period immediately
preceding the birth of Christ. Consequently, the Teutons must have made
a halt somewhere on their journey to the North. This halt must have been
of several centuries' duration, and, of course, like the Romans, they
must have founded a city, and from it ruled a territory in commemoration
of their fallen city Troy. In that age very little was known of Asia,
where this Teutonic-Trojan colony was supposed to have been situated,
but, both from Orosius and, later, from Gregorius of Tours, it was known
that our world is divided into three large divisions--Asia, Europe, and
Africa--and that Asia and Europe are divided by a river called Tanais.
And having learned from Gregorius of Tours that the Teutonic Franks were
said to have lived in Pannonia in ancient times, and having likewise
learned that the Moeotian marshes lie east of Pannonia, and that the
Tanais empties into these marshes, they had the course marked out by
which the Teutons had come to Europe--that is, by way of Tanais and the
Moeotian marshes. Not knowing anything at all of importance in regard to
Asia beyond Tanais, it was natural that they should locate the colony of
the Teutonic Trojans on the banks of this river.
I think I have now pointed out the chief threads of the web of that
scholastic romance woven out of Latin convent learning concerning a
Teutonic emigration from Troy and Asia, a web which extends from
Fredegar's Frankish chronicle, through the following chronicles of the
middle age, down into Heimskringla and the Foreword of the Younger Edda.
According to the Frankish chronicle, _Gesta regum Francorum_, the
emigration of the Franks from the Trojan colony near the Tanais was
thought to have occurred very late; that is, in the time of
Valentinianus I., or in other words, between 364 and 375 after Christ.
The Icelandic authors very well knew that Teutonic tribes had been far
into Europe long before that time, and the reigns they had constructed
in regard to the North indicated that they must have emigrated from the
Tanais colony long before the Franks. As the Roman attack was the cause
of the Frankish emigration, it seemed probable that these
world-conquerors had also caused the earlier emigration from Tanais;
and as Pompey's expedition to Asia was the most celebrated of all the
expeditions made by the Romans in the East--Pompey even entered
Jerusalem and visited its Temple--it was found most convenient to let
the Asas emigrate in the time of Pompey, but they left a remnant of
Teutons near the Tanais, under the rule of Odin's younger brothers Vile
and Ve, in order that this colony might continue to exist until the
emigration of the Franks took place.
Finally, it should be mentioned that the Trojan migration saga, as born
and developed in antiquity, does not indicate by a single word that
Europe was peopled later than Asia, or that it received its population
from Asia. The immigration of the Trojans to Europe was looked upon as a
return to their original homes. Dardanus, the founder of Troy, was
regarded as the leader of an emigration from Etruria to Asia (_AEneid_,
iii. 165 ff., Serv. Comm.). As a rule the European peoples regarded
themselves in antiquity as autochthones if they did not look upon
themselves as immigrants from regions within Europe to the territories
they inhabited in historic times.
[Footnote 5:
"Mennor der erste was genant,
Dem diutische rede got tet bekant."
Later on in this work we shall discuss the traditions of the Mannussaga
found in Scandinavia and Germany.]
[Footnote 6: Saturday is in the North called Loeverdag, Loerdag--that is,
Laugardag=bathday.--TR.]
13.
THE MATERIALS OF THE ICELANDIC TROY SAGA.
We trust the facts presented above have convinced the reader that the
saga concerning the immigration of Odin and the Asas to Europe is
throughout a product of the convent learning of the middle ages. That
it was born and developed independently of the traditions of the
Teutonic heathendom shall be made still more apparent by the additional
proofs that are accessible in regard to this subject. It may, however,
be of some interest to first dwell on some of the details in the
Heimskringla and in the Younger Edda and point out their source.
It should be borne in mind that, according to the Younger Edda, it was
Zoroaster who first thought of building the Tower of Babel, and that in
this undertaking he was assisted by seventy-two master-masons. Zoroaster
is, as is well known, another form for the Bactrian or Iranian name
Zarathustra, the name of the prophet and religious reformer who is
praised on every page of Avesta's holy books, and who in a prehistoric
age founded the religion which far down in our own era has been
confessed by the Persians, and is still confessed by their descendants
in India, and is marked by a most serious and moral view of the world.
In the Persian and in the classical literatures this Zoroaster has
naught to do with Babel, still less with the Tower of Babel. But already
in the first century of Christianity, if not earlier, traditions became
current which made Zoroaster the founder of all sorcery, magic, and
astrology (Plinius, _Hist. Nat._, xxx. 2); and as astrology particularly
was supposed to have had its centre and base in Babylon, it was natural
to assume that Babel had been the scene of Zoroaster's activity. The
Greek-Roman chronicler Ammianus Marcellinus, who lived in the fourth
century after Christ, still knows that Zoroaster was a man from Bactria,
not from Babylon, but he already has formed the opinion that Zoroaster
had gotten much of his wisdom from the writings of the Babylonians. In
the Church fathers the saga is developed in this direction, and from the
Church fathers it got into the Latin chronicles. The Christian historian
Orosius also knows that Zoroaster was from Bactria, but he already
connects Zoroaster with the history of Nineveh and Babylon, and makes
Ninus make war against him and conquer him. Orosius speaks of him as the
inventor of sorcery and the magic arts. Gregorius of Tours told in his
time that Zoroaster was identical with Noah's grandson, with Chus, the
son of Ham, that this Chus went to the Persians, and that the Persians
called him Zoroaster, a name supposed to mean "the living star."
Gregorius also relates that this Zoroaster was the first person who
taught men the arts of sorcery and led them astray into idolatry, and as
he knew the art of making stars and fire fall from heaven, men paid him
divine worship. At that time, Gregorius continues, men desired to build
a tower which should reach to heaven. But God confused their tongues and
brought their project to naught. Nimrod, who was supposed to have built
Babel, was, according to Gregorius, a son of Zoroaster.
