Chapter 14

Beside language, the gods have customs in common with men. They love song and play, take delight in hunting, war and banquets, and the goddesses in ploughing, weaving, spinning; both of them keep servants and messengers. Zeus causes all the other gods to be summoned to the assembly (agorh, Il. 8, 2. 20, 4), just as the Ases attend to the þîng (Sæm. 93ª), on the rökstôla, and by the Yggdrasill (Sæm. 1b 2ª 44ª), to counsel and to judge. Hebe, youth, is cupbearer of the gods and handmaid to Here (Il. 5, 722), as Fulla is to Frigg (Sn. 36); the youth Ganymede is cupbearer too, and so is Beyla at the feast of the Ases (Sæm. 67ª); Skîrnir is Frey's shoemaker (81) and messenger, Beyggvir and Beyla are also called his servants (59). These services do no detriment to their own divine nature. Beside Hermes, the goddess Iris goes on errands for the Greek gods (see Suppl.).

Among the gods themselves there is a difference of rank. Three sons of Kronos have the world divided among them, the sky is allotted to Zeus, the sea to Poseidon, hell to Hades, and the earth they are supposed to share between them (Il. 15, 193). These three tower above all the rest, like Hâr, Iafnhâr and Thriði in the Norse religion, the triad spoken of on p. 162. This is not the same thing as 'Wuotan, Donar, Ziu,' if only because the last two are not brothers but sons of Wuotan, although these pass for the three mightiest gods. Then, together with this triad, we become aware of a circle of twelve (p. 26), a close circle from which some of the gods are excluded. Another division, that into old and new gods, does not by any means coincide with this: not only Oðinn and his Ases, but also Zeus and his colleagues, appear as upstarts (21) to have supplanted older gods of nature (see Suppl.).

All the divinities, Greek and Norse, have offices and functions assigned them, which define their dominion, and have had a marked influence on their pictorial representation. In Sn. 27-29 these offices are specified, each with the words: 'hann ræðr fyrir (he looks after),' or 'â hann skal heita til, er gott at heita til (to him you shall pray for, it is good to pray for)'. Now, as any remnants of Greek or Teutonic paganism in the Mid. Ages were sure to connect themselves with some christian saints, to whom the protection of certain classes or the healing of certain diseases was carried over, it is evident that a careful classification of these guardian saints according to the offices assigned them, on the strength of which they are good to pray to, (22) would be of advantage to our antiquities. And the animals dedicated to each deified saint (as once they were to gods) would have to be specified too.

The favourite residence of each god is particularly pointed out in the Grîmnismâl; mountains especially were consecrated to the Teutonic, as to the Greek deities: Sigtýsberg, Himinbiörg, &c. Olympus was peculiarly the house of Zeus (Dioj dwma), to which the other gods assembled (Il. 1, 494); on the highest peak of the range he would sit apart (ater allwn 1, 498. 5, 753), loving to take counsel alone (apaneuqe qewn 8, 10). He had another seat on Ida (11, 183. 336), whence he looked down to survey the doings of men, as Oðinn did from Hliðsciâlf. Poseidon sat on a height in the wooded range of Samos (13, 12). Valhöll and Bilskirnir, the dwellings of Oðinn and Thôrr, are renowned for their enormous size; the one is said to have 540 doors, through any one of which 800 einheriar can go out at once, and Bilskirnir has likewise 540 'golfe'[ON. gôlfr, floor] (see Suppl.).

If now we take in one view the relations of gods and men, we find they meet and touch at all points. As the created being is filled with a childlike sense of its dependence on the creator, and prayers and offerings implore his favour, so deity too delights in its creations, and takes in them a fatherly interest. Man's longing goes forth towards heaven; the gods fix their gaze on the earth, to watch and direct the doings of mortals. The blessed gods do commune with each other in their heavenly abodes, where feasts and revels go on as in earthly fashion; but they are more drawn to men, whose destinies enlist their liveliest sympathy. It is not true, what Mart. Cap. says 2, 9: ipsi dicuntur dii, et caelites alias perhibentur........nec admodum eos mortalium curarum vota sollicitant, apaqeij que perhibentur. Not content with making their will known by signs and messengers, they resolve to come down themselves and appear to men. Such appearance is in the Hindu mythology marked by a special name: avatâra, i.e., descensus. (23)

