Chapter 15

According to the Edda (Sæm. 133), Völundr had two brothers Slagfiðr and Egill, all three 'synir Finnakonûngs,ð sons of a Finnish king, whereas the saga transplanted to the North from Germany makes its Vilkinus a king of Vilkinaland. Or can Finna be taken as the gen. of Finni, and identified with that Finn Folcwaldansunu on p. 219? Slagfiðr might seem = Slagfinnr, but is better explained as Slagfiöðr (flap-wing, see ch. XVI, Walachuriun). All three brothers married valkyrs, and Egill, the one that chiefly concerns us here, took Ölrûn (Aliorûna). The Vilk. saga, cap. 27, likewise calls Velint's younger brother Eigill: 'ok þenna kalla menn Ölrûnar Eigil,' (74) but the bride is not otherwise alluded to; this form Eigil agrees with the OHG. Eigill would have been Eigli. Well, this Eigill was a famous archer; at Nidung's command he shot an apple off the head of his own little son, and when the king asked him what the other two arrows were for, replied that they were intended for him, in case the first had hit the child. The tale of this daring shot must have been extremely rife in our remotest antiquity, it turns up in so many places, and always with features of its own. As the Vilkinasaga was imported into Scandinavia in the 13th century, the story of Eigill was certianly diffused in Lower Germany before that date. But Saxo Grammaticus in Denmark knew it in the 12th century, as told of Toko and king Harald Gormsson, with the addition, wanting in Eigill, that Toko after the shot behaved like a hero in the sea-storm. The Icelanders too, particularly the Iomsvîkînga saga, relate the deeds of this Pâlnatôki, but not the shot from the bow, though they agree with Saxo in making Harald fall at last by Tôki's shaft. The king's death by the marksman's hand is historical (A.D. 992), the shot at the apple mythical, having gathered round the narrative out of an older tradition, which we must presume to have been in existence in the 10-11th centuries. To the Norwegian saga of Olaf the Saint (d. 1030), it has attached itself another way: Olaf wishing to convert a heathen man, Eindriði, essayed his skill against him in athletic arts, first swimming, then shooting; after a few successful shots, the king required that Eindriði's boy should be placed at the butts, and a writing-tablet be shot off his head without hurting the child. Eindriði declared himself willing, but also ready to avenge any injury. Olaf sped the first shaft, and narrowly missed the tablet, when Eindriði, at his mother's and sister's prayer, declined the shot (Fornm. sög. 2, 272). Just so king Haraldr Sigurðarson (Harðrâða, d. 1066) measured himself against an archer Hemîngr, and bade him shoot a hazelnut off his Biörn's head, and Hemîngr accomplished the feat (Müller's sagabibl. 3, 359. Thâttr af Hemingi cap. 6, ed. Reykjavik p. 55). Long afterwards, the legend was transferred to a Hemming Wolf, or von Wulfen, of Wewelsflet in the Wilstermarsch of Holstein, where the Elbe empties itself into the sea. Hemming Wolf had sided with count Gerhard in 1472, and was banished by king Christian. The folk-tale makes the king do the same as Harald, and Hemming as Toko; an old painting of Wewelsflet church represents the archer on a meadow with bow unbent, in the distance a boy with the apple on his head, the arrow passes through the middle of the apple, but the archer has a second between his teeth, and betwixt him and the boy stands a wolf, perhaps to express that Hemming after his bold answer was declared a wolf's head. (75) Most appropriately did the mythus rear its head on the emancipated soil of Switzerland: in 1307, it is said, Wilhelm Tell, compelled by Gessler, achieved the same old master-shot, and made the courageous speech; but the evidence of chroniclers does not begin till toward the 16th century, (76) shortly before the first printed edition of Saxo, 1514. Of the unhistorical character of the event there cannot be the slightest doubt. The mythic substratum of the Tell fable shews itself in an Upper Rhine legend of the 15th century (in Malleus malef. pars 2 cap. 16, de sagittariis maleficis) which immediately preceded the first written record of that of Tell: Fertur de ipso (Punchero), quod quidam de optimatibus, cum artis sue experientiam capere voluisset, eidem proprium filium parvulum ad metam poswit, et pro signo super birretum pueri denarium, sibique mandavit, ut denarium sine birreto per sagittam amoveret. Cum autem maleficus id se facturum sed cum difficultate assereret, libentius abstinere, ne per diabolum seduceretur in sui interitum; verbis tamen principis inductus, sagittam unam collari suo circa collum immisit, et alteram balistae supponens denarium a birreto pueri sine omni nocumento excussit. Quo viso, dum ille maleficum interrogasset, 'cur sagittam collari imposuisset?' respondit, 'si deceptus per diabolum puerum occidissem, cum me mori necesse fuisset, subito cum sagitta altera vos transfixissem, ut vel sic mortem meam vindicassem'. This shot must have taken place somewhere about 1420, and the story have got about in the middle part of the 15th century.---Beside the above-mentioned narratives, Norse and German, we have also an Old English one to shew in the Northumbrian ballad of the three merry men, Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesle; this last, whose christian name, like the surname of the first, reminds one of Tell, offers in the king's presence to set an apple on the head of his son, seven years old, and cleft the apple. I suppose that Aegel's skill in archery would be known to the Anglo-Saxons; and if we may push Wada, Weland and Wudga far up into our heathen time, Aegel seems to have an equal claim. The whole myth shows signs of having deep and widely extended roots. It partly agrees even with what Eustathius on Il. 12, 292 tells us, that Sarpedon, a hero of the blood of Zeus, was made when a child to stand up and have a ring shot off his breast without injury to him, an action which entailed the acquisition of the Lycian kingdom (see Suppl.)(77)