If we compare this with what the Foreword of the Younger Edda tells,
then we find that there, too, Zoroaster is a descendant of Noah's son
Cham and the founder of all idolatry, and that he himself was worshipped
as a god. It is evident that the author of the Foreword gathered these
statements from some source related to Gregorius' history. Of the 72
master-masons who were said to have helped Zoroaster in building the
tower, and from whom the 72 languages of the world originated, Gregorius
has nothing to say, but the saga about these builders was current
everywhere during the middle ages. In the earlier Anglo-Saxon literature
there is a very naive little work, very characteristic of its age,
called "A Dialogue between Saturn and Solomon," in which Saturnus tests
Solomon's knowledge and puts to him all sorts of biblical questions,
which Solomon answers partly from the Bible and partly from sagas
connected with the Bible. Among other things Saturnus informs Solomon
that Adam was created out of various elements, weighing altogether eight
pounds, and that when created he was just 116 inches long. Solomon tells
that Shem, Noah's son, had thirty sons, Cham thirty, and Japhet
twelve--making 72 grandsons of Noah; and as there can be no doubt that
it was the author's opinion that all the languages of the world, thought
to be 72, originated at the Tower of Babel, and were spread into the
world by these 72 grandsons of Noah, we here find the key to who those
72 master-masons were who, according to the Edda, assisted Zoroaster in
building the tower. They were accordingly his brothers. Luther's
contemporary, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, who, in his work _De occulta
Philosophia_, gathered numerous data in regard to the superstition of
all ages, has a chapter on the power and sacred meaning of various
numbers, and says in speaking of the number 72: "The number 72
corresponds to the 72 languages, the 72 elders in the synagogue, the 72
commentators of the Old Testament, Christ's 72 disciples, God's 72
names, the 72 angels who govern the 72 divisions of the Zodiac, each
division of which corresponds to one of the 72 languages." This
illustrates sufficiently how widespread was the tradition in regard to
the 72 master-masons during the centuries of the middle ages. Even
Nestor's Russian chronicle knows the tradition. It continued to enjoy a
certain authority in the seventeenth century. An edition of Sulpicius
Severus' _Opera Omnia_, printed in 1647, still considers it necessary to
point out that a certain commentator had doubted whether the number 72
was entirely exact. Among the doubters we find Rudbeck in his
_Atlantica_.
What the Edda tells about king Saturnus and his son, king Jupiter, is
found in a general way, partly in the Church-father Lactantius, partly
in Virgil's commentator Servius, who was known and read during the
middle age. As the Edda claims that Saturnus knew the art of producing
gold from the molten iron, and that no other than gold coins existed in
his time, this must be considered an interpretation of the statement
made in Latin sources that Saturnus' was the golden age--_aurea secula,
aurea regna_. Among the Romans Saturnus was the guardian of treasures,
and the treasury of the Romans was in the temple of Saturnus in the
Forum.
The genealogy found in the Edda, according to which the Trojan king
Priam, supposed to be the oldest and the proper Odin, was descended in
the sixth generation from Jupiter, is taken from Latin chronicles.
Herikon of the Edda, grandson of Jupiter, is the Roman-Greek
Erichtonius; the Edda's Lamedon is Laomedon. Then the Edda has the
difficult task of continuing the genealogy through the dark centuries
between the burning of Troy and the younger Odin's immigration to
Europe. Here the Latin sources naturally fail it entirely, and it is
obliged to seek other aid. It first considers the native sources. There
it finds that Thor is also called Lorride, Indride, and Vingthor, and
that he had two sons, Mode and Magne; but it also finds a genealogy made
about the twelfth century, in which these different names of Thor are
applied to different persons, so that Lorride is the son of Thor,
Indride the son of Lorride, Vingthor the son of Indride, &c. This mode
of making genealogies was current in Iceland in the twelfth century, and
before that time among the Christian Anglo-Saxons. Thereupon the Edda
continues its genealogy with the names Bedvig, Atra, Itrman, Heremod,
Skjaldun or Skold, Bjaef, Jat, Gudolf, Fjarlaf or Fridleif, and finally
Odin, that is to say, the younger Odin, who had adopted this name after
his deified progenitor Hermes-Priam. This whole genealogy is taken from
a Saxon source, and can be found in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle name for
name. From Odin the genealogy divides itself into two branches, one from
Odin's son, Veggdegg, and another from Odin's son, Beldegg or Balder.
The one branch has the names Veggdegg, Vitrgils, Ritta, Heingest. These
names are found arranged into a genealogy by the English Church
historian Beda, by the English chronicler Nennius, and in the
Anglo-Saxon chronicle. From one of these three sources the Edda has
taken them, and the only difference is that the Edda must have made a
slip in one place and changed the name Vitta to Ritta. The other branch,
which begins with Balder or Beldegg, embraces eight names, which are
found in precisely the same order in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle.
In regard to Balder, the Edda says that Odin appointed him king in
Westphalia. This statement is based on the tradition that Balder was
known among the heathen Germans and Scandinavians by the name Fal
(_Falr_, see No. 92), with its variation Fol. In an age when it was
believed that Sweden got its name from a king Sven, Goetaland from a king
Goet, Danmark from a king Dan, Angeln from a king Angul, the Franks from
a duke Francio, it might be expected that Falen (East- and West-Phalia)
had been named after a king Fal. That this name was recognised as
belonging to Balder not only in Germany, but also in Scandinavia, I
shall give further proof of in No. 92.
As already stated, Thor was, according to the Edda, married to Sibil,
that is to say, the Sibylla, and the Edda adds that this Sibil is called
Sif in the North. In the Teutonic mythology Thor's wife is the goddess
Sif. It has already been mentioned that it was believed in the middle
age that the Cumaean or Erythreian Sibylla originally came from Troy, and
it is not, therefore, strange that the author of the Younger Edda, who
speaks of the Trojan descent of Odin and his people, should marry Thor
to the most famous of Trojan women. Still, this marriage is not invented
by the author. The statement has an older foundation, and taking all
circumstances into consideration, may be traced to Germany, where Sif,
in the days of heathendom, was as well known as Thor. To the northern
form Sif corresponds the Gothic form _Sibba_, the Old English _Sib_, the
Old Saxon _Sibbia_, and the Old High German _Sibba_, and Sibil, Sibilla,
was thought to be still another form of the same name. The belief, based
on the assumed fact that Thor's wife Sif was identical with the Sibylla,
explains a phenomenon not hitherto understood in the saga-world and
church sculpture of the middle age, and on this point I now have a few
remarks to make.
In the Norse mythology several goddesses or dises have, as we know,
feather-guises, with which they fly through space. Freyja has a
falcon-guise; several dises have swan-guises (Volundarkv. Helreid.
Brynh., 6). Among these swan-maids was Sif (see No. 123). Sif could
therefore present herself now in human form, and again in the guise of
the most beautiful swimming bird, the swan.
A legend, the origin of which may be traced to Italy, tells that when
the queen of Saba visited king Solomon, she was in one place to cross a
brook. A tree or beam was thrown across as a bridge. The wise queen
stopped, and would not let her foot touch the beam. She preferred to
wade across the brook, and when she was asked the reason for this, she
answered that in a prophetic vision she had seen that the time would
come when this tree would be made into a cross on which the Saviour of
the world was to suffer.
The legend came also to Germany, but here it appears with the addition
that the queen of Saba was rewarded for this piety, and was freed while
wading across the brook from a bad blemish. One of her feet, so says the
German addition, was of human form, but the other like the foot of a
water-bird up to the moment when she took it out of the brook. Church
sculpture sometimes in the middle age represented the queen of Saba as a
woman well formed, except that she had one foot like that of a
water-bird. How the Germans came to represent her with this blemish,
foreign to the Italian legend, has not heretofore been explained,
although the influence of the Greek-Roman mythology on the legends of
the Romance peoples, and that of the Teutonic mythology on the Teutonic
legends, has been traced in numerous instances.
