Vol. 3 Preface

If now we look from these heathen myths to those in a christian dress and of a later time, the connexion between them can be no enigma: that of Perkunos changing into the Saviour has already set us the key. Either Christ and Peter journey out together, or one of the two alone; the fable itself turns about in more than one direction. Antique above all sounds the visit of these godlike beings, like that of Oðinn, to the blacksmith, and here the rewarding of hospitality is not left out. In the Norw. tale no 21, the Saviour, after he has far surpassed his host in feats of skill, yet places three wishes at his disposal, the very same that were allowed the smith of Jüterbok: compare also Kinderm. no. 147, the Netherl. story of Smeke in Wolf's Wodana p. 54 seq., and H. Sachs iv. 3, 70. But in Kinderm. 82, though the player, like the smith, asks for the tree from which one cannot get down, the main point with him is the dice, and the bestowal of them cannot but remind us of Wuotan the inventor of dice (p. 150. 1007), and again of Mercury. In H. Sachs ii. 4, 114 it is only Peter that bestows the wishing-die on a landsknecht at work in the garden. But the Fabliau St. Pierre et le jongleur (Méon 3, 282) relates how the juggler fared after death in hell; though nothing is said of travelling or gift-giving, yet Peter coming down from heaven in a black beard and smug moustaches and with a set of dice, to win from the showman the souls entrusted to his keeping, has altogether the appearances of Wuotan, who is eager, we know, to gather souls into his dwelling; and that tailor who hurled the leg of a chair out of heaven (p. 136) had been admitted by eter. Then another group of legends betrays a new feature, full of significance to us. The Saviour and Peter are travelling together, Peter has to dress the dinner, and he bites a leg off the roast chicken (Wolf's Wodana, p. 180); in the Latin poem of Heriger, belonging to the tenth century, Peter is called in so many words head-cook of heaven, and a droll fellow secretly eats a piece of lung off the roast, as in Märchen no. 81 brother Lustig, travelling with Peter, steals the heart of the roast lamb, and elsewhere the landsknecht or the Swabian steals the liver. This seems to be all the same myth, for the circumstance that Peter plays by turns the culprit and the god whose attendant is in fault, may itself be of very old date: even the heathen stories may have made Oðinn and Loki change places. Loki is all the more a cook, a roast-stealer, and therefore on a line with Peter, as even the Edda imputes to him the eating of a heart (the suspected passage in Sæm. 118b I emend thus: 'Loki ât hiarta lundi brenda, fann hann hâlfsviðinn hugstein konu,' Lokius comedit cor in nemore assum, invenit semiustum mentis-lapidem mulieris), and in our ancient beast-fable the sly fox (Loki still) carries off the stag's heart half-roasted (Reinh. xlviii. lii).----Nor does this by any means exhaust the stock of such tales of travel. Hans Sachs 1, 492 made up a poem in 1557 (and Burc. Waldis 4, 95 before him in 1537) how Peter journeying with Christ wished in the pride of his heart to rule the world, and could not so much as manage the goat which the Lord had given into his hands for one day; again 1, 493 how they arrived at a parting of the roads, and asked their way of a lazy workman lying in the shade of a peartree, who gave them a gruff answer; then they came upon a maidservant, who was toiling in the sweat of her brow, and saw the Lord into the right road: 'be this maid,' said the Saviour to Peter, 'assigned to none other but that man,' (in Agricola , Spr. 354, the maid is idle and the man idustrious). This recalls not only Perkunos with the horse and ox, but the norns or fays passing through the land in the legend quoted on p. 409. Old French poems give the part of short-sighted Peter to the hermit who escorts an angel through the world (Méon. Nouv. rec. 2, 116, and pref. to tome 1); from Mielcke's Lith. sprachl. p. 167 I learn that the same version prevails in Samogitia, and the Gesta Romanor. cap. 80 tell of the angelus et eremita. As the gods lodged with Philemon and Baucis, so does a dwarf travelling in the Grindelwald with some poor but hospitable folk, and protects their little house from the flood (DS. no. 45); in Kinderm. 87 God Almighty lodges with the poor man, and allows him three wishes; to Rügen comes the old beggar-man (= Wuotan), gets a night's lodging from a poor woman, and on leaving in the morning lets her dabble in the wishing business, which turns out ill for the envious neighbour. Thiele (Danmarks folkesagn 2, 306) finds the very same myth in Fünen, and here the traveller is Peter again: the Norwegian tale makes the Lord God and Peter come to dame Gertrude and turn the stingy thing into a bird (p. 673). There is a popular joke about Christ and Peter being on a journey, and the Saviour creating the first Bohemian; and a Netherl. tale (Wodana p. xxxvii) about their putting up at an ogre's house in a wood, and being concealed by his compassionate wife, an incident that occurs in many other tales.

Afzelius (Sagahäfder 3, 155), while he proves the existence of these legends of Christ and Peter in Sweden also, is certainly wrong in pronouncing them mere fabricated drolleries, not founded on popular belief. They are as firmly grounded as anything can be on primitive traditions, and prove with what fidelity the people's memory has cared for our mythology, while MHG. poets despise these fables which they could have sung so admirably, just as they leave on one side dame Berhte and Holde and in general what is of home growth. Yet a couple of allusions may prove, if proof it needs, that this dressing up of the old myth was in vogue as early as the 13^th century: Rumelant (Amgb. 12a) relates of Christ and Peter, how they came to a deep rivulet into which a man had fallen, who was doing nothing to help himself; and a nameless poet (Mone's Anz. 5, 192) tells of a woodcutter whom Peter was trying to hoist into heaven by his mallet, but when on the topmost rung, the mallet's handle came off, and the poor man dropt into hell. The pikeman or blacksmith in the fairy-tale got on better by flinging his knapsack or apron (sledge-hammer in Asbiörnsen p. 136 is still more archaic) into heaven. Of course these wanderings of the Saviour and one of his disciples have something in common with the journeys of Jesus and his apostles in Judea, the dwarf visitor might be compared to the angels who announced God's mercies and judgments to Abraham and Lot, as Philemon and Baucis have a certain resemblance to Abraham and Sarah; but the harmony with heathen legend is incomparably fuller and stronger. The angels were simply messengers; our mythology, like the Greek and Indian, means here an actual avatâra of Deity itself.

