Zoological Mythology Volume I Part 10

The morning sun emerges safe and sound from the flames of the morning aurora; the evening sun pa.s.ses through those flames, and dies.

The tenth Calmuc tale gives us the myth of the two brothers; the rich one avaricious and wicked, and the poor one virtuous. The story ends in a manner a.n.a.logous to that of the dying adulterer, who, as we have seen in the _Tuti-Name_, bites off his mistress's nose.

The eleventh story is a variation of that of the lover, or husband, who abandons or kills his wife, after having despoiled her of her riches; but instead of the waters of the sea, we have here the sea of sand, the sandy desert, in a cavity of which is deposited the young girl, shut up in a chest, the same chest which in other popular tales drifts about on the surface of the water.[331] But into the place where it was laid, the chest having been taken away by a young prince, a tiger enters; the unworthy husband turns up himself to abstract the chest, and is torn to pieces by the tiger. The sterile night is a vast desert, a sea of waters, a sea of sand; the sun-prince frees the aurora from the waters, out of the well, or the cavern of the desert; the tiger kills the monster-husband.

In the twelfth tale, a thief steals the enchanted gem from the prince; he throws the gem to the ground, the consequence of which is that the prince's nose bleeds so excessively that he dies. The nose is the most prominent part of the face, the most conspicuous and splendid part; it is the gem of the sun-prince. The sun falls at night upon the mountain; the gem falls to the ground; the prince's nose bleeds; he has struck his nose against the ground, and it bleeds. The sun-prince dies, and the evening sky is tinged red, blood-colour; the sun, who loses his blood in the evening, dies.

The thirteen Calmuc stories are followed by ten Mongol tales; in all, twenty-three, of which the sixteenth, however, is lost.

The fourteenth tells us of the rich and avaricious man whose poor brother goes in despair into the forest to die upon a rock; but his presence not being known to the spirits, he has the good luck to come upon a hammer and a sack, of which the former, when struck against an object, produces whatever is desired by the owner, the latter being used to carry away the objects thus obtained, this hammer and this sack having been left there by the hobgoblins. Thus the poor brother becomes rich, and is envied by the other, who goes to the same place, in hopes of experiencing the same good fortune; but as he does not hide himself, the hobgoblins see him, and believing him to be the man who stole the hammer and the sack, avenge themselves upon him by lengthening his nose, and covering it with protuberances. To this myth may perhaps be referred the origin of the Italian expression, "Restare con uno o due palmi di naso," to remain with one or two spans of the nose; that is to say, to be laughed at, and with the gesture by which derision is accompanied, and which is addressed to the man who is laughed at, by applying one or sometimes both hands to the end of one's nose. The poor brother, now rich, visits the miserly brother, who has a long nose covered with protuberances, and knocks them off with his hammer. He had already knocked off eight, and only one remained, when, at his wife's request, he desisted and left the last one on. The rich man's wife, seeing how the protuberances had been taken off by striking them, tries herself to remove the last one, and strikes it with a hammer; but not calculating her aim accurately, she splits her husband's head open, and he dies.

In the seventeenth Mongol story, an old man and an old woman have nine cows. The old man is fond of meat, and eats all the calves; the old woman, on the other hand, has a great liking for milk and b.u.t.ter, with which she satiates herself. When the old man has eaten all the calves, he thinks that one cow more or less will not affect his wealth; reasoning thus, he eats all the cows except one, which he spares out of respect for the whim of his old wife. But one day that the old woman is out, the old man cannot resist the temptation, and kills the last cow. His wife returns, is angry, and abandons him, upon which he throws after her one of the cow's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The woman, in grateful memory of the milk and b.u.t.ter she liked so much, takes it up and goes up the mountain, where she strikes the cow's breast against the summit of the rock, and thereupon there flow out milk and b.u.t.ter in rivers.

She satisfies her appet.i.te, and then remembers that her husband is perhaps dying of hunger, feeding, as he does, upon ashes; she therefore, but secretly, throws b.u.t.ter into the house down the chimney, and then disappears. In this attention the old man recognises the love of his wife, and resolves upon the plan of following her footsteps during the night upon the snow. He comes to the mountain, sees the breast, and cannot resist the temptation it offers; he eats it, and takes the b.u.t.ter away with him. The old woman wanders about till she comes upon a herd of deer, who pasture freely, and who, instead of fleeing, let themselves be milked. Again, she thinks of her husband, and she throws deer's b.u.t.ter down the chimney. The old man follows her over the snow, finds her near the deer, and kills them in his inordinate pa.s.sion for meat. The old woman continues to wander about, and stumbles this time upon a cavern of the wild beasts, guarded by a hare. The hare defends her from the wild beasts; but she then conceives the idea of giving her husband a stick, and throws it down the chimney whilst he is taking the ashes up with a spoon. He follows her, and comes to the cave of the wild animals, who, seeing them arrive together, tear them to pieces. Here again we have the myth of the sun and the aurora (or the fine season); the hare who guards the cavern and tames the wild beasts is, as we shall see in the chapter which treats of it, the moon, the cows and the deer being the same. The ferocious animals of the cavern of night rend both sun and aurora (or fine season), both old man and old woman.

The eighteenth Mongol story is too indecent for me to relate, or for the reader to peruse; suffice it to say, that we have in it a comic variation of the Amazon heroine, and that this heroine calls herself Surya (the sun) Bagatur (to which corresponds the bagatir; or hero, of the Russians).

