Vol. 3 Preface

Among all branches of Teutonic race there shew themselves innumerable varieties of dialect, each possessing an equal right; so likewise in the people's religion we must presuppose a good many differences: the difficulty is to reconcile in every case the local bearings of the matter with the temporal. If the more numerous testimonies to Wuotan in Lower Germany would lead us to infer that he was held in higher esteem by Saxons than by Alemanns or Bavarians, we must remember that this (apparent) preference is mainly due to the longer continuance of heathenism in the north; that in the first few centuries after conversion the south too would have borne abundant witness to the god. Upper Germany has now scarcely a single name of a place compounded with Wuotan (p. 158), Wuotan's day has there given place to 'midweek,' and just there the legend of his 'wütende heer' is found more alive than elsewhere! It would be a great thing to ascertain whereabouts---whether among Goths---the designation Faírguneis prevailed above that of Thunrs. Any conclusion drawn from the proximity of the Lithuanian Perkunas, the Slavic Perun, may seem bold, though it is precisely to these two nations that the Gothic and High German incline more than the Low German, even in language: witness Hruodo and Kirt (p. 248). It seems an easier matter to trace the distinction between Zio and Eru, and follow it up to Swabia and Bavaria; yet, if my conjecture be right, the Cheruscans must of all races have had the best claim to Eru. Even the name of the plant Ziolinta (p. 1193) is worth taking into account. Sahsnôt, Seaxneát, was assuredly an eponymous deity of the Saxons. How do Paltar and Phol stand to one another, as regards the nations that were devoted to them? Phol appears to point, now eastward, now westward. An important mark of distinction is the change of gender in the same name of a god among different tribes. In Gothic the masc. fráuja (lord) was still current as a common noun, in O.H. German the fem. frouwâ, in O. Saxon only the masc. frôho, frô, AS. freá, so that Goths and Saxons seem to have preferred the god, High Germans the goddess; in the North both Freyr and Freyja are honoured alike. But the North knows only the god Niörðr, and the Germans living on the opposite side of the Baltic only the goddess Nerthus. The relation of Zio to Zisa, perhaps Isis (p. 298), demands further explanation. No doubt the numerous aliases of that female deity, who is not yet forgotten in modern legend, are due to differences of race: Holda shews herself in Hesse, Thuringia, and North Franconia, Berhta in Vogtland, East Franconia and sundry tracts of Swabia, where likewise a male Berhtold encounters us. There is no trace of either goddess in Lower Germany, but a dame Freke now turns up in the Mark, and dame Gaue haunts Mecklenburg between Elbe and Weser. Yet in ancient times Holda, as Huldana, must have reached far westward to the Rhine, and, if the Ver-hilden-straet (p. 285) was named after her, into the Netherlands, reminding us of the kinship between Chatti and Batavi; while the Carolingian Berhta Pedauca and the Biört of the Edda would betoken a similar extension of Berhta's worship. We must pay regard to the almost universal rush of nations towards the West: even Isis and her Suevian ship we managed to trace as far as the Ardennes.---But, beside the deities, other portions of mythology must also have their say. Himins and himil, himel and heven are discussed on p. 698, the lapse of Himil into Gimill on p. 823; in Hesse is the borderland between Wights and Elves, the one belonging to Franconian, the other to Saxon soil: the Low Saxon hüne is out of use in High Germany, even in O.H. German the hûni seem to be only Huns, not giants, and the M. H. German hiune had a very limited circulation, being never heard now in Hesse, Swabia or Bavaria, unless we are to look for it in the name of the disease (p. 1163).

Such investigations and similar ones capable of indefinite expansion, some of them not even dreamt of at present, may gradually become important to the internal aspect of our own Mythology: a still more urgent task is, to establish its relation to the Religions of Other Nations; nay, this is really the hinge on which mythological study in general turns. But seldom have their mutual influences or differences been so successfully explored, as to educe therefrom a safe standard for the treatment of any one mythology.

Every nation seems instigated by nature to isolate itself, to keep itself untouched by foreign ingredients. Its language, its epos feel happy in the home circle alone; only so long as it rolls between its own banks does the stream retain its colour pure. An undisturbed development of all its own energies and inmost impulses proceeds from this source, and our oldest language, poetry and legend seem to take no other course. But the river has not only to take up the brooks that convey fresh waters to it from hill and mountain, but to disembogue itself at last in the wide ocean: nations border upon nations, and peaceful intercourse or war and conquest blend their destinies in one. From their combinations will come unexpected results, whose gain deserves to be weighed against the loss entailed by the suppression of the domestic element. If the language, literature and faith of our forefathers could at no time resist at all points the pressure of the Foreign, they have one and all undergone the most disruptive revolution by the people's passing over to Christianity.

