LINUS
In the Iliad a vineyard is described with youths and maidens singing, as they gather the fruit, “a sweet Linus song.” This was probably a lament for the young son of Apollo and Psamathe—Linus, who was deserted by his mother, brought up by shepherds, and before he was full-grown torn to pieces by dogs. This Linus was, like Adonis and Hyacinthus, a type of all lovely young life that dies or is withered before it has borne fruit. The Greek word ailinon!, meaning “woe for Linus!” grew to mean no more than the English “alas!” and was used in any lament. There was another Linus, the son of Apollo and a Muse, who taught Orpheus and tried to teach Hercules, but was killed by him.
MARPESSA
She was more fortunate than other maidens beloved of the gods. Idas, one of the heroes of the Calydonian Hunt and also one of the Argonauts, carried her off from her father with her consent. They would have lived happily ever after, but Apollo fell in love with her. Idas refused to give her up; he even dared to fight with Apollo for her. Zeus parted them and told Marpessa to choose which she would have. She chose the mortal, fearing, certainly not without reason, that the god would not be faithful to her.
MARSYAS
The flute was invented by Athena, but she threw it away because in order to play it she had to puff out her cheeks and disfigure her face. Marsyas, a satyr, found it and played so enchantingly upon it that he dared to challenge Apollo to a contest. The god won, of course, and punished Marsyas by flaying him.
MELAMPUS
He saved and reared two little snakes when his servants killed the parent snakes, and as pets they repaid him well. Once when he was asleep they crept upon his couch and licked his ears. He started up in a great fright, but he found that he understood what two birds on his windowsill were saying to each other. The snakes had made him able to understand the language of all flying and all creeping creatures. He learned in this way the art of divination as no one ever had, and he became a famous soothsayer. He saved himself, too, by his knowledge. His enemies once captured him and kept him a prisoner in a little cell. While there, he heard the worms saying that the roof-beam had been almost gnawed through so that it would soon fall and crush all beneath it. At once he told his captors and asked to be moved elsewhere. They did as he said and directly afterward the roof fell in. Then they saw how great a diviner he was and they freed and rewarded him.
MEROPE
Her husband, Cresphontes, a son of Hercules, and king of Messenia, was killed in a rebellion together with two of his sons. The man who succeeded him, Polyphontes, took her as his wife. But her third son, Aepytus, had been hidden by her in Arcadia. He returned years later pretending to be a man who had slain Aepytus and was kindly received therefore by Polyphontes. His mother, however, not knowing who he was, planned to kill her son’s murderer, as she thought him. However, in the end she found out who he was and the two together brought about Polyphontes’ death. Aepytus became king.
THE MYRMIDONS
These were men created from ants on the island of Aegina, in the reign of Aeacus, Achilles’ grandfather, and they were Achilles’ followers in the Trojan War. Not only were they thrifty and industrious, as one would suppose from their origin, but they were also brave. They were changed into men from ants because of one of Hera’s attacks of jealousy. She was angry because Zeus loved Aegina, the maiden for whom the island was named, and whose son, Aeacus, became its king. Hera sent a fearful pestilence which destroyed the people by thousands. It seemed that no one would be left alive. Aeacus climbed to the lofty temple of Zeus and prayed to him, reminding him that he was his son and the son of a woman the god had loved. As he spoke he saw a troop of busy ants. “Oh Father,” he cried, “make of these creatures a people for me, as numerous as they, and fill my empty city.” A peal of thunder seemed to answer him and that night he dreamed that he saw the ants being transformed into human shape. At daybreak his son Telamon woke him saying that a great host of men was approaching the palace. He went out and saw a multitude, as many as the ants in number, all crying out that they were his faithful subjects. So Aegina was repopulated from an ant hill and its people were called Myrmidons after the ant (myrmex) from which they had sprung.
NISUS AND SCYLLA
Nisus, King of Megara, had on his head, a purple lock of hair which he had been warned never to cut. The safety of his throne depended upon his preserving it. Minos of Crete laid siege to his city, but Nisus knew that no harm would come to it as long as he had the purple lock. His daughter, Scylla, used to watch Minos from the city wall and she fell madly in love with him. She could think of no way to make him care for her except by taking her father’s lock of hair to him and enabling him to conquer the town. She did this; she cut it from her father’s head in his sleep and carrying it to Minos she confessed what she had done. He shrank from her in horror and drove her out of his sight. When the city had been conquered and the Cretans launched their ships to sail home, she came rushing to the shore, mad with passion, and leaping into the water seized the rudder of the boat that carried Minos. But at this moment a great eagle swooped down upon her. It was her father, whom the gods had saved by changing him into a bird. In terror she let go her hold, and would have fallen into the water, but suddenly she too became a bird. Some god had pity on her, traitor though she was, because she had sinned through love.