Under this head come first the solemn car-processions of deities heralding peace and fruitfulness or war and mischief, which for the most, part recur at stated seasons, and are associated with popular festivals; on the fall of heathenism, only motherly wise-women still go their rounds, and heroes ride through field or air. More rarely, and not at regular intervals, there take place journeys of gods through the world, singly or in twos or threes, to inspect the race of man, and punish the crimes they have noticed. Thus Mercury and Oðinn apeared on earth, or Heimdall to found the three orders, and Thôrr visited at weddings; Oðinn, Hœnir and Loki travelled in company; medieval legend makes God the Father seek a lodging, or the Saviour and St. Peter, or merely three angels (as the Servian song does, Vuk 4, no. 3). Most frequent however are the solitary appearances of gods, who, invoked or uninvoked, suddenly bring succour to their favoured ones in every time of need; the Greek epos is quite full of this. Athene, Poseidon, Ares, Aphrodite mingle with the warriors, warning, advising, covering; and just as often do Mary and saints from heaven appear in christian legends. The Lithuanian Perkunos also walks on earth (see Suppl.).

But when they descend, they are not always visible; you may hear the car of the god rush by, and not get sight of him bodily; like ghosts the blessed gods flit past the human eye unnoticed, till the obstructive mist be removed from it. Athene seizes Achilles by the hair, only by him and no other is she seen, Il. 1, 197; to take the succouring deities visible to Diomed, she has 'taken the mist from his eyes, that was on them before' 5, 127:
aclun d au toi ap ofqalmwn elon h prin ephen, ofr en gignwskhj hmen qeon hde kai andra.
       Just so Biarco, in Saxo Gram., p. 37, is unable to spy Othin riding a white steed and aiding the Swedes, till he peeps through the ring formed by the arm of a spirit-seeing woman: a medium that elsewhere makes the elfin race visible to the bleared eyes of man. In another way the gods, even when they showed themselves bodily, concealed their divine nature, by assuming the form of a human acquaintance, or of an animal. Poseidon stept into the host, disguised as Kalchas, Il. 13, 45, Hermes escorted Priam as a Myrmidon warrior 24, 397, and Athene the young Telemachus as Mentor. In the same way Othin appeared as the chariot-driver Bruno (p. 330), or as a one-eyed old man. Metamorphoses of gods into animals in Teutonic mythology take place only for a definite momentary purpose, to which the character of the animal supplies the key; e.g., Oðinn takes the shape of a snake, to slip through a hole he has bored (Sn. 86), and of an eagle, to fly away in haste (86), Loke that of a fly, in order to sting (131), or to creep through a keyhole (356); no larger designs are ever compassed by such means. So, when Athene flies away as a bird, it expresses the divinity of her nature and the suddenness of her departure. But the swan or bull, into which Zeus transformed himself, can only be explained on the supposition that Leda too, and Io and Europa, whom he was wooing, were thought of as swan-maidens or kine. The form of animal would then be determined by the mythus, and the egg-birth of the Dioscuri can be best understood in this way (see Suppl.).

In the Asiatic legends, it seems to me, the manifestations of deity are conceived deeply and purely in comparison, and nowhere more profoundly than in those of India. The god comes down and abides in the flesh for a season, for the salvation of mankind. Wherever the doctrine of metempsychosis prevailed, the bodies of animals even were eligible for avatâra; and of Vishnu's ten successive incarnations, the earlier ones are animal, it was in the later ones that he truly 'became man' (see Suppl.). The Greek and Teutonic mythologies steer clear of all such notions; in both of them the story of the gods was too sensuously conceived to have invested their transformation with the seriousness and duration of an avatâra, although a belief in such incarnation is in itself so nearly akin to that of the heroes being bodily descended from the gods.

I think that on all these lines of research, which could be extended to many other points as well, I have brought forward a series of undeniable resemblances between the Teutonic mythology and the Greek. Here, as in the relation between the Greek and Teutonic languages, there is no question of borrowing or choice, nothing but unconscious affinity, allowing room (and that inevitably) for considerable divergences. But who can fail to recognise, or who invalidate, the surprising similarity of opinions on the immortality of gods, their divine food, their growing up overnight, their journeyings and transformations, their epithets, their anger and their mirth, their suddenness in appearing and recognition at parting, their use of carriages and horses, their performance of all natural functions, their illnesses, their language, their servants and messengers, offices and dwellings? To conclude, I think I see a further analogy in the circumstance, that out of the names of living gods, as Týr, Freyr, Baldr, Bragi, Zeus, grew up the common nounds týr, fráuja, baldor, bragi, deus, or they bordered close upon them (see Suppl.).




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