We had long plagued ourselves to derive all languages from the far-off Hebrew; it was only by closely studying the history of the European idioms near at hand, that a safe road was at length thrown open, which, leaving on one side for the moment the Semitic province, leaads farther on into the heart of Asia. Between the Indian and Zendic languages and the majority of those which spread themselves over Europe there exists an immediate tie, yet of such a kind as makes them all appear as sisters, who at the outset had the same leading features, but afterwards, striking into paths of their own, have everywhere found occasion and reason to diverge from each other. Amongst all languages on earth points of contact are to be found, any discovered rule compels us to admit exceptions, and these exceptions are apt to be misleading; but the rule teaches us to fix upon fundamental distinctions, for which we can only expect a very slow resolution into a higher unity. While there is every appearance of Europe not having contained any aborigines, but received its population gradually from Asia, yet the figures in our chronologies do not reach back to the actual descent of all human speech from one original source; and the strata of our mountains bear witness to a higher prehistoric age, whose immeasurable breadth no inquirer can penetrate. Then, over and above the original kinship necessarily underlying the facts taught by comparative philology, we must also assume in the history of European tongues some external, accidental and manifest interchanges of influence between them, which, powerful and resultful as they may have been, are to be carefully distinguished from that more hidden agency: we have only to call to mind the former influence of Latin and the later of French on almost all the other languages, or the origin of English from a mixture of Teutonic and Romance elements. The difference between the two kinds of likeness shews itself especially in the fact that, while the originally cognate elements of a language remain flexible and intelligible, the borrowed ones, because they are borrowed, shew an indistinctness of form and a crippling of movement. Hence all cognate words are rooted in the essential life of a language, about which the borrowed ones mostly tell us nothing: how lifeless, for example, has our adj. rund become! whereas the French rond, from it comes, can still carry us back to roond, reond, the Span. redondo, It. rotondo, and so to rotundus, and therefore rota. Again, cognate forms are seldom confined to one stem or branch, but run impartially through several: e.g. our numerals; our ist, Goth. ist, Lat. est, Gr. esti, Skr. asti; the Goth. sa, sô, þata, AS. se, seo, þæt, ON. sa, sû, þat, Gr. o, h, to, Skr. sa, sâ, tad; all of them consonances which did not arise, like that 'rund,' at some definite assignable period, but were there from time immemorial.

These examples are well known, and are here chosen merely to make good for Mythology also a distinction between material that was common from the first and that which was borrowed and came in later. Our scholarship, disloyal to its country, inured to outlandish pomp and polish, loaded with foreign speech and science, miserably stocked with that of home, was prepared to subordinate the myths of our olden time to those of Greece and Rome, and something higher and stronger, and to overlook the independence of German poetry and legend, just as if in grammar also we were free to derive the German ist from est and esti, instead of putting the claims of these three forms perfectly on a par. Giving the go-by to that really wonderful and delightful consonance, whose origin would have had to be pushed far back, they struggled, however much against the grain, to hunt up any possible occasions of recent borrowing, so as to strip their country of all productive power and pith. Not content even with handing over our mythology to foreign countries, they were eager, with as little reason, to shift its contents into the sphere of history, and to disparage essentially unhistoric elements by expounding them as facts.

Why hold our tongues about the mischief and the caprices of this criticism? Mone, an honest and able explorer, whose stenuous industry I respect, will often come half-way to meet the truth, then suddenly spring aside and begin worrying her. By hook or by crook the Reinhart of our apologue must be resolved into a historical one, the Siegfried of our heroic lay into Arminius, Civilis and Siegbert by turns, Tanhäuser into Ulysses. In all that I had gathered by a careful comparison of original authorities on sorcery and witches, he of course can see neither circumspectness nor moderation, who gravely imagines that witchcraft was once a reality, who from the minutes of a single trial in 1628 jumps at once to the Greek Dionysia, makes the devil Dionysus, and warms up again the stale explanation of hexe (witch) from Hecate. This is allowing the devil a great antiquity in comparison with those heroes; to me Reinhart and Isengrim seem to reach up far higher than the ninth century, and Siegfried even beyond Arminius, therefore a long way before the time when the term devil first came into our language. Several designations of the giants are unmistakably connected with the names of surrounding nations; Mone's view applies them to Indians, Frisians, Persians, according as the words ent and wrise suit his purpose; let no one be startled to find that Caucasus comes from our Gouchsberg (cuckoo's hill)!

A later work, whose merits I acknowledge on p. 1070n., comes in not unseasonably here. Soldan agrees in my opinion on the atrocity and folly of the witch-persecutions, but he would dispute the connection of witches with German mythology, and derive all our magic and demonology from the Greeks and Romans again. The resemblance of the mediæval notions to classical antiquity strikes him so forcibly, that he seems to think, either that Germany and all barbarian Europe till their early contact with the Romans were without any magic or belief in ghosts, or that such belief suddenly died out. The Walburgis-night, it seems, was suggested by Roman lares praestites, even the practice of bidding for fiefs by floralia and averruncalia, and the cutting of henbane by the fruges excantare: why may not our es also come from id, our auge from oculus, our zehn from decem? At that rate Wuotan might without more ado be traced back to Jupiter, Holda to Diana, the alp to the genius, all German mythology to Roman, and nothing be left us of our own but the bare soil that drank in the foreign doctrine.

When two nations resemble each other in language, manners, and religion, such agreement is welcome proof of their age, and is not to be perverted to conclusions in favour of borrowing or influence which any peculiarity in them may suggest. But the stamp of authority will be given to research, when side by side with the string of consonances there also runs an inevitable string of divergences and transpositions.