In the twentieth tale we have a calf and a lion's whelp brought up together by a lioness upon the same milk.[332] When grown, the lion goes and inhabits the forest, or the desert, and the bull, the mountain illumined by the sun, meeting as good friends and brothers to drink the same water. This good understanding is, however, put an end to by their perfidious uncle the fox, who persuades the lion to believe that the bull designs to kill him, and adds that when the bull in the morning strikes the ground with his horns, and bellows loudly, will be the sign that he is going to carry his purpose into effect; he then tells the bull that the lion has a similar design against him. In the morning, when the two brothers, bull and lion, go to drink the same water, they approach each other with suspicion, engage in battle and kill each other, the fox, or wolf, being the only one to benefit by the quarrel. This is a form of the story of the two twilights (the Acvinau), which we shall ill.u.s.trate in the following chapter.

The beginning of the twenty-first Mongol story offers a new a.n.a.logy with the apologue of Perrette.[333] A poor father and mother find a little lamb's-wool; they consult together, and resolve with the wool to make cloth, and with the cloth to buy an a.s.s. Upon this a.s.s they will place their little child, and go a-begging; by begging they will become yet richer, and buy another a.s.s. Of the two, a young a.s.s will be born. The youngster immediately exclaims that if a young donkey is born he will ride upon it; whereupon his mother answers, "You would break its back," when, accompanying these words with the movement of a stick, she strikes the youngster's head with it, and kills him; with him the fine projects of the poor parents also vanish.

In the last of the stories of _Siddhi-kur_, which is joined to the three legends of the grateful animals, the disguises, and the laughing princess, a man uses the horns of his dead buffalo to grub up the roots upon which he lives in exile.

The history of _Ards.h.i.+-Bords.h.i.+_ also contains several interesting stories.

It begins with a challenge among the children who keep the king's cows to run a race from the summit of a mountain. The first who comes to the winning-post is honoured as a king by his companions for that day, and acts and judges on the spot where the race takes place as a real king; indeed, he judges and decides as a court of final appeal on cases which have not been well examined by the great king of the country. He unmasks and convicts robbers and false witnesses acquitted by the king as innocent, and sends a missive to the king, recommending him to be more cautious in future in his judgments, or else to resign his royal dignity. The great king wonders at the extraordinary wisdom of the king of the children, and ascribes his preternatural sagacity to the magical influence of the mountain where the children who guard the cows play their games. On another occasion, the king of the children, by his craftiness, detects a demon in one whom the king had thought to be the legitimate son of his minister. The discovery is made by means of a challenge to the minister's real son and his demoniacal counterfeit to get into a small jug at hand. The real son cannot; but the supposit.i.tious makes himself small and enters the jug, in which the king of the children shuts him up with a diamond, and administers thereupon fresh reproof to the great king for his carelessness. The great king then visits the mountain of the children, and sees a golden throne with thirty-two steps emerge from the ground; upon each step there is a wooden puppet (the moon). The great king has the throne carried into his palace, and endeavours to ascend it; the puppets arrest him, and one of them tells him that this was once the throne of the G.o.d Indras, and afterwards of King Vikramadityas. The great king inclines himself in reverence, and one of the puppets begins to narrate the history of Vikramadityas.

The history of Vikramadityas, narrated by the puppets, refers to a wise child, born of the wife of the king, after she had eaten a cake made of earth mixed with oil, and dissolved in water in a porcelain vase (of which cake the servant-maid eats the remainder). The young Vikramadityas pa.s.ses his infancy in the forests, where he learns all the arts, not excluding the art of thieving, taught him by the most experienced robbers, as well as every kind of mercantile fraud; by cheating, he becomes possessed of an enchanted gem which was in the hip of a dead man, and of a child who has the faculty of understanding the language of the wolves, and who calls himself son of the wolves, but was, in fact, born by the roadside of the maid who had eaten the rest of the cake; this child is nursed by his mother, and although at first ill-favoured, becomes in the long run very handsome. Vikramadityas afterwards kills the king of the demons in battle, in which it is remarkable that as many new demons arise to combat him as there are pieces into which the hero cuts the demon, until the hero multiplies himself in his turn, and to every demon opposes a lion sprung from his own body. Vikramadityas mounts upon a throne where those who had sat before him had all perished, each after a reign of twenty-four hours, because they had omitted to offer up funeral sacrifices to the dead during the night; Vikramadityas, with his companion, the son of the wolf, fulfils the sacred duty, and escapes death.

In the same story, which reminds us of the _?ibhavas_ and the four cups and the cow, four young shepherds, one after another, work at the same piece of wood; one gives it the general shape of a woman, the second colours it, the third imparts the features peculiar to the feminine form, and the fourth gives it life; they then dispute for her person.

The case is referred to the king; a wise man p.r.o.nounces that the two first who worked the wood are the father and mother, the third is the priest, the fourth, who gave it life, is the legitimate husband. Thus the four become three, by making a group of the first two.

Next comes the legend of the wife who, taking her husband by the feet, makes him fall into a fountain, because she hears a melodious voice, perhaps an echo of her own, which charms her; she sees a monster instead, and bewails her lost husband. In zoological mythology, the fable of the dog who, at the sight of his own shadow, lets the meat drop into the river, is a.n.a.logous to this legend, which, however, we introduce here, only because of its relation to the similar stories of the wife who kills her husband, and of the husband who kills his wife by throwing her into the water, already vaguely hinted at in the Vedic hymns.