With these specimens of particular heroes---crumbs from the richly furnished table of our antiquities---I will content myself, as there are still some reflections of a more general kind to be made.

I started with saying, that in the heroic is contained an exalting and refining of human nature into divine, originally however founded on the affinity of some god with the human race. Now as procreation is a repetition, and the son is a copy of the father (for which reason our language with a profound meaning has avarâ for image and avaro for child); so in every hero we may assume to a certain extent an incarnation of the god, and a revival of at least some of the qualities that distinguish the god. In this sense the hero appears as a sublimate of man in general, who, created after the image of God, cannot but be like him. But since the gods, even amongst one another, reproduce themselves, i.e., their plurality has radiated out of the primary force of a single One (p. 164), it follows, that the origin of heroes must be very similar to that of polytheism altogether, and it must be a difficult matter in any particular case to distinguish between the full-bred divinity and the half-blood. If heroes, viewed on one side, are deified men, they may on the other hand be also regarded as humanized gods; and it comes to the same thing, whether we say that the son or grandson begotten by the god has attained a semi-divine nature, or that the god born again in him retains but a part of his pristine power. We are entitled to see in individual heroes a precipitate of former gods, and a mere continued extension, in a wider circle, of the same divine essence which had already branched out into a number of gods (see Suppl.).




ENDNOTES:

74. Peringskiöld translates 'Egillus sagittarius,' and Rafn. 'Egil den träffende,' but this was merely guessed from the incidents of the story. Arrow is not öl, but ör; Orentil on the contrary, Eigil's son, does seem to have been named from the arrow. Back

75. Schleswigholst. prov. berichte 1798, vol. 2, p. 39 seq. Müllenhof, Schleswigholst. sagen no. 66. Back

76. I suspect the genuineness of the verse, alleged to be by Heinrich von Hünenberg of 1315, which Carl Zay has made known in his book on Goldau, Zurich 1807, p. 41:

Dum pater in puerum telum crudele coruscat

Tellius ex jussu, saeve tyranne, tuo,

pomum, non natum, figit fatalis arundo:

altera mox ultrix te, periture, petet.

H. von Hünenberg is the same who, before the battle of Morgarten, shot a warning billet

over to the Swiss on his arrow (Joh. Müller 2, 37), he was therefore a bowman himself.

Justinger and Johann von Winterthur are silent about Tell; Melchior Russ (d. 1499) and

Petermann Etterlin (completed 1507) were the first who commited the story to writing. Back

77. Similar legends seem to live in the East. In a MS. of the Cassel library containing a journey in Turkey, I saw the representation of an archer taking aim at a child with an apple on its head. Back