During the middle ages the queen of Saba was called queen Seba, on
account of the Latin translation of the Bible, where she is styled
_Regina Seba_, and Seba was thought to be her name. The name suggested
her identity, on the one hand, with Sibba, Sif, whose swan-guise lived
in the traditions; on the other hand, with Sibilla, and the latter
particularly, since queen Seba had proved herself to be in possession of
prophetic inspiration, the chief characteristic of the Sibylla. Seba,
Sibba, and Sibilla were in the popular fancy blended into one. This
explains how queen Seba among the Germans, but not among the Italians,
got the blemish which reminds us of the swan-guise of Thor's wife Sibba.
And having come to the conclusion that Thor was a Trojan, his wife Sif
also ought to be a Trojan woman. And as it was known that the Sibylla
was Trojan, and that queen Seba was a Sibylla, this blending was almost
inevitable. The Latin scholars found further evidence of the correctness
of this identity in a statement drawn originally from Greek sources to
the effect that Jupiter had had a Sibylla, by name Lamia, as mistress,
and had begotten a daughter with her by name Herophile, who was endowed
with her mother's gift of prophecy. As we know, Mercury corresponds to
Odin, and Jupiter to Thor, in the names of the days of the week. It thus
follows that it was Thor who stood in this relation to the Sibylla.
The character of the anthropomorphosed Odin, who is lawgiver and king,
as represented in Heimskringla and the Prose Edda, is only in part based
on native northern traditions concerning the heathen god Odin, the ruler
of heaven. This younger Odin, constructed by Christian authors, has
received his chief features from documents found in the convent
libraries. When the Prose Edda tells that the chief who proceeded from
Asgard to Saxland and Scandinavia did not really bear the name Odin, but
had assumed this name after the elder and deified Odin-Priam of Troy, to
make people believe that he was a god, then this was no new idea.
Virgil's commentator, Servius, remarks that ancient kings very
frequently assumed names which by right belonged only to the gods, and
he blames Virgil for making Saturnus come from the heavenly Olympus to
found a golden age in Italy. This Saturnus, says Servius, was not a god
from above, but a mortal king from Crete who had taken the god Saturnus'
name. The manner in which Saturnus, on his arrival in Italy and the
vicinity of Rome, was received by Janus, the king ruling there, reminds
us of the manner in which Odin, on his arrival in Svithiod, was received
by king Gylfe. Janus is unpretentious enough to leave a portion of his
territory and his royal power to Saturnus, and Gylfe makes the same
concessions to Odin. Saturnus thereupon introduces a higher culture
among the people of Latium, and Odin brings a higher culture to the
inhabitants of Scandinavia. The Church father Lactantius, like Servius,
speaks of kings who tried to appropriate the name and worship of the
gods, and condemns them as foes of truth and violators of the doctrines
of the true God.
In regard to one of them, the Persian Mithra, who, in the middle age,
was confounded with Zoroaster, Tertulianus relates that he (Mithra), who
knew in advance that Christianity would come, resolved to anticipate the
true faith by introducing some of its customs. Thus, for example,
Mithra, according to Tertulianus, introduced the custom of blessing by
laying the hands on the head or the brow of those to whom he wished to
insure prosperity, and he also adopted among his mysteries a practice
resembling the breaking of the bread in the Eucharist. So far as the
blessing by the laying on of hands is concerned, Mithra especially used
it in giving courage to the men whom he sent out as soldiers to war.
With these words of Tertulianus it is interesting to compare the
following passage in regard to Odin in the Heimskringla: "It was his
custom when he sent his men to war, or on some errand, to lay his hands
on their heads and give them _bjannak_." Bjannak is not a Norse word,
not even Teutonic, and there has been uncertainty in regard to its
significance. The well-known Icelandic philologist, Vigfusson, has, as I
believe, given the correct definition of the word, having referred it to
the Scottish word _bannock_ and the Gaelic _banagh_, which means bread.
Presumably the author of Heimskringla has chosen this foreign word in
order not to wound the religious feelings of readers with a native term,
for if _bjannak_ really means bread, and if the author of Heimskringla
desired in this way to indicate that Odin, by the aid of sacred usages,
practised in the Christian cult--that is, by the laying on of hands and
the breaking of bread--had given his warriors assurance of victory, then
it lay near at hand to modify, by the aid of a foreign word for bread,
the impression of the disagreeable similarity between the heathen and
Christian usages. But at the same time the complete harmony between what
Tertulianus tells about Mithra and Heimskringla about Odin is manifest.
What Heimskringla tells about Odin, that his spirit could leave the body
and go to far-off regions, and that his body lay in the meantime as if
asleep or dead, is told, in the middle age, of Zoroaster and of
Hermes-Mercurius.
New Platonian works had told much about an originally Egyptian god, whom
they associated with the Greek Hermes and called Hermes-Trismegistus--that
is, the thrice greatest and highest. The name Hermes-Trismegistus became
known through Latin authors even to the scholars in the middle age
convents, and, as a matter of course, those who believed that Odin
was identical with Hermes also regarded him as identical with
Hermes-Trismegistus. When Gylfe sought Odin and his men he came to a
citadel which, according to the statement of the gatekeeper, belonged to
king Odin, but when he had entered the hall he there saw not _one_
throne, but three thrones, the one above the other, and upon each of the
thrones a chief. When Gylfe asked the names of these chiefs, he received
an answer that indicates that none of the three alone was Odin, but that
Odin the sorcerer, who was able to turn men's vision, was present in
them all. One of the three, says the doorkeeper, is named _Har_, the
second, _Jafnhar_, and the one on the highest throne is _Thridi_. It
seems to me probable that what gave rise to this story was the surname
"the thrice-highest," which in the middle age was ascribed to Mercury,
and, consequently, was regarded as one of the epithets which Odin
assumed. The names _Third_ and _High_ seem to point to the phrase "the
thrice-highest." It was accordingly taken for granted that Odin had
appropriated this name in order to anticipate Christianity with a sort
of idea of trinity, just as Zoroaster, his progenitor, had, under the
name Mithra, in advance imitated the Christian usages.