The last of the tales contained in the history of _Ards.h.i.+ Bords.h.i.+_ shows us, on the other hand, a far too complaisant wife. A king has a daughter, named Light of the sun, who is to be seen by no one. The daughter asks to be allowed to go out into the city to walk on the 15th of the month (at full moon); this granted, the king orders every one to stay that day in his house, and all the doors and windows to be shut; and capital punishment is the penalty of disobeying the king's command. (The like occurs again in the British legend of G.o.diva, the Countess of Mercia, in the eleventh century.) A minister, Ssaran by name (moon), cannot repress his curiosity, and observes her from a balcony; the girl makes signs to him, inviting him to join her; the wife of the inquisitive minister interprets the signs to him, and urges him to overtake the beautiful girl, giving him, at parting, a pearl of recognition. Light of the sun and Light of the moon meet at the foot of a tree, and spend the night until sunrise in amorous dalliance. One of the persons employed to guard the princess discovers this intrigue, and denounces it before the king; the wife of the minister Ssaran ascertains, by means of the pearl, that her husband is in danger; she rejoins him, disguises and disfigures him, suggesting a formula of oath by which Light of the sun swears that it was the monster, and the monster only she embraced; which seeming impossible to the king and courtiers, the minister Ssaran and Light of the sun are acquitted. (The aurora, or the sun, hides during the night, and no one sees, no one is allowed to see her; the G.o.d Lunus shows himself; he remains during the night with the sun, or with the solar aurora, whom no one can see during the night; the G.o.d Lunus then transforms and disfigures himself, so that he becomes unrecognisable, invisible; the guilty one glides away, and escapes; it then seems impossible that the G.o.d Lunus, who is no longer seen, can have been with the light of the sun; their loves having come to an end, the adulterers being separated, their guilt is no longer believed, their innocence is recognised, and the morality of the myth is left to take care of itself as best it can.)

But the Calmuc and Mongol stories _Siddhi-kur_, and the history of _Ards.h.i.+ Bords.h.i.+_, being, as they are, only paraphrases of Hindoo tales, would not alone suffice to prove the derivation from the zoological legends of Aryan mythology of the oral Turco-Finnic tradition, properly speaking. We must, therefore, search for the proofs of their influence in other quarters as well.

A Turanian story of the south of Siberia[334] combines together several of the mythical subjects which we are already acquainted with.

A poor old man and woman have three sons; the three sons go upon the mountain to dream; the two eldest dream of riches, and the third dreams that his father and mother are lean camels, his brothers two hungry wolves running towards the mountains, while he himself, between the sun and the moon, wears the morning star upon his forehead. The father orders the brothers to kill him; they dare not do so; they only expel him from the house, and kill the dog instead, the blood of which they take to their father, who, thinking it is his son's, says they have done well. The young man wanders about till he comes to a hut where a lame old man and a blind old woman are eating out of a golden cup, which of itself fills with meat as they empty it (the moon). The hungry youth helps himself to some of this meat, but the old man finds, as he continues to eat the food, that some one has put his teeth into it; with a hook, which he whirls around him, he clutches hold of the young man, who begs for his life, pledging himself to be the eye of her who has no eyes, and the foot of him who has no feet. This proposal pleases the old couple, and they adopt him as their son; he makes himself a bow and a wooden arrow, and goes to hunt wildfowl for their support. The old man lends him his iron-grey horse, one day old, but advises him to ride him only by day; the young man, thinking that by night he conceals treasures, cattle, and people, disobeys, and rides by night. What the horse then does we shall see in the next chapter. The youth fights and vanquishes the demon, by fastening one of his lips to the heavens, and the other to the earth; the defeated demon advises him to rub himself with the fat of his stomach; inside his stomach he will find a casket of silver, inside that a casket of gold, and inside that another casket of silver; he is to take it and throw it into the sea of milk. From the monster's stomach, cut open, come forth innumerable animals, men, treasures, and other objects. Some of the men say, "What n.o.ble man has delivered us from the black night? what n.o.ble man has shown us the clear day?" The youth finds in the caskets money and a white handkerchief, which he puts into his pocket; from the last casket come forth more men, animals, and valuables of every kind; he drives the white cattle before him and returns home, where the old couple are asleep. He opens the handkerchief, and finds in it the old woman's eyes; whilst he is smoking near the fire, the old people waken, see him, and embrace him. The old man then endows him with the power of transforming himself into a fox, a wolf, a lion, a vulture, and other shapes, at will. He goes, to find for himself a wife, to the residence of the prince Ai-Kan; the latter promises to give his daughter to whoever will bring him the necessary amount of gold. It is in the shape of a vulture[335] that the young man sets out to search for it; he then wins the young maiden who has the gold, and she, who is herself the daughter of Ai-Kan, says to him, "Thou art my husband." After various other transformations, in one of which the two lean camels reappear, _i.e._, his two parents, of whom he had dreamt, whom he loads with a sack, he ends by taking to himself another wife, the daughter of Kun-Kan, and he lives now with one, now with the other, to whom he gives the flesh of his own infanticide father to eat.

Let us recapitulate the moments of this significant legend:--1st, We have the presage, the dream of the mountain-peak; 2d, The three brothers, the third of whom, predestined to good fortune, the others wish to sacrifice; 3d, The lame and the blind in the forest; 4th, The hero's hunt; 5th, The struggle with the monster of night; 6th, The treasures, spiritual and material, which come out of the monster; 7th, The cattle in conjunction with the sea of milk; 8th, The pa.s.sage of the hero from the milky sea to the fireside, from the alba to the aurora, from the whitish sky to the reddish one; 9th, The awakening of the sleepers, and restoration of sight to the blind, whilst he sits by the fire, whilst the sun is united to the aurora; 10th, The transformation of the hero himself; 11th, Winning his bride, by procuring the necessary amount of gold; 12th, His marriage of two wives; 13th, His revenge on his persecuting father. The legend is in itself an epic poem, and we can only regret that the Altaic story-tellers did not give it a more artistic form than that in which it appears in the excellent collection of Radloff.