ORION
He was a young man of gigantic stature and great beauty, and a mighty hunter. He fell in love with the daughter of the King of Chios, and for love of her he cleared the island of wild beasts. The spoils of the chase he brought always home to his beloved, whose name is sometimes said to be Aero, sometimes Merope. Her father, Oenopion, agreed to give her to Orion, but he kept putting the marriage off. One day when Orion was drunk he insulted the maiden, and Oenopion appealed to Dionysus to punish him. The god threw him into a deep sleep and Oenopion blinded him. An oracle told him, however, that he would be able to see again if he went to the east and let the rays of the rising sun fall on his eyes. He went as far east as Lemnos and there he recovered his sight. Instantly he started back to Chios to take vengeance on the king, but he had fled and Orion could not find him. He went on to Crete, and lived there as Artemis’ huntsman. Nevertheless in the end the goddess killed him. Some say that Dawn, also called Aurora, loved him and that Artemis in jealous anger shot him. Others say that he made Apollo angry and that the god by a trick got his sister to slay him. After his death he was placed in heaven as a constellation, which shows him with a girdle, sword, club, and lion’s skin.
THE PLEIADES
They were the daughters of Atlas, seven in number. Their names were Electra, Maia, Taygete, Alcyone, Merope, Celaeno, Sterope. Orion pursued them but they fled before him and he could never seize any of them. Still he continued to follow them until Zeus, pitying them, placed them in the heavens as stars. But it was said that even there Orion continued his pursuit, always unsuccessful, yet persistent. While they lived on earth one of them, Maia, was the mother of Hermes. Another, Electra, was the mother of Dardanus, the founder of the Trojan race. Although it is agreed that there were seven of them, only six stars are clearly visible. The seventh is invisible except to those who have specially keen sight.
RHOECUS seeing an oak about to fall propped it up. The dryad who would have perished with it told him to ask anything he desired and she would give it. He answered that he wanted only her love and she consented. She bade him keep on the alert for she would send him a messenger, a bee, to tell him her wishes. But Rhoecus met some companions and forgot all about the bee, so much so that when he heard one buzzing he drove it away and hurt it. Returning to the tree he was blinded by the dryad, who was angry at the disregard of her words and the injury to her messenger.
SALMONEUS
This man was another illustration of how fatal it was for mortals to try to emulate the gods. What he did was so foolish, however, that in later years it was often said that he had gone mad. He pretended that he was Zeus. He had a chariot made in such a
way that there was a loud clanging of brass when it moved. On the day of Zeus’s festival he drove it furiously through the town, scattering at the same time firebrands and shouting to the people to worship him because he was Zeus the Thunderer. But instantly there came a crash of actual thunder and a flash of lightning. Salmoneus fell from his chariot dead.
The story is often explained as pointing back to a time when weather-magic was practiced. Salmoneus, according to this view, was a magician trying to bring on a rainstorm by imitating it, a common magical method.
SISYPHUS was King of Corinth. One day he chanced to see a mighty eagle, greater and more splendid than any mortal bird, bearing a maiden to an island not far away. When the river-god Asopus came to him to tell him that his daughter Aegina had been carried off, he strongly suspected by Zeus, and to ask his help in finding her, Sisyphus told him what he had seen. Thereby he drew down on himself the relentless wrath of Zeus. In Hades he was punished by having to try forever to roll a rock uphill which forever rolled back upon him. Nor did he help Asopus. The river-god went to the island but Zeus drove him away with his thunderbolt. The name of the island was changed to Aegina in honor of the maiden, and her son Aeacus was the grandfather of Achilles, who was called sometimes Aeacides, descendant of Aeacus.
TYRO was the daughter of Salmoneus. She bore twin sons to Poseidon—but fearing her father’s displeasure if he learned of the children’s birth, she abandoned them. They were found by the keeper of Salmoneus’ horses, and brought up by him and his wife, who called one Pelias and the other Neleus. Tyro’s husband Cretheus discovered, years later, what her relations with Poseidon had been. In great anger he put her away and married one of her maids, Sidero, who ill-treated her. When Cretheus died the twins were told by their foster-mother who their real parents were. They went at once to seek out Tyro and discover themselves to her. They found her living in great misery and so they looked for Sidero, to punish her. She had heard of their arrival and she had taken refuge in Hera’s temple. Nevertheless Pelias slew her, defying the goddess’s anger. Hera revenged herself, but only after many years. Pelias’ half-brother, the son of Tyro and Cretheus, was the father of Jason, whom Pelias tried to kill by sending him after the Golden Fleece. Instead, Jason was indirectly the cause of his death. He was killed by his daughters under the direction of Medea, Jason’s wife.
PART SEVEN
The Mythology of the Norsemen
Introduction to Norse Mythology
THE world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a grave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know that a day will come when they will be destroyed. Sometime they will meet their enemies and go down beneath them to defeat and death. Asgard will fall in ruins. The cause the forces of good are fighting to defend against the forces of evil is hopeless. Nevertheless, the gods will fight for it to the end.
Necessarily the same is true of humanity. If the gods are finally helpless before evil, men and women must be more so. The heroes and heroines of the early stories face disaster. They know that they cannot save themselves, not by any courage or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not yield. They die resisting. A brave death entitles them—at least the heroes—to a seat in Valhalla, one of the halls in Asgard, but there too they must look forward to final defeat and destruction. In the last battle between good and evil they will fight on the side of the gods and die with them.