The rest that Heimskringla and the Younger Edda tell about the king Odin
who immigrated to Europe is mainly taken from the stories embodied in
the mythological songs and traditions in regard to the god Odin who
ruled in the celestial Valhal. Here belongs what is told about the war
of Odin and the Asiatics with the Vans. In the myth, this war was waged
around the walls built by a giant around the heavenly Asgard (Voelusp.,
25). The citadel in which Gylfe finds the triple Odin is decorated in
harmony with the Valhal described by the heathen skalds. The men who
drink and present exercises in arms are the einherjes of the myth. Gylfe
himself is taken from the mythology, but, to all appearances, he did not
play the part of a king, but of a giant, dwelling in Jotunheim. The
Fornmanna sagas make him a descendant of _Fornjotr_, who, with his sons,
_Hler_, _Logi_, and _Kari_, and his descendants, _Joekull_, _Snaer_,
_Geitir_, &c., doubtless belong to Jotunheim. When Odin and the Asas had
been made immigrants to the North, it was quite natural that the giants
were made a historical people, and as such were regarded as the
aborigines of the North--an hypothesis which, in connection with the
fable about the Asiatic emigration, was accepted for centuries, and
still has its defenders. The story that Odin, when he perceived death
drawing near, marked himself with the point of a spear, has its origin
in the words which a heathen song lays on Odin's lips: "I know that I
hung on the wind-tossed tree nine nights, by my spear wounded, given to
Odin, myself given to myself" (Havam., 138).
14.
THE RESULT OF THE FOREGOING INVESTIGATIONS.
Herewith I close the examination of the sagas in regard to the Trojan
descent of the Teutons, and in regard to the immigration of Odin and his
Asiamen to Saxland, Denmark, and the Scandinavian peninsula. I have
pointed out the seed from which the sagas grew, the soil in which the
seed could be developed, and how it gradually grew to be what we find
these sagas to be in Heimskringla and the Younger Edda. I have shown
that they do not belong to the Teutonic heathendom, but that they were
born, as it were of necessity, in a Christian time, among Teutons
converted to Christianity, and that they are throughout the work of the
Latin scholars in the middle age. The assumption that they concealed
within themselves a tradition preserved for centuries among the Teutons
themselves of an ancient emigration from Asia is altogether improbable,
and is completely refuted by the genuine migration sagas of Teutonic
origin which were rescued from oblivion, and of which I shall give an
account below. In my opinion, these old and genuine Teutonic migration
sagas have, from a purely historical standpoint, but little more claim
than the fables of the Christian age in regard to Odin's emigration from
Asia to be looked upon as containing a kernel of reality. This must in
each case be carefully considered. But that of which they furnish
evidence is, how entirely foreign to the Teutonic heathens was the idea
of an immigration from Troy or Asia, and besides, they are of great
interest on account of their connection with what the myths have to say
in regard to the oldest dwelling-places, history, and diffusion of the
human race, or at least of the Teutonic part of it.
As a rule, all the old migration sagas, no matter from what race they
spring, should be treated with the utmost caution. Large portions of
the earth's surface may have been appropriated by various races, not by
the sudden influx of large masses, but by a gradual increase of the
population and consequent moving of their boundaries, and there need not
have been very remarkable or memorable events in connection therewith.
Such an expansion of the territory may take place, and be so little
remarked by the people living around the centre, that they actually do
not need to be aware of it, and much less do they need to remember it in
sagas and songs. That a few new settlers year by year extend the
boundaries of a race has no influence on the imagination, and it can
continue generation after generation, and produce as its final result an
immense expansion, and yet the separate generations may scarcely have
been conscious of the change in progress. A people's spreading over new
territory may be compared with the movement of the hour-hand on a clock.
It is not perceptible to the eye, and is only realized by continued
observation.
In many instances, however, immigrations have taken place in large
masses, who have left their old abodes to seek new homes. Such
undertakings are of themselves worthy of being remembered, and they are
attended by results that easily cling to the memory. But even in such
cases it is surprising how soon the real historical events either are
utterly forgotten or blended with fables, which gradually, since they
appeal more to the fancy, monopolise the interest. The conquest and
settlement of England by Saxon and Scandinavian tribes--and that, too,
in a time when the art of writing was known--is a most remarkable
instance of this. Hengist, under whose command the Saxons, according to
their own immigration saga, are said to have planted their feet on
British soil, is a saga-figure taken from mythology, and there we shall
find him later on (see No. 123). No wonder, then, if we discover in
mythology those heroes under whose leadership the Longobardians and
Goths believed they had emigrated from their original Teutonic homes.
B. REMINISCENCES IN THE POPULAR TRADITIONS
OF THE MIDDLE AGES OF THE
HEATHEN MIGRATION SAGA.
15.
THE LONGOBARDIAN MIGRATION SAGA.
What there still remains of migration sagas from the middle ages, taken
from the saga-treasure of the Teutons themselves, is, alas! but little.
Among the Franks the stream of national traditions early dried up, at
least among the class possessing Latin culture. Among the Longobardians
it fared better, and among them Christianity was introduced later.
Within the ken of Roman history they appear in the first century after
Christ, when Tiberius invaded their boundaries.
Tacitus speaks of them with admiration as a small people whose paucity,
he says, was balanced by their unity and warlike virtues, which rendered
them secure in the midst of the numerous and mighty tribes around them.
The Longobardians dwelt at that time in the most northern part of
Germany, on the lower Elbe, probably in Luneburg. Five hundred years
later we find them as rulers in Pannonia, whence they invade Italy. They
had then been converted to Christianity. A hundred years after they had
become settled in North Italy, one of their Latin scholars wrote a
little treatise, _De Origine Longobardorum_, which begins in the
following manner: "In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ! Here begins the
oldest history of our Longobardian people. There is an island called
Skadan, far in the north. There dwelt many peoples. Among them was a
little people called the Vinnilians, and among the Vinnilians was a
woman by name Gambara. Gambara had two sons: one by name Ibor, the other
named Ajo. She and these sons were the rulers among the Vinnilians. Then
it came to pass that the Vandals, with their dukes Ambri and Assi,
turned against the Vinnilians, and said to them: 'Pay ye tribute unto
us. If ye will not, then arm yourselves for war!' Then made answer Ibor
and Ajo and their mother Gambara: 'It is better for us to arm ourselves
for war than to pay tribute to the Vandals'. When Ambri and Assi, the
dukes of the Vandals, heard this, they addressed themselves to Odin
(Godan) with a prayer that he should grant them victory. Odin answered
and said: 'Those whom I first discover at the rising of the sun, to them
I shall give victory'. But at the same time Ibor and Ajo, the chiefs of
the Vinnilians, and their mother Gambara, addressed themselves to Frigg
(Frea), Odin's wife, beseeching her to assist them. Then Frigg gave the
advice that the Vinnilians should set out at the rising of the sun, and
that the women should accompany their husbands and arrange their hair so
that it should hang like a beard under their chins. When the sky cleared
and the sun was about to rise, Frigg, Odin's wife, went to the couch
where her husband was sleeping and directed his face to the east (where
the Vinnilians stood), and then she waked him. And as he looked up he
saw the Vinnilians, and observed the hair hanging down from the faces of
their women. And then said he: 'What long-beards are they?' Then said
Frigg to Odin: 'My lord, as you now have named them, you must also give
them victory!' And he gave them victory, so that they, in accordance
with his resolve, defended themselves well, and got the upper hand. From
that day the Vinnilians were called Longobardians--that is to say,
long-beards. Then the Longobardians left their country and came to
Golaida, and thereupon they occupied Aldonus, Anthaib, Bainaib, and
Burgundaib."