Another interesting Turanian story, in the same collection, which preserves several traces of the primitive myth, is another version of the story of the hero who solves the riddle proposed by his father-in-law, and thus wins his wife. A father has three sons; the first-born dreams that their cow has devoured a wolf; he goes to see, and finds it is true (the aurora destroys the night). We have already seen that, as the third brother is the wise child, so the first-born of the three is often the one who possesses the secret of solving riddles. The father of the three brothers wishes to obtain a wife for his first-born son, and the bride's father, to give her up, demands that the bridegroom's father should come to take her, arriving, the first time, with a fur-coat and without one (in the morning the old man, by the advice of the eldest son, departs wearing a coat of fur which seems to be one, but is not, being in reality a coat of mail), and coming, the second time, without touching the road, yet not off the road, on horseback, yet without horses (the old man, by the advice again of his first-born son, arrives at the father-in-law's abode, going on the side of the road, and riding on a stick; thus he obtains permission to take the bride away for his son).

Professor Schiefner gives a Finnic variation of the same story. A king orders the son of a peasant to come neither by day nor by night, neither by the road nor by the road-side, neither on horseback nor on foot, neither dressed nor naked, neither inside nor outside. The intelligent boy makes a robe of goat's skin, goes to the city lying in the bottom of a coffin, during the morning twilight, having a sieve fastened to one foot, and a brush to the other, and stops on the doorstep of the antechamber, with one leg out and the other in.

Such was the humour, and such the wisdom of our fathers; ingenuity was measured by skill in solving astronomical riddles. Now the riddles have taken another form; they are strokes of diplomacy, amorous hieroglyphs, ethical ambiguities, metaphysical nebulosities, which we, the men of progress, must solve; but not wis.h.i.+ng to acknowledge our inferiority in acuteness to the children of the legends, we are fain to persuade ourselves that the new riddles are more obscure than the ancient.

In the Vedic riddles proposed to one another by the aurora and the sun, we have seen how they were solved in the morning by the nuptials of the guesser and the guessee. Thus in the two riddles which we have just described, the son of the old man and the child solve the riddle in the morning. As to the sieve, the brush, and the coffin, they are mythical furniture of great interest and obvious import. The nocturnal sky is the great coffin; to sweep the sky of night, we must have a brush; to sunder the good grain from the bad during the night, as the cruel mother-in-law commands, we must have a sieve; the child-sun arrives, in the twilight, in the bottom of the coffin, at the doorstep of the royal palace, and presents to the maiden aurora (the Vedic cleaner or purifier) the brush and the sieve. The sun, at twilight, is neither in nor out. In the second Scottish story of Mr J. F. Campbell, the giant commands the hero, among other things, to cleanse, in one day, the stables which had not been cleansed for seven years (Herakles and Augeias).

But let us continue our subject, for the path is a long one.

A Mongol tradition, contained in the _Mongol Crestomathy_ of Papoff,[336] speaks of the boy who comes riding upon a black ox, instead of in a coffin.

We have seen above the cow who eats the wolf; in another Altaic legend we find an old woman who gives up her seven azure (dark-coloured) cows to be eaten by the seven wolves, in order that the latter may spare the child Kan Pudai, whom she had found at the foot of a tree; meanwhile the child, who has fed upon two hundred hares,[337] has become strong, and breaks his iron cradle (the iron sky of night is the cradle of the young sun); from the horns of six roebucks he makes himself a bow; from the skin of a colossal marine animal (the cloud, the gloomy one), he makes a string for the bow (the string of the Hindoo bow is also called _go_, _i.e._, cow, as a cloud in the sky, and as being formed from the hide of a cow); he rides upon the azure calf (the dark calf, which recalls our attention to the black ox, and leads us to conclude the colossal animal to have been a cow), and subdues and tames it; he then comes to a field of snow, upon which he breathes a black and numbing wind, and where he finds the seven wolves; he ties them to the tail of his calf, and drags them along the ground till they die. The boy continues his wild beast hunt; he kills the black and fat ones, and leaves the yellow and lean ones alone. He goes into a black sea, and erects there a black castle, into which he receives both the old woman who had sustained him, and his azure (_i.e._, dark-coloured) calf. Thereafter the young Kan Pudai, applying himself to warfare, forsakes or exchanges his calf for a horse.

We shall see in the next chapter what he does with his horse;--suffice it to notice here, that, in the end, he meets the black bull, who will one day be the king of the Alta. The soul of the black bull takes refuge in a red thread in the middle of the rainbow (in the popular belief of the East the rainbow was supposed to be a bridge, a road traversed by the souls of mortals); the young Kan Pudai transfixes it with his arrows. He wins the white cattle, kills the monstrous Kara Kula, and, taking the latter's wife and daughter with him, returns home; and for seven days there is eating, drinking, and festivity in the house of Kan Pudai. But up to this point it is not said that he has espoused the daughter and the wife of Kara Kula. Kan Pudai is, on the contrary, pa.s.sionately enamoured of Taman oko, the daughter of the sky (duhitar divas, or daughter of the sky, is the name usually given to the aurora in the Vedic hymns), and ascends, in order to secure her and make her his wife, to the third heaven (it is the third step of Vish?us; it is the third brother, the sun of the third night-watch, who carries off the palm against the gloomy monster). In order to become worthy of the daughter of the sky, Kan Pudai has to kill two monsters; to scatter ashes on the field of victory, and lead away from it the white cattle; to catch the three bears; to take the three black bulls and make them swallow three hills; to take the tiger and give it the gra.s.s of the three mountains to eat; to kill the whale in the azure sea (all different forms of one and the same mythical and heroic battle); and, finally, to play upon the mountain-peak with the golden-haired monster Andalma. He then obtains his bride, and returns with her to his own country, where he hunts, and makes war, and vanquishes all his enemies, until he grows old; he then renounces all except his old companion (the old sun and the old aurora meet again in the evening).

