Chapter 21

The little coccinella septempunctata has mythical names in nearly all our dialects: NHG. gotteskühlein (God's little cow), (88) gotteskalb, herrgotteskalb, herrgotts-thierchen (-beastie), herrgots-vöglein (-birdie), Marienvöglein, Marienkäfer, Marienkälblein; Engl. ladycow, ladybird, ladyfly; Dan. Marihöne (-hen); Boh. krawka, krawicka (little cow). In Up. Germany they call the small goldbeetle (chrysomela vulg.) fraua-chüeli, ladycow (Tobler 204b) and 'der liebe froue henje,' our lady's hen (Alb. Schott's Deutsche in Piemont 297), in contrast to herra-chüeli the coccinella (Tobler 265ª), though the name probably wavers between the two. By the same process which we observed in the names of plants and stars, Mary seems to have stept into the place of Freyja, and Marihöne was formerly Freyjuhœna, which we still have word for word in Froue henje, and the like in Frauachüeli. And of Romance tongues, it is only that of France (where the community of views with Germany was strongest) that has a bête a dieu, vache a dieu; Span. and Ital. have nothing like it. At all events our children's song:

Marienkäferchen, flieg aus! (fly away)

dein häuschen brennt, (burns)

dein mütterchen flennt, (weeps)

dein väterchen sitzt auf der schwelle; (sits on the threshold)

flieg in 'n himmel aus der hölle! (into heaven out of hell)
must be old, for in England also they sing: 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, and your children will burn [all but little Bessie that sits in the sun].' With us too the children put the Marienkäfer on their finger, and ask it, like the cuckoo: 'sunnenkieken (sun's chicken), ik frage di, wo lange schal ik leven?' 'Een jaar, twee jaar,' etc., till the chafer flies away, its home being in the sun or in heaven. In Switzerland they hold the goldbeetle on their hand, and say: 'cheferli, cheferli, flüg us! i getter milech ond brocka ond e silberigs löffeli dezue.' Here the chafer, like the snake, is offered 'milk and crumbs and a silver spoon thereto.' In olden times he must have been regarded as the god's messenger and confidant (see Suppl.).

Lastly the bee, the one insect that is tamable and will live among men, and whose wise ways are such a lesson to them, may be expected to have old mythic associations. The bee is believed to have survived from the golden age, from the lost paradise (Chap. XXX.); nowhere is her worth and purity more prettily expressed than in the Servian lay of the rich Gavan, where God selects three holy angels to prove mankind, and bids them descend from heaven to earth, 'as the bee upon the flower,' kako pchela po tsvetu (Vuk. 1, 128 ed. 2). The clear sweet honey, which bees suck out of every blossom, is a chief ingredient of the drink divine (p. 319), it is the ndeia edwdh of the gods, Hymn. in Merc. 560; and holy honey the first food that touches the lips of a new-born child, RA. 457. Then, as the gift of poesy is closely connected with Oðhrœris dreckr, it is bees that bring it to sleeping Pindar: melissai autw kaqeudonti prosepetonto te kai eplasson proj ta ceilh tou khrou arch men Pindarw poiein asmata egeneto toiauth, Pausan. ix. 23, 2. And therefore they are called Musarum volucres (Varro de re rust. 3, 16). A kindermärchen (no. 62) speaks of the queen-bee settling on her favourite's mouth; (89) if she flies to any one in his sleep, he is accounted a child of fortune.

It seems natural, in connexion with these bustling winged creatures, to think of the silent race of elves and dwarfs, which like them obey a queen. It was in the decaying flesh of the first giant that dwarfs bred as maggots; in exactly the same way bees are said to have sprung from the putrefaction of a bullock's body: 'apes nascuntur ex bubulo corpore putrefacto,' Varro, 2, 5; 'amissas reparari ventribus bubulis recentibus cum fimo obrutis,' Plin. 11, 20 (23); conf. Virg. Georg. 4, 284-558. Ov. Met. 15, 364. To this circumstance some have ascribed the resemblance between apis bee and Apis bull, though the first has a short a, and the last a long. What seems more important for us is the celebrated discovery of a golden bullock's-head amongst many hundred golden bees in the tomb of the Frankish king Childeric at Doornik (repres. in Eccard's Fr. or. 1, 39. 40).

Natural history informs us that clouds of bees fall upon the sweet juice of the ash-tree; and from the life-tree Yggdrasil the Edda makes a dew trickle, which is called a 'fall of honey,' and nourishes bees (Sn. 20). (90)

The Yngl. saga cap. 14 says of Yngvifrey's son, king Fiölnir (Siolm in the O. Swed. chron.), that he fell into a barrel of mead and was drowned; so in Saxo, king Hunding falls into sweet mead, and the Greek myth lets Glaucus drown in a honey-jar, the bright in the sweet. According to a legend of the Swiss Alps, in the golden age when the brooks and lakes were filled with milk, a shepherd was upset in his boat and drowned; his body, long sought for, turned up at last in the foaming cream, when they were churning, and was buried in a cavity which bees had constructed of honeycombs as large as town-gates (Mém. de l'acad. celt. 5, 202). Bees weave a temple of wax and feathers (Schwenk's Gr. myth. p. 129. Herm. Müller's Griechenth. 455), and in our Kinderm. no. 107, p. 130-1 a palace of wax and honey. This reminds us of the beautiful picture in Lohengrin p. 191 of Henry 2.'s tomb in Bamberg cathedral:

Sus lît er dâ in sîner stift

di'er het erbouwen, als diu bin ir wift

ûz maneger blüete würket, daz man honc-seim nennet.
(he lies in the minister he built, as the bee her web from many a blossom works, that we name honey-juice). In the various languages the working bee is represented as female, OHG. pîa, Lat. apis, Gr. melissa, Lith. bitte, in contrast with the masc. fucus the drone, OHG. treno, Lith. tranas; but then the head of the bees is made a king, our weiser (pointer), MHG. wîsel, OHG. wîso, dux, Pliny's 'rex apium,' Lith. bittinis, M. Lat. chosdrus (Ducange sub v.), yet AS. beomôdor, Boh. matka. The Gr. esshn is said to have meant originally the king-bee, and to have acquired afterwards the sense of king or priest, as megissa also signified priestess, especially of Demeter and Artemis. Even gods and goddesses themselves are represented by the sacred animal, Zeus (Aristaeus) as a bee, Vishnu as a blue bee. A Roman Mellona (Arnob. 4, 131), or Mellonia (Aug. de civ. Dei 4, 24), was goddess of bees; the Lith. Austheia was the same, jointly with a bee-god Bybylus. Masculine too was the Lett. Uhsinsh, i.e., the hosed one, in reference to bees' legs being covered with wax ('waxen thighs,' Mids. Dream 3, 1). From all these fancies, mostly foreign, we might fairly make guesses about our own lost antiquities; but we should have to get more exact information as to the legend of the Bee-wolf (pp. 369, 673) and the mythic relationship of the woodpecker (Lith. melleta) to the bee (see Suppl.).




ENDNOTES:

88. The Russ. 'Bózhia koróvka, has exactly the same meaning---Trans. [Back]

89. Sederunt in ore infantis tum etiam Platonis, suavitatem illam praedulcis eloquii portendentes. Plin. 11, 17 (18). [Back]

90. Ceram ex floribus, melliginem e lacrimis arborum quae glutinum pariunt, salicis, ulmi, arundinis succo. [Back]