This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has ever given birth to. The only sustaining support possible for the human spirit, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attain, is heroism; and heroism depends on lost causes. The hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason. Although the Norse hero was doomed if he did not yield, he could choose between yielding or dying. The decision was in his own hands. Even more than that. A heroic death, like a martyr’s death, is not a defeat, but a triumph. The hero in one of the Norse stories who laughs aloud while his foes cut his heart out of his living flesh shows himself superior to his conquerors. He says to them, in effect, You can do nothing to me because I do not care what you do. They kill him, but he dies undefeated.
This is stern stuff for humanity to live by, as stern in its totally different way as the Sermon on the Mount, but the easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind. Like the early Christians, the Norsemen measured their life by heroic standards. The Christian, however, looked forward to a heaven of eternal joy. The Norseman did not. But it would appear that for unknown centuries, until the Christian missionaries came, heroism was enough.
The poets of the Norse mythology, who saw that victory was possible in death and that courage was never defeated, are the only spokesmen for the belief of the whole great Teutonic race—of which England is a part, and ourselves through the first settlers in America. Everywhere else in northwestern Europe the early records, the traditions, the songs and stories, were obliterated by the priests of Christianity, who felt a bitter hatred for the paganism they had come to destroy. It is extraordinary how clean a sweep they were able to make. A few bits survived: Beowulf in England, the Nibelungenlied in Germany, and some stray fragments here and there. But if it were not for the two Icelandic Eddas we should know practically nothing of the religion which molded the race to which we belong. In Iceland, naturally by its position the last northern country to be Christianized, the missionaries seem to have been gentler, or, perhaps, they had less influence. Latin did not drive Norse out as the literary tongue. The people still told the old stories in the common speech, and some of them were written down, although by whom or when we do not know. The oldest manuscript of the Elder Edda is dated at about 1300, three hundred years after the Christians arrived, but the poems it is made up of are purely pagan and adjudged by all scholars to be very old. The Younger Edda, in prose, was written down by one Snorri Sturluson in the last part of the twelfth century. The chief part of it is a technical treatise on how to write poetry, but it also contains some prehistoric mythological material which is not in the Elder Edda.
The Elder Edda is much the more important of the two. It is made up of separate poems, often about the same story, but never connected with each other. The material for a great epic is there, as great as the Iliad, perhaps even greater, but no poet came to work it over as Homer did the early stories which preceded the Iliad. There was no man of genius in the Northland to weld the poems into a whole and make it a thing of beauty and power; no one even to discard the crude and the commonplace and cut out the childish and wearisome repetitions. There are lists of names in the Edda which sometimes run on unbroken for pages. Nevertheless the somber grandeur of the stories comes through in spite of the style. Perhaps no one should speak of “the style” who cannot read ancient Norse; but all the translations are so alike in being singularly awkward and involved that one cannot but suspect the original of being responsible, at least in part. The poets of the Elder Edda seem to have had conceptions greater than their skill to put them into words. Many of the stories are splendid. There are none to equal them in Greek mythology, except those retold by the tragic poets. All the best Northern tales are tragic, about men and women who go steadfastly forward to meet death, often deliberately choose it, even plan it long beforehand. The only light in the darkness is heroism.
CHAPTER I
The Stories of Signy and Sigurd
I have selected these two stories to tell because they seem to me to present
better than any other the Norse character and the Norse point of view. Sigurd is the most famous of Norse heroes; his story is largely that of the hero of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried. He plays the chief part in the Volsungasaga, the Norse version of the German tale which Wagner’s operas have made familiar. I have not gone to it, however, for my story, but to the Elder Edda, where the love and death of Sigurd and Brynhild and Gudrun are the subject of a number of the poems. The sagas, all prose tales, are of later date. Signy’s story is told only in the Volsungasaga.
SIGNY was the daughter of Volsung and the sister of Sigmund. Her husband slew Volsung by treachery and captured his sons. One by one he chained them at night to where the wolves would find them and devour them. When the last, who was Sigmund, was brought out and chained, Signy had devised a way to save him. She freed him and the two took a vow to avenge their father and brothers. Signy determined that Sigmund should have one of their own blood to help him and she visited him in disguise and spent three nights with him. He never knew who she was. When the boy who was born of their union was of an age to leave her, she sent him to Sigmund and the two lived together until the lad—his name was Sinfiotli—was grown to manhood. All this time Signy was living with her husband, bearing him children, showing him nothing of the one burning desire in her heart, to take vengeance upon him. The day for it came at last. Sigmund and Sinfiotli surprised the household. They killed Signy’s other children; they shut her husband in the house and set fire to it. Signy watched them with never a word. When all was done she told them that they had gloriously avenged the dead, and with that she entered the burning dwelling and died there. Through the years while she had waited she had planned when she killed her husband to die with him. Clytemnestra would fade beside her if there had been a Norse Aeschylus to write her story.