Here evidently the mythology is really zoological.

In the complicated legend of Ai-Kan, we have in the brother Altyn Ayak, who sleeps in the form of a golden cup, and who awakens to help Ai-Kan, a figure which, though not the same as, is similar to, that of the sleeping brother k.u.mbhakar?as (conch-ear) in the _Ramaya?am_, who awakens to help Rava?as. We have the inebriating liquor which gives strength to the hero, who is resuscitated three times from death, after having been the food of dogs; the wolves who devour Sary-Kan, or the fair-haired prince; the hero (the sun) who beats the wife (the aurora) given him by the two brothers (the Acvinau); the friendly dog and cat; the golden cup in which the brother of Ai-Kan is shut up asleep, and which falls into the sea; the grateful animals which search for the cup; the gem found in the stomach of a fish (from the whale of the nocturnal ocean the gem comes forth); and the consequent awakening of the sleeping Altyn Ayak.

The following is from an Altaic saga, in the collection of Radloff:--Beyond the sea, on a rock surrounded with treasures, a dwarf girl is brought up, against whom aggressive warriors can prevail nothing. She sends all enemies away, after loading them with gold and silver, and placing on their heads part of the hair of her forehead, which proves to be sufficient to cover seven men. In this marvellous hair, in this enchanted maiden, and in the warriors who come by sea, who does not recognise the veil of the maiden aurora of the Vedas, who uncovers her bosom before the sun her husband, and the sea which the warrior-sun crosses, and from which he emerges to come to the aurora?--who does not recognise the golden fleece, Jason, Medea, the Argonauts of h.e.l.lenic tradition?

In the Finnic mythology of the _Kalevala_[338] also, we have upon the mountain a good and pure hostess, a generous giver, from the golden windows of whose house are observed the women who give the wildfowl; but in this Finnic representation, it is not the heroic girl-aurora, it seems to me, we recognise, but the moon, Diana the huntress (the German _h.e.l.ljager_), who also appears on the mountain-peak, surrounded by the stars of the nocturnal forest, where the wildfowl is found, which she can therefore lavish upon the hero.

The Finns wors.h.i.+p a thundering G.o.d, united with the clouds, who has the thunderbolt for his sword, and who is called Ukko,[339] father of Vainamoinen, the valorous and wise hero, who speaks in the womb of his mother, who performs prodigies when yet a child, and who produces the sun and the moon.

This child-hero occurs again in their dwarf-G.o.d (_pikku mies_), who, although, like the Hindoo Vish?us, he is but a span long, wields in his hand an axe the length of a man, with which he cuts down an oak-tree that no one had yet been able to bring to the ground. The sun-hero is little; but his ray, his thunderbolt, his weapon, his hand, lengthen themselves, extend themselves as far as the dwarf-hero can desire, in order to destroy the enemy, who wears here the well-known aspect of the trunk of a tree, or of a dark forest. The woodcutter is therefore a favourite figure in popular tradition. And the fact that Vainamoinen, having grown old and truthful in speech, cuts down in the _Kalevala_,[340] by the help of the little G.o.d, the prodigious oak, shows us that this little G.o.d is a new and junior form, a younger and victorious brother, or self-reproduction of the erewhile child-hero Vainamoinen, who has lived his life of a day. The valiant child-sun of morning has become the experienced old sun of evening; but as this old sun is not strong enough to cut down the oak-tree, under whose shadow he loses himself, he is obliged to become a child again to develope the requisite amount of strength; he needs a younger brother, a hero or dwarf-G.o.d, to free him from the evil shades of the forest of night. To this end he also invokes the sun and the moon to illumine the forest, and also the bear (the middle brother)--(in the _Kalevala_, of the three heroes it is the bear Ilmarinen who shows the greatest strength, and who wins the virgin for his bride)--in order that by his strength he may root up the tree. But to root up the tree is all that bears can do, while Vainamoinen wishes it to be cut down; and so this victorious enterprise is intrusted to the dwarf-G.o.d. Thus, without explicit mention of their names, we find the three brothers described in the entirely mythical epopee of the Finns.

Alongside of the dwarf, by force of ant.i.thesis, there arises, even in the Finnic mythology, the idea of a giant, a t.i.tan who amuses himself with uplifting and hurling rocks and mountains. The cloud, the monster of darkness, being represented as a mountain, the monster inhabiting this country must fight by means of the mountain itself. The cloudy mountain moves; it is a giant monster that moves it; it is the second brother, the strong brother, the son of the cow, the bear, who amuses himself with it, who shakes, carries, and throws it like a weapon. And such mythical battles must have seemed so much the more natural in the age in which the greater number of the myths were conceived and produced, as we know it to have been the age which archaeologists call the age of stone. The sun, as a dwarf, destroys the vast cloud, the vast darkness, viewed as a giant.

But battles are not always going on in the heavens; even the wild animals of the gloomy forest become tame and rest themselves; music fills the soul with calm sentiments. Therefore even the warrior Gandharvas of the Hindoo Olympus are transformed into expert musicians, who entrance the very G.o.ds with wonder. The song of the Sirens attracts and seduces the traveller; the lyre of Orpheus draws after it mountains, trees, and animals; the harp of Vainamoinen, in the _Kalevala_, makes the wolf forget his ferocity, the bear his wildness, the fish his coldness. And it is grief which is the first inspirer of song; the first stanza of the poet Valmikis had its origin in the sorrow he felt upon seeing a bird bereft of its companion.