In the days of Charlemagne the Longobardians got a historian by name
Paulus Diaconus, a monk in the convent Monte Cassino, and he was himself
a Longobardian by birth. Of the earliest history of his people he
relates the following: The Vinnilians or Longobardians, who ruled
successfully in Italy, are of Teutonic descent, and came originally from
the island Scandinavia. Then he says that he has talked with persons who
had been in Scandinavia, and from their reports he gives some facts,
from which it is evident that his informants had reference to Scania
with its extensive coast of lowlands and shallow water. Then he
continues: "When the population on this island had increased beyond the
ability of the island to support them, they were divided into three
parts, and it was determined by lot which part should emigrate from the
native land and seek new homes. The part whose destiny it became to
leave their native land chose as their leaders the brothers Ibor and
Ajo, who were in the bloom of manhood and were distinguished above the
rest. Then they bade farewell to their friends and to their country, and
went to seek a land in which they might settle. The mother of these two
leaders was called Gambara, who was distinguished among her people for
her keen understanding and shrewd advice, and great reliance was placed
on her prudence in difficult circumstances." Paulus makes a digression
to discuss many remarkable things to be seen in Scandinavia: the light
summer nights and the long winter nights, a maelstrom which in its
vortex swallows vessels and sometimes throws them up again, an animal
resembling a deer hunted by the neighbours of the Scandinavians, the
Scritobinians (the Skee[7] Finns), and a cave in a rock where seven men
in Roman clothes have slept for centuries (see Nos. 79-81, and No. 94).
Then he relates that the Vinnilians left Scandinavia and came to a
country called Scoringia, and there was fought the aforesaid battle, in
which, thanks to Frigg's help, the Vinnilians conquered the Vandals, who
demanded tribute from them.
The story is then told how this occurred, and how the Vinnilians got the
name Longobardians in a manner corresponding with the source already
quoted, with the one addition, that it was Odin's custom when he awoke
to look out of the window, which was open, to the east toward the rising
sun. Paulus Diaconus finds this Longobardian folk-saga ludicrous, not in
itself, but because Odin was, in the first place, he says, a man, not a
god. In the second place, Odin did not live among the Teutons, but among
the Greeks, for he is the same as the one called by the Romans Mercury.
In the third place, Odin-Mercury did not live at the time when the
Longobardians emigrated from Scandinavia, but much earlier. According to
Paulus, there were only five generations between the emigration of the
Longobardians and the time of Odoacer. Thus we find in Paulus Diaconus
the ideas in regard to Odin-Mercury which I have already called
attention to. Paulus thereupon relates the adventures which happened to
the Longobardians after the battle with the Vandals. I shall refer to
these adventures later on. They belong to the Teutonic mythology, and
reappear in mythic sources (see No. 112), but in a more original form,
and as events which took place in the beginning of time in a conflict
between the Asas and Vans on the one hand, and lower beings on the other
hand; lower, indeed, but unavoidable in connection with the well-being
of nature and man. This conflict resulted in a terrible winter and
consequent famine throughout the North. In this mythological description
we shall find Ajo and Ibor, under whose leadership the Longobardians
emigrated, and Hengist, under whom the Saxons landed in Britain.
It is proper to show what form the story about the Longobardian
emigration had assumed toward the close of the twelfth century in the
writings of the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. The emigration took
place, he says, at a time when a Danish king, by name Snoe, ruled, and
when there occurred a terrible famine. First, those starving had
resolved to kill all the aged and all children, but this awful resolve
was not carried out, thanks to a good and wise woman, by name Gambaruc,
who advised that a part of the people should emigrate. This was done
under the leadership of her sons Aggo and Ebbo. The emigrants came first
to Blekingia (Blekinge), then they sailed past Moringia (Moere) and came
to Gutland, where they had a contest with the Vandals, and by the aid of
the goddess Frigg they won the victory, and got the name Longobardians.
From Gutland they sailed to Rugen, and thence to the German continent,
and thus after many adventures they at length became masters of a large
part of Italy.
In regard to this account it must be remarked that although it contains
many details not found in Paulus Diaconus, still it is the same
narrative that has come to Saxo's knowledge. This Saxo also admits, and
appeals to the testimony of Paulus Diaconus. Paulus' Gambara is Saxo's
Gambaruc; Ajo and Ibor are Aggo and Ebbo. But the Longobardian monk is
not Saxo's only source, and the brothers Aggo and Ebbo, as we shall
show, were known to him from purely northern sources, though not as
leaders of the Longobardians, but as mythic characters, who are actors
in the great winter which Saxo speaks of.
The Longobardian emigration saga--as we find it recorded in the seventh
century, and then again in the time of Charlemagne--contains
unmistakable internal evidence of having been taken from the people's
own traditions. Proof of this is already the circumstance, that although
the Longobardians had been Christians for nearly 200 years when the
little book _De Origine Longobardorum_ appeared, still the long-banished
divinities, Odin and Frigg, reappear and take part in the events, not as
men, but as divine beings, and in a manner thoroughly corresponding with
the stories recorded in the North concerning the relations between Odin
and his wife. For although this relation was a good and tender one,
judging from expressions in the heathen poems of the North (Voelusp., 51;
Vafthr., 1-4), and although the queen of heaven, Frigg, seems to have
been a good mother in the belief of the Teutons, this does not hinder
her from being represented as a wily person, with a will of her own
which she knows how to carry out. Even a Norse story tells how Frigg
resolves to protect a person whom Odin is not able to help; how she and
he have different favourites among men, and vie with each other in
bringing greater luck to their favourites. The story is found in the
prose introduction to the poem "Grimnismal," an introduction which in
more than one respect reminds us of the Longobardian emigration saga. In
both it is mentioned how Odin from his dwelling looks out upon the world
and observes what is going on. Odin has a favourite by name Geirrod.
Frigg, on the other hand, protects Geirrod's brother Agnar. The man and
wife find fault with each other's proteges. Frigg remarks about Geirrod,
that he is a prince, "stingy with food, so that he lets his guests
starve if they are many." And the story goes on to say that Geirrod, at
the secret command of Odin, had pushed the boat in which Agnar was
sitting away from shore, and that the boat had gone to sea with Agnar
and had not returned. The story looks like a parable founded on the
Longobardian saga, or like one grown in a Christian time out of the same
root as the Longobardian story. Geirrod is in reality the name of a
giant, and the giant is in the myth a being who brings hail and frost.