Another example, of smaller compass, but equally instructive as to the mingling of christian with heathen ideas, may be drawn from the old legend of Fruoto. The blissful birth of the Saviour, the new era beginning with him, were employed in drawing pictures of a golden age (p. 695. 793 n.) and the state of happiness and peace inseparable from it. The Roman Augustus, under whom Christ was born, closed the temple of Janus, and peace is supposed to have reigned all over the earth. Now the Norse tradition makes its mythic Frôði likwise contemporary with Augustus, Frôði whose reign is marked by peace and blessedness, who made captive giantesses grind heaps of gold for him (p. 531. 871), and had bracelets deposited on the public highway without any one laying hands on them. The poets call gold 'miöl Frôða,' Fruoto's meal (Sn. 146), to explain which phrase the poem Grôttasaungr is inserted in the Edda; and in Sæm. 151a occurs: 'sleit Frôða frið fianda â milli.' Rymbegla says, in his time the fields bore crops without being sown (it is the blessed Sampo-period of the Finns), and metal was found everywhere in the ground; nature joined in extolling the prince, as she does in lamenting his death (p. 591). When Helgi was born, eagles uttered a cry, and holy waters streamed down from the hills of heaven (Sæm. 149a); in the year of Hâkon's election the birds, we are told, bred twice, and twice the trees bore, about which the Hâk. Hâkonarsaga cap. 24 has some beautiful songs. Hartmann, a monk of St. Gall, sings on the entry of the king: 'Haec ipsa gaudent tempora, floreque verno germinant, adventus omni gaudio quando venit optatior.' So deep a feeling had the olden time for a beloved king. And Beda 2, 16 thus describes king Eádwine's time: 'Tanta eo tempore pax in Britannia fuisse perhibetur, ut, sicut usque hodie in proverbio dicitur, etiamsi mulier una cum recens nato parvulo vellet totam perambulare insulam a mari ad mare, nullo se laedente valeret. Tantum rex idem utilitati suae gentis consuluit, ut plerisque in locis, ubi fontes lucidos juxta publicos viarum transitus construxit, ibi ob refrigerium viantium erectis stipitibus aereos caucos suspendi juberet, neque hos quisquam nisi ad usum necessarium contingere prae magnitudine vel timoris ejus auderet vel amoris vellet.' And of several other kings the tale is told, that they exposed precious jewels on the public road. Mildness and justice were the highest virtues of rulers, and 'mild' signified both mitis and largus, munificus. Frôði was called the fêmildi (bountiful); 'frôði' itself includes the notion of sagacity. When the genealogies and legends make several kings of that name follow one another, they all evidently mean the same (conf. p. 348). Saxo Gramm. 27 makes his first Frotho sprinkle ground gold on his food, which is unmistakably that 'Frôða miöl' of Snorri; the second is called 'frœkni,' vegetus; it is not till the reign of the third, who fastens a gold bracelet on the road, that the Saviour is born (p. 95).

But this myth of the mild king of peace must formerly have been known outside of Scandinavia, namely, here in Germany, and in Britain too. For one thing, our chroniclers and poets, when they mention the Saviour's birth, break out, like Snorri and Saxo, in praises of a peaceful Augustan age; thus Godfrey of Viterbo p. 250:

Fit gladius vomer, fiunt de cuspide falces,

Mars siluit, pax emicuit, miles fuit auceps;

nascentis Christi tempore pax rediit.
Wernher's Maria, p. 160:

Dô wart ein chreftiger fride,

  Then befell a mighty peace,

diu swert versluogen die smide,

    smiths converted their swords,

bediu spieze und sper;

     both pikes and spears;

dô ne was dehein her

       then was there no army

daz iender des gedæhte

   that anywhere thought

daz ez strite oder væhte,

 of striving and fighting,

dô ne was niht urliuge

      then was no war

bî des meres piunge,

by the sea's margin,

noch enhein nîtgeschelle.

 nor any sound of hate.

Mit grôzer ebenhelle

In great unison

und harte fridlîche

    and right peacefully

stuonden elliu rîche.

 stood all kingdoms.

And p. 193:

Aller fride meiste

mit des keisers volleiste

der wart erhaben und gesworn

dô Christ was geborn.
Compare En. 13205-13, and Albrecht of Halberstadt's Prologue, which also says that Augustus

machte sô getânen fride (perfect peace)

daz man diu swert begunde smide

in segense (scythes), und werken hiez

zuo den sicheln den spiez.
It is true, none of these passages make any reference to Fruoto; but how could the 'milte Fruote von Tenemarke' have got so firm a footing in our heroic lays of Gudrun and the Rabenschlacht, and in the memory of our Court-poets (MS. 2, 221b, 227b, Conr. Engelhart, and Helbl. 2, 1303. 7, 366. 13, 111) without some express legend to rest upon? This I had a presentiment of on p. 532 from our proper names Fanigolt, Manigolt (fen-gold, bracelet-gold); conf. Haupt's pref. to Engelh. p. x. And what is more, the Austrian weisthümer (3, 687. 712) require by way of fine a shield full of ground gold; and filling shields with gold meant being liberal. The folk-song in Uhland 1, 76-7 makes the mill grind gold and love. How else to explain gold-grinding and gold-meal I cannot divine.