Orpheus (the Thracian sun) sings and plays for grief, when the serpent (the shade of night) has bitten and thrown into the gloomy regions his sweet bride Eurydice (the aurora), and moves the demons to pity; the harp of Vainamoinen is also born of sorrow.[341]

The epopee of the Finns contains, moreover, several other myths cognate with those of Aryan mythical tradition;--such as the resuscitated hero; the winning of the maiden by display of heroism; the bride heroically won and afterwards cut in pieces; the cup of abundance, or the cornucopia (the Sampo); the golden cradle; the marvellous vessel in which the hero crosses the sea; the three sisters, of whom one gives black milk, one white, and one red (night, the alba or moon, and aurora); the invulnerable s.h.i.+rt; the magician who makes children of gold and silver; and others of secondary importance,[342] but all tending to prove that formerly the Turanian and Aryan races, in their neighbouring abodes, were originally much more similar to each other than they now appear, on account of partly diversity of language, and partly their different degrees of civilisation.

I have just named the Finnish Sampo as a cup of abundance or cornucopia; it does, in fact, yield marvellous abundance to whoever possesses it, and wherever it falls. It is made of the feather of a swan, or of a duck (the swan and the duck are, as we shall see, confounded together in tradition, and the duck, like the hen, is a symbol of abundance), of a tuft of wool, of a grain of corn, and of chips from a spindle, all evident symbols of abundance; and it becomes so large that it has to be carried by a hundred-horned ox (reminding us of the horns of the cow which spin). The ox bears abundance upon its horns, it yields abundance from its horns. The cornucopia is, in my mind, unmistakably implied in these mythical data.

The same mythical correspondence which we have found to exist between the Finnic epos and the various legendary Aryan traditions is observable between the latter and the Esthonian popular tales. In the collection of Frederic Kreuzwald[343] we find numerous proofs of this correspondence.

In the first story we have, in a hut in the forest, three sisters, of whom the youngest is the most beautiful. The old witch, her step-mother, persecutes her, and always gives her filaments of gold to spin, hiding from time to time the gold she has spun in a secret room.

During the summer the old woman goes out of the house, no one knows where, after having apportioned their respective tasks to the three sisters. While the old woman is out, a young prince, having lost himself in the forest, finds his way to the hut, and becomes enamoured of the youngest of the three sisters. The young couple speak to each other of love in the light of the moon and of the stars; while the old king, impatient at the absence of his son, falls into grief, and sends everywhere to look for him. After three days he is found; before going back to the palace, he secretly promises to the youngest sister that he will return. Meanwhile the old woman comes back, finds the work badly done, curses, threatens, and maltreats the girl. Early in the morning, while the old woman and the two elder sisters are slumbering, the maiden slips out, and leaves the house. During her childhood she had learned the language of birds; accordingly, when she meets a crow, she salutes him by the name of "bird of light," and sends him as a messenger to the young prince, to warn him not to come back to see her, on account of the fury of the old woman. The prince then names her another trysting-place, and the young couple meet under a tree, between the second and third crowing of the c.o.c.k; and when the sun rises, they flee away together. The old witch causes them to be followed by a ball made of nine evil herbs, and carried by malignant winds. The fugitives are overtaken on the banks of a river, where the ball strikes the prince's horse; it rears up on its hind legs, and the girl falls off into the river, into the hands of a marine monster; upon which the prince is struck by a disease which no one can cure. By eating the flesh of a hog, the prince acquires a knowledge of the language of birds; he sends the swallows as messengers to the magician of Finland, that he may teach him the way to free a girl who has been transformed into a pond-rose (lotus-flower). The answer, instead of being brought by the swallows, is brought by an eagle. The prince must become a shrimp, in order to enter the water without being drowned; he must detach the lotus by its root, draw it along the surface of the water to the bank, near a stone, and p.r.o.nounce these words, "From the pond-rose, a maiden--from the shrimp, a man." The crow confirms the eagle's words. The prince hears a song issue from the rose; he then determines to deliver the girl. The two young people emerge together from the water. The maiden is ashamed of being naked, and the prince goes to procure nuptial robes for her; after which he conducts her to the palace in a beautiful chariot, where a joyous and gorgeous wedding-festival is celebrated. Soon afterwards the old witch dies, to appear again in the form of a cat, which is taken by the tail and flung into the fire. In the witch's house are found mountains of spun gold, which serve for the dowry of the three sisters. We have already said that the three sisters correspond to the three brothers, and the youngest sister to the youngest brother. The epithet of _young_ is often given to the Vedic aurora, whom the sun marries. Here the prince marries the youngest of the three sisters; the morning aurora is united to the sun. Towards night she falls into the water; it is the witch (night) who throws her in; the hog which the prince (the sun) eats we shall see to be a figurative representation of the nocturnal monster, or the moon. Eating the hog, staying in the forest of night, the prince learns the language of birds. The prince frees the maiden from the waters; the sun delivers the aurora from the gloomy ocean of night, and robes her in his splendour, causing the witch of night to be burned in the flames of the aurora, and taking from the witch's abode the spun gold or golden fleece.

In the third Esthonian story, a woman, called mother-of-gold, bears, by the favour of a dwarf, three dwarf-sons at the same time, who become three heroes. The first is the seer (the wise brother), the second has a ready arm (the strong brother), the third runs swiftly in the race (a quality distinctive of the third brother, Ar?unas, in the _Mahabharatam_, and which is applicable to the victorious sun of morning, who wins the race, together with the aurora).