He dwells in the uttermost North, beyond the mythical Gandvik
(Thorsdrapa, 2), and as a mythical winter symbol he corresponds to king
Snoe in Saxo. His "stinginess of food when too many guests come" seems to
point to lack of food caused by the unfavourable weather, which
necessitated emigrations, when the country became over-populated. Agnar,
abandoned to the waves of the sea, is protected, like the Longobardians
crossing the sea, by Frigg, and his very name, Agnar, reminds us of the
names Aggo, Acho, and Agio, by which Ajo, one of the leaders of the
Longobardians, is known. The prose introduction has no original
connection with _Grimnismal_ itself, and in the form in which we now
have it, it belongs to a Christian age, and is apparently from an author
belonging to the same school as those who regarded the giants as the
original inhabitants of Scandinavia, and turned winter giants like
Joekull, Snaer, &c., into historical kings of Norway.
The absolutely positive result of the Longobardian narratives written by
Longobardian historians is that the Teutonic race to which they belonged
considered themselves sprung, not from Troy or Asia, but from an island,
situated in the ocean, which washes the northern shores of the Teutonic
continent, that is to say, of Germany.
[Footnote 7: The snow-skate, used so extensively in the north of Europe,
is called _Ski_ in the Norse, and I have taken the liberty of
introducing this word here and spelling it phonetically--_skee_, pl.
_skees_. The words snow-shoes, snow-skates, hardly describe sufficiently
these skees used by the Finns, Norsemen, and Icelanders. Compare the
English word _skid_, the drag applied to a coach-wheel.--_Tr._]
16.
THE SAXON AND SWABIAN MIGRATION SAGA.
From the Longobardians I now pass to the great Teutonic group of peoples
comprised in the term the _Saxons_. Their historian, Widukind, who wrote
his chronicle in the tenth century, begins by telling what he has
learned about the origin of the Saxons. Here, he says, different
opinions are opposed to each other. According to one opinion held by
those who knew the Greeks and Romans, the Saxons are descended from the
remnants of Alexander the Great's Macedonian army; according to the
other, which is based on native traditions, the Saxons are descended
from Danes and Northmen. Widukind so far takes his position between
these opinions that he considers it certain that the Saxons had come in
ships to the country they inhabited on the lower Elbe and the North Sea,
and that they landed in Hadolaun, that is to say, in the district
Hadeln, near the mouth of the Elbe, which, we may say in passing, still
is distinguished for its remarkably vigorous population, consisting of
peasants whose ancestors throughout the middle ages preserved the
communal liberty in successful conflict with the feudal nobility.
Widukind's statement that the Saxons crossed the sea to Hadeln is found
in an older Saxon chronicle, written about 860, with the addition that
the leader of the Saxons in their emigration was a chief by name
Hadugoto.
A Swabian chronicle, which claims that the Swabians also came from the
North and experienced about the same adventures as the Saxons when they
came to their new home, gives from popular traditions additional details
in regard to the migration and the voyage. According to this account,
the emigration was caused by a famine which visited the Northland
situated on the other side of the sea, because the inhabitants were
heathens who annually sacrificed twelve Christians to their gods. At the
time when the famine came there ruled a king Rudolph over that region in
the Northland whence the people emigrated. He called a convention of all
the most noble men in the land, and there it was decided that, in order
to put an end to the famine, the fathers of families who had several
sons should slay them all except the one they loved most. Thanks to a
young man, by name Ditwin, who was himself included in this dreadful
resolution, a new convention was called, and the above resolution was
rescinded, and instead, it was decided to procure ships, and that all
they who, according to the former resolution, were doomed to die, should
seek new homes beyond the sea. Accompanied by their female friends, they
embarked, and they had not sailed far before they were attacked by a
violent storm, which carried them to a Danish harbour near a place,
says the author, which is called Slesvik. Here they went ashore, and to
put an end to all discussion in regard to a return to the old dear
fatherland, they hewed their ships into pieces. Then they wandered
through the country which lay before them, and, together with much other
booty, they gathered 20,000 horses, so that a large number of the men
were able to ride on horseback. The rest followed the riders on foot.
Armed with weapons, they proceeded in this manner through the country
ruled by the Danes, and they came to the river Alba (Elbe), which they
crossed; after which they scattered themselves along the coast. This
Swabian narrative, which seems to be copied from the Saxon, tells, like
the latter, that the Thuringians were rulers in the land to which the
immigrants came, and that bloody battles had to be fought before they
got possession of it. Widukind's account attempts to give the Saxons a
legal right, at least to the landing-place and the immediate vicinity.
This legal right, he says, was acquired in the following manner: While
the Saxons were still in their ships in the harbour, out of which the
Thuringians were unable to drive them, it was resolved on both sides to
open negotiations, and thus an understanding was reached, that the
Saxons, on the condition that they abstained from plundering and murder,
might remain and buy what they needed and sell whatever they could. Then
it occurred that a Saxon man, richly adorned with gold and wearing a
gold necklace, went ashore. There a Thuringian met him and asked him:
"Why do you wear so much gold around your lean neck?" The youth
answered that he was perishing from hunger, and was seeking a purchaser
of his gold ornaments. "How much do you ask?" inquired the Thuringian.
"What do you bid?" answered the Saxon. Near by was a large sand-hill,
and the Thuringian said in derision: "I will give you as much sand as
you can carry in your clothes." The Saxon said he would accept this
offer. The Thuringian filled the skirts of his frock with sand; the
Saxon gave him his gold ornaments and returned to the ships. The
Thuringians laughed at this bargain with contempt, and the Saxons found
it foolish; but the youth said: "Go with me, brave Saxons, and I will
show you that my foolishness will be your advantage." Then he took the
sand he had bought and scattered it as widely as possible over the
ground, covering in this manner so large an area that it gave the Saxons
a fortified camp. The Thuringians sent messengers and complained of
this, but the Saxons answered that hitherto they had faithfully observed
the treaty, and that they had not taken more territory than they had
purchased with their gold. Thus the Saxons got a firm foothold in the
land.
Thus we find that the sagas of the Saxons and the Swabians agree with
those of the Longobardians in this, that their ancestors were supposed
to have come from a northern country beyond the Baltic. The Swabian
version identifies this country distinctly enough with the Scandinavian
peninsula. Of an immigration from the East the traditions of these
tribes have not a word to say.
17.
THE FRANKISH MIGRATION SAGA.