A variation of the story relating to the youngest sister and the dwarf is that of the girl seven years old, the wise girl (the aurora), in the fourth Esthonian tale, who, being persecuted by her step-mother, retires into the forest (the night). While there, it seems to her that she is in heaven, where, in a house of crystal and pearls, she is received by a well-dressed woman of gold (the fair-haired moon). The girl asks the golden woman to be allowed to take care of the cattle, like the cowmaid aurora. In the history of _Ards.h.i.+ Bords.h.i.+_ we have seen the wise puppet. This form of the wise girl, the dressed girl of wood, occurs again in the Esthonian story; in which she is made of wood from the forest, of three anchovies, of bread, of a black serpent, and of the blood of the girl herself, to whom the image has a great likeness, and which may be beaten by the old step-mother without being hurt. From the forest-tree, wood, or wooden box of the night, with the juice of the black serpent of night and the blood of the girl aurora of evening, comes forth the maiden aurora of morning, the wise, the speaking puppet, the puppet who guesses the riddles. The girl who comes out of wood is represented as a wooden puppet; more frequently the puppet is the moon, the wise fairy who comes out of the forest. In the same story we have the magic rod which produces a c.o.c.k upon the mountain, beside which a tablecloth spreads itself out, while the chairs range themselves in their places, and the dishes are filled of their own accord. The story ends with the usual marriage between the beautiful maiden, and a king's son returning from the chase (or the son who comes out of the forest of night, viewed as infested by ferocious animals).

In the sixth Esthonian tale, the poor girl finds a woman in a white robe (the moon), adorned with gold, upon a rock near a fountain, who announces her approaching marriage with a youth as poor as herself; but the good fairy G.o.dmother--for in the legends the G.o.dmother is represented as good, as the stepmother is wicked--promises to make them both rich and happy. She calls herself the lady of the waters, secret wife of the wind, and she judges the criminals who present themselves at her tribunal (Proserpina or Persephone).

In the seventh tale, a boy nine years of age, the third son of two poor people, goes out to be a cowherd; his master treats him well, but his mistress gives him more floggings than bread. One day the young cowherd is unfortunate enough to lose a cow; he searches for it all through the forest, but in vain. He re-enters the house with the cattle, after the sun has set some time. The observant eye of his mistress perceives at once that there is a cow missing; she beats the boy without pity, and sends him out to look for it, threatening to kill him if he returns without it. He wanders through the forest; but when the sun arises from out the bosom of the dawn, he resolves to stay out of the house, and not to return to his persecutor (the young morning sun flees from the old and perverse night). In the evening, the boy finds an old dwarf, who is his host during the night (the moon), and who says to him, "When the sun rises to-morrow, carefully observe the spot in which he rises. Thou must go in that direction, so that every morning thou may'st have the sun before thee, and every evening the sun behind thee. Thus thy strength will increase more and more every day." How can one indicate better the apparent course of the solar hero, or of the sun in the night? The hero, in order to go towards the morning sun, must necessarily have the sun of evening behind him. The old dwarf also gives him a sack and a little barrel, in which he will always find the food and drink he requires; but he recommends him never to eat or drink more than is necessary, that he may have to give to a hungry bird or a thirsty wild beast. He also leaves him a rolled-up leaf of burdock, upon which, by rolling it out, he will always be able to cross water (a new form of the cup). We know how the Hindoos represented their G.o.d as floating upon a lotus-leaf in the midst of the waters, and how Padma?as (born of the lotus-flower, or the rose of the waters, which shuts during the night) was one of the names of Brahman; here we have the G.o.d or hero shutting himself up in the flower, from which he afterwards comes out. In the chapters on the Serpent and the Frog we shall again see how the G.o.d sometimes shuts himself up in a monstrous form in this flower, the rose, on account of a curse from which he is to be freed by a beautiful maiden.

We have seen how the Esthonian girl, who was by the curse of the old woman thrown into the water, was transformed into a water-rose or lotus-flower, and delivered by the young prince. The Esthonian boy finds himself before a small lake; he throws the leaf in, and it becomes a magical boat, which carries him over. Meanwhile he has become strong. Upon the mountain he sees a serpent, a tortoise, and an eagle, all three of enormous dimensions, approaching to attack him, with a man upon a black horse, which has wings on its feet, in the rear of them. He kills the serpent and the tortoise, but the eagle flies away. The man with the black horse takes the boy into his house, and appoints him to look after the dogs, that they may not get loose from their chains, a danger against which the man provides by making twelve colossal oxen fetch rocks upon rocks, to repair the damage done by the dogs. The rocks, touched by a magical rod, arrange themselves upon the car drawn by the oxen. At last, by the advice of the eagle, he steals his master's horse, and departs to sojourn among mankind, taking a wife with him.

In the eighth Esthonian story too, the third brother is the cunning one.