We have already stated that the Frankish chronicles, unlike those of the
other Teutonic tribes, wholly ignore the traditions of the Franks, and
instead present the scholastic doctrine concerning the descent of the
Franks from Troy and the Moeotian marshes. But I did not mean to say
that we are wholly without evidence that another theory existed among
the Franks, for they, too, had traditions in harmony with those of the
other Teutonic tribes. There lived in the time of Charlemagne and after
him a Frankish man whose name is written on the pages of history as a
person of noble character and as a great educator in his day, the abbot
in Fulda, later archbishop in Mayence, Hrabanus Maurus, a scholar of the
distinguished Alcuin, the founder of the first library and of the first
large convent school in Germany. The fact that he was particularly a
theologian and Latinist did not prevent his honouring and loving the
tongue of his fathers and of his race. He encouraged its study and use,
and he succeeded in bringing about that sermons were preached in the
churches in the Teutonic dialect of the church-goers. That a Latin
scholar with so wide a horizon as his also was able to comprehend what
the majority of his colleagues failed to understand--viz., that some
value should be attached to the customs of the fathers and to the old
memories from heathen times--should not surprise us. One of the proofs
of his interest in this matter he has given us in his treatise _De
invocatione linguarum_, in which he has recorded a Runic alphabet,
and added the information that it is the alphabet used by the Northmen
and by other heathen tribes, and that songs and formulas for healing,
incantation, and prophecy are written with these characters. When
Hrabanus speaks of the Northmen, he adds that those who speak the German
tongue trace their descent from the Northmen. This statement cannot be
harmonised with the hypothesis concerning the Asiatic descent of the
Franks and other Teutons, except by assuming that the Teutons on their
immigration from Asia to Europe took a route so far to the north that
they reached the Scandinavian peninsula and Denmark without touching
Germany and Central Europe, and then came from the North to Germany. But
of such a view there is not a trace to be found in the middle age
chronicles. The Frankish chronicles make the Franks proceed from
Pannonia straight to the Rhine. The Icelandic imitations of the
hypothesis make Odin and his people proceed from Tanais to Saxland, and
found kingdoms there before he comes to Denmark and Sweden. Hrabanus has
certainly not heard of any such theory. His statement that all the
Teutons came from the North rests on the same foundation as the native
traditions which produced the sagas in regard to the descent of the
Longobardians, Saxons, and Swabians from the North. There still remains
one trace of the Frankish migration saga, and that is the statement of
Paulus Diaconus, made above, concerning the supposed identity of the
name Ansgisel with the name Anchises. The identification is not made by
Paulus himself, but was found in the Frankish source which furnished
him with what he tells about the ancestors of Charlemagne, and the
Frankish source, under the influence of the hypothesis regarding the
Trojan descent of the Franks, has made an emigration leader mentioned in
the popular traditions identical with the Trojan Anchises. This is
corroborated by the Ravenna geographer, who also informs us that a
certain Anschis, Ansgisel, was a Teutonic emigration leader, and that he
was the one under whose leadership the Saxon tribes left their old
homes. Thus it appears that, according to the Frankish saga, the Franks
originally emigrated under the same chief as the Saxons. The character
and position of Ansgisel in the heathen myth will be explained in No.
123.
18.
JORDANES ON THE EMIGRATION OF THE GOTHS, GEPIDAE,
AND HERULIANS. THE MIGRATION SAGA OF THE
BURGUNDIANS. TRACES OF AN ALAMANNIC MIGRATION
SAGA.
The most populous and mighty of all the Teutonic tribes was during a
long period the _Gothic_, which carried victorious weapons over all
eastern and southern Europe and Asia Minor, and founded kingdoms between
the Don in the East and the Atlantic ocean and the Pillars of Hercules
in the West and South. The traditions of the Goths also referred the
cradle of the race to Scandinavia. Jordanes, a Romanised Goth, wrote in
the sixth century the history of his people. In the North, he says,
there is a great ocean, and in this ocean there is a large island called
Scandza, out of whose loins our race burst forth like a swarm of bees
and spread over Europe. In its capacity as cradle of the Gothic race,
and of other Teutonic tribes, this island Scandza is clearly of great
interest to Jordanes, the more so since he, through his father Vamod or
Alano-Vamut, regarded himself as descended from the same royal family as
that from which the Amalians, the famous royal family of the East Goths,
traced their ancestry. On this account Jordanes gives as complete a
description of this island as possible. He first tells what the Greek
and Roman authors Claudius Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela have written about
it, but he also reports a great many things which never before were
known in literature, unless they were found in the lost _Historia
Gothorum_ by Cassiodorus--things which either Jordanes himself or
Cassiodorus had learned from Northmen who were members of the large
Teutonic armies then in Italy. Jordanes also points out, with an air of
superiority, that while the geographer Ptolemy did not know more than
seven nations living on the island Scandza, he is able to enumerate many
more. Unfortunately several of the Scandinavian tribe-names given by him
are so corrupted by the transcriber that it is useless to try to restore
them. It is also evident that Jordanes himself has had a confused notion
of the proper geographical or political application of the names. Some
of them, however, are easily recognisable as the names of tribes in
various parts of Sweden and Norway, as, for instance, Vagoth,
Ostrogothae, Finnaithae (inhabitants of Finved), Bergio, Hallin,
Raumaricii, Ragnaricii, Rani. He gives us special accounts of a
Scandinavian people, which he calls sometimes Svehans and sometimes
Svethidi, and with these words there is every reason to believe that he
means the Swedes in the wider or more limited application of this term.
This is what he tells about the Svehans or Svethidi: The Svehans are in
connection with the Thuringians living on the continent, that Teutonic
people which is particularly celebrated for their excellent horses. The
Svehans are excellent hunters, who kill the animals whose skins through
countless hands are sent to the Romans, and are treasured by them as the
finest of furs. This trade cannot have made the Svehans rich. Jordanes
gives us to understand that their economical circumstances were not
brilliant, but all the more brilliant were their clothes. He says they
dressed _ditissime_. Finally, he has been informed that the Svethidi are
superior to other races in stature and corporal strength, and that the
Danes are a branch of the Svethidi. What Jordanes relates about the
excellent horses of the Swedes is corroborated by the traditions which
the Icelanders have preserved. The fact that so many tribes inhabited
the island Scandza strengthens his conviction that this island is the
cradle of many of the peoples who made war on and invaded the Roman
Empire. The island Scandza, he says, has been _officina gentium_,
_vagina nationum_--the source of races, the mother of nations. And
thence--he continues, relying on the traditions and songs of his own
people--the Goths, too, have emigrated. This emigration occurred under
the leadership of a chief named Berig, and he thinks he knows where
they landed when they left their ships, and that they, like the
Longobardians, on their progress came in conflict with the Vandals
before they reached the regions north of the Black Sea, where they
afterwards founded the great Gothic kingdom which flourished when the
Huns invaded Europe.
The saga current among the Goths, that they had emigrated from
Scandinavia, ascribed the same origin to the Gepidae. The Gepidae were a
brave but rather sluggish Teutonic tribe, who shared the fate of the
Goths when the Huns invaded Europe, and, like the Goths, they cast off
the Hunnish yoke after the death of Attila. The saga, as Jordanes found
it, stated that when the ancestors of the Goths left Scandza, the whole
number of the emigrants did not fill more than three ships. Two of them
came to their destination at the same time; but the third required more
time, and therefore the first-comers called those who arrived last
Gepanta (possibly Gepaita), which, according to Jordanes, means those
tarrying, or the slow ones, and this name changed in course of time into
Gepidae. That the interpretation is taken from Gothic traditions is
self-evident.
Jordanes has heard a report that even the warlike Teutonic Herulians had
come to Germany from Scandinavia. According to the report, the Herulians
had not emigrated voluntarily from the large islands, but had been
driven away by the Svethidi, or by their descendants, the Danes. That
the Herulians themselves had a tradition concerning their Scandinavian
origin is corroborated by history. In the beginning of the sixth
century, it happened that this people, after an unsuccessful war with
the Longobardians, were divided into two branches, of which the one
received land from the emperor Anastasius south of the Danube, while the
other made a resolve, which has appeared strange to all historians,
viz., to seek a home on the Scandinavian peninsula. The circumstances
attending this resolution make it still more strange. When they had
passed the Slavs, they came to uninhabited regions--uninhabited,
probably, because they had been abandoned by the Teutons, and had not
yet been occupied by the Slavs. In either case, they were open to the
occupation of the Herulians; but they did not settle there. We
misunderstand their character if we suppose that they failed to do so
from fear of being disturbed in their possession of them. Among all the
Teutonic tribes none were more distinguished than the Herulians for
their indomitable desire for war, and for their rash plans. Their
conduct furnishes evidence of that thoughtlessness with which the
historian has characterised them. After penetrating the wilderness, they
came to the landmarks of the Varinians, and then to those of the Danes.
These granted the Herulians a free passage, whereupon the adventurers,
in ships which the Danes must have placed at their disposal, sailed over
the sea to the island "Thule," and remained there. Procopius, the East
Roman historian who records this (_De Bello Goth._, ii., 15), says that
on the immense island Thule, in whose northern part the midnight sun can
be seen, thirteen large tribes occupy its inhabitable parts, each tribe
having its own king. Excepting the Skee Finns, who clothe themselves in
skins and live from the chase, these Thulitic tribes, he says, are
scarcely to be distinguished from the people dwelling farther south in
Europe. One of the largest tribes is the Gauts (the Goetar). The
Herulians went to the Gauts and were received by them.
Some decades later it came to pass that the Herulians remaining in South
Europe, and dwelling in Illyria, were in want of a king. They resolved
to send messengers to their kinsmen who had settled in Scandinavia,
hoping that some descendant of their old royal family might be found
there who was willing to assume the dignity of king among them. The
messengers returned with two brothers who belonged to the ancient family
of rulers, and these were escorted by 200 young Scandinavian Herulians.
As Jordanes tells us that the Herulians actually were descended from the
great northern island, then this seems to me to explain this remarkable
resolution. They were seeking new homes in that land which in their old
songs was described as having belonged to their fathers. In their
opinion, it was a return to the country which contained the ashes of
their ancestors. According to an old middle age source, _Vita
Sigismundi_, the Burgundians also had old traditions about a
Scandinavian origin. As will be shown further on, the Burgundian saga
was connected with the same emigration chief as that of the Saxons and
Franks (see No. 123).
Reminiscences of an Alamannic migration saga can be traced in the
traditions found around the Vierwaldstaedter Lake. The inhabitants of
the Canton Schwitz have believed that they originally came from Sweden.
It is fair to assume that this tradition in the form given to it in
literature has suffered a change, and that the chroniclers, on account
of the similarity between Sweden and Schwitz, have transferred the home
of the Alamannic Switzians to Sweden, while the original popular
tradition has, like the other Teutonic migration sagas, been satisfied
with the more vague idea that the Schwitzians came from the country in
the sea north of Germany when they settled in their Alpine valleys. In
the same regions of Switzerland popular traditions have preserved the
memory of an exploit which belongs to the Teutonic mythology, and is
there performed by the great archer Ibor (see No. 108), and as he
reappears in the Longobardian tradition as a migration chief, the
possibility lies near at hand, that he originally was no stranger to the
Alamannic migration saga.
19.
THE TEUTONIC EMIGRATION SAGA FOUND IN TACITUS.
The migration sagas which I have now examined are the only ones
preserved to our time on Teutonic ground. They have come down to us from
the traditions of various tribes. They embrace the East Goths, West
Goths, Longobardians, Gepidae, Burgundians, Herulians, Franks, Saxons,
Swabians, and Alamannians. And if we add to these the evidence of
Hrabanus Maurus, then all the German tribes are embraced in the
traditions. All the evidences are unanimous in pointing to the North as
the Teutonic cradle. To these testimonies we must, finally, add the
oldest of all--the testimony of the sources of Tacitus from the time of
the birth of Christ and the first century of our era.
[Illustration: THOR, THE THUNDER GOD. (_From the painting by M. E.
Winge._)
Thor was reputed to be the son of Odin, surnamed the All-father, and
Jorth, the earth. He was the source of wisdom, patron of culture and of
heroes, friend of mankind and slayer of giants. He always carried a
heavy hammer, called The Crusher, with which he fought, assisted by
thunder and lightning. From Thor is derived the middle English words
Thursday (Thorsday) and Thunder.]
The statements made by Tacitus in his masterly work concerning the
various tribes of Germany and their religion, traditions, laws, customs,
and character, are gathered from men who, in Germany itself, had seen
and heard what they reported. Of this every page of the work bears
evidence, and it also proves its author to have been a man of keen
observation, veracity, and wide knowledge. The knowledge of his
reporters extends to the myths and heroic songs of the Teutons. The
latter is the characteristic means with which a gifted people, still
leading their primitive life, makes compensation for their lack of
written history in regard to the events and exploits of the past. We
find that the man he interviewed had informed himself in regard to the
contents of the songs which described the first beginning and the most
ancient adventures of the race, and he had done this with sufficient
accuracy to discover a certain disagreement in the genealogies found in
these songs of the patriarchs and tribe heroes of the Teutons--a
disagreement which we shall consider later on. But the man who had done
this had heard nothing which could bring him, and after him Tacitus, to
believe that the Teutons had immigrated from some remote part of the
world to that country which they occupied immediately before the birth
of Christ--to that Germany which Tacitus describes, and in which he
embraces that large island in the North Sea where the seafaring and
warlike Sviones dwelt. Quite the contrary. In his sources of information
Tacitus found nothing to hinder him from assuming as probable the view
he expresses--that the Teutons were aborigines, autochthones, fostered
on the soil which was their fatherland. He expresses his surp
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