His two elder brothers, after the death of their father, despoil him of his share of the inheritance, and he is reduced to wander alone and impoverished about the world in quest of good fortune. He falls in with a woman who complains to him that her husband regularly beats her when she is unable to procure for him the things he wants, which he asks for in the form of a riddle. The third brother solves the enigma for the woman (the moon), who, in grat.i.tude, gives him provisions for his travels. He then comes to a palace, where the king is engaged in celebrating a summer festival, and he undertakes to provide and prepare the feast. A magician presents himself at the festival in the shape of an old man, and asks to taste the food. The young man suspects him, but, seeing a ring upon his finger, he consents to allow him if he gives him a pledge. The magician vows that he has nothing to give. The youth asks for his ring, and the old man in his gluttony at once gives it up; upon which the youth, who, along with the ring, has taken all the magician's strength away, first binds and derides him, and then has him beaten by seven strong men. The old man breaks the ropes and disappears; however, the young man, having the ring in his hands, possesses the means of tracking his footsteps and making him his. (This is the usual disc, la.s.so, or bridle which is now in the hands of the hero, now in those of the monster.) The youth follows the magician underground. The latter, it appears, is served by three maidens, who, when they perceive that the sorcerer has lost his ring, and that they have a young man for companion, enjoy themselves with him while the magician is asleep. The youth learns from them that the old wizard also possesses a sword which can destroy armies, and a magical rod which can create a bridge to span the sea; these, therefore, he steals, and departs, returning by a wonderful bridge thrown over the sea to the palace whence he had started. It seems to him as if his journey had lasted only two nights, instead of which a year has pa.s.sed.[344] He finds on his arrival his two brothers in the king's service, one as coachman and the other as a valet, both enriched because they have received the pay due to their younger brother for having prepared the great feast. The young man now engages himself in another capacity, in a species of service especially dear to the young hero, next to those of stable-boy and cowherd; that is to say, he becomes under-cook of the king. (In the _Vira?a-Parvam_ of the _Mahabharatam_, it is the second of the brothers who disguises himself as a cook, in order to prepare good sauces and substantial food for the king whose guest he is; the elder brother is disguised as a Brahmanas, a wise adviser; the third brother, Ar?unas, the agile, the swift one, pretends to be a eunuch, is given in exchange for a woman, and teaches dancing, music, and singing in the gynecium. Of the two sons of the Acvinau, one becomes a groom, the other a cowherd.) His brothers continue to dislike him, and because he boasts to them that he had seen in h.e.l.l golden birds, they induce the king to send him to h.e.l.l in order to procure them. He accomplishes this undertaking with great difficulty, and brings the birds in a sack made of spiders' webs, which is so strong that the birds enclosed in it cannot extricate themselves. In the same sack, during another expedition, the young man brings from h.e.l.l many precious objects of gold and silver. In compensation, he only asks of the king to send the princess, his daughter, to listen for one evening to the conversation of his two brothers the coachman and the valet. Both boast of having enjoyed to satiety the favours of the princess. The latter, indignant and full of shame, runs to tell the king everything, upon which he arraigns them before him and has them judged. The third brother is named Counsellor; with his enchanted sword he destroys an entire army of enemies, and obtains in reward for his services and his valour the king's daughter to wife.

The ninth Esthonian story presents to us the son of the thunder, who sells his soul to the devil, on condition that the latter serves him for seven years. The time agreed upon is nearly come to an end, and the son of the thunder wishes to escape from him, and profits by an opportunity which has chanced. The devil sees a black cloud, which is a sign of an approaching tempest; he is afraid, hides himself under a stone, and asks the son of the thunder to keep him company. The latter consents; but seeing that the devil is afraid, at each thunderclap he presses his ears and eyes in such a manner as to make him perspire and s.h.i.+ver all over. The devil, believing this to be the effect of the thunder, promises the son of the thunder that he will not only leave him his soul, but give him three other souls, if he will deliver him from the evils which he suffers on account of the thunder, by taking from the thundering G.o.d, the father of the clouds, his weapon (which is also a musical instrument). This weapon, having been ravished from the G.o.d, is taken by the devil into h.e.l.l, into a chamber of iron, shut up within seven castles. A great drought coming upon the earth, the son of the thunder repents of having rendered such a service to the devil; he finds means, however, of informing the thunder-G.o.d where his weapon is concealed. The thunder-G.o.d then becomes a child, and engages himself in the service of a fisherman, near a lake which the devil is accustomed to visit to steal the fishes. He surprises him in the act of robbery, and by the help of a magician takes him prisoner, and has him beaten without pity, until he promises to pay a heavy ransom in money to be let free, the fisherman and his child to accompany him to h.e.l.l itself to receive the sum of money. Arrived in h.e.l.l, the devil entertains them like a gentleman. The child tells the fisherman to ask the devil to show them the musical instrument which he keeps enclosed in the iron room. The devil kindly consents, but cannot draw from the instrument anything more musical than the mewing of a cat or the grunting of a pig. The fisherman then laughs at the devil, and says that his boy can play better. The devil does not believe it, and laughingly gives the instrument, which he calls bagpipes, to the boy.

The latter blows into them and makes such a noise that all h.e.l.l resounds with it, and the devils fall to the earth as if dead. The child then becomes the G.o.d of thunder again, and returns to heaven, where by the noise of his instrument he opens the celestial reservoirs and lets out the beneficent rain. The description of the tempest which occurs in many Vedic hymns is the germ of this interesting myth. The drum or kettledrum thunder is a familiar image in Hindoo poetry, and the Gandharvas, the musician-warriors of the Hindoo Olympus, have no other instrument than the thunder. The conch of the warrior Pa??avas in the _Mahabharatam_, and the famous horn of Orlando (which comes from the golden horn of Odin), are epical reminiscences of thunder.

Orpheus, who in h.e.l.l plays on his lyre and tames the animals, is a more lucid and more perfect form of this Esthonian thunder-G.o.d who plays the bagpipes in h.e.l.l. It is also remarkable how, in harmony with the pastoral bagpipes, in the tenth Esthonian story, which is a variation of the preceding one, the G.o.d transformed into a powerful boy is called a little shepherd or cowherd--another interesting fact, which completes his identification with Orpheus.[345] The magic flute is a variation of the same celestial musical instrument. The magic flute, the bagpipes or wonderful pipe, occurs again in the twenty-third Esthonian story, in which the good Tiidu, by means of it and of his virtue, obtains riches. The magical harp of Gunnar in the Edda has the same marvellous effects.