With the first sustained breath of frost the beauty of the Galaxy
becomes the chief glory of the nocturnal skies. But in midsummer even
what amplitude of space, what infinite depths it reveals, and how
mysterious that filmy stardrift blown like a streaming banner from
behind the incalculable brows of an unresting Lord of Space, one
of those Sons of the Invisible, as an oriental poet has it, whose
ceaseless rush through eternity leaves but this thin and often scarce
visible dust, ‘delicate as the tost veil of a dancing girl swaying
against the wind.’ Perhaps no one of our poets, and poetry ancient
and modern and of every country and race is full of allusions to the
Galaxy, has more happily imaged it in a single line than Longfellow has
done in
“Torrent of light and river of the air.”
As a river, or as a winding serpent, or as a stellar road, it has
imaginatively been conceived by almost every people, though many
races have delighted in the bestowal of a specific name, as though it
were not an aggregation of star-clusters and nebulæ, but a marvellous
creature of the heavens, as, perhaps, we may conceive the Great Bear,
or Orion, or moons-beset Jupiter, or Saturn among his mysterious rings.
Thus in the Book of Job it is called the Crooked Serpent; the Hindûs of
Northern India call it the Dove of Paradise (Swarga Duari), though they
have or had a still finer name signifying the Court of God; and the
Polynesians give it the strange but characteristic designation, ‘The
Long, Blue, Cloud-Eating Shark.’
Last night I watched the immense tract for a long time. There was
frost in the air, for I saw that singular pulsation which rightly or
wrongly is commonly held to be an optical illusion, the aspect as of
a pulse, or of an undulating motion of life such as one might dimly
perceive in the still respiration of some sleeping saurian. There
appeared to be countless small stars, and in the darker spaces the
pale vaporous drift became like the trail of phosphorescence in the
wake of a vessel: at times it seemed almost solid, a road paven with
diamonds and the dust of precious stones, with flakes as of the
fallen plumage of wings--truly _Arianrod_, the Silver Road, as the
Celts of old called it. Of course it was no more than a fantasy of the
dreaming imagination, but it seemed to me more than once that as a vast
indefinite sigh came from the windless but nevertheless troubled sea
there was a corresponding motion in that white mysterious Milky Way, so
infinitely remote. It was as though the Great Snake--as so many bygone
peoples called and as many submerged races still call the Galaxy--lay
watching from its eternal lair that other Serpent of Ocean which
girdles the rolling orb of our onward-rushing Earth: and breathed in
slow mysterious response: and, mayhap, sighed also into the unscanned
void a sigh infinitely more vast, a sigh that would reach remote
planets and fade along the gulfs of incalculable shores.
As winter comes, the Milky Way takes on a new significance for pastoral
and other lonely peoples, for shepherds and fisher-folk above all.
Songs and poems and legends make it familiar to everyone. A hundred
tales own it as a mysterious background, as Brocéliande is the
background of a hundred Breton ballads, or as Avalon is the background
of a hundred romances of the Cymric and Gaelic Celt. The Hebridean
islanders seldom look at it on still frosty nights without in the long
idle hours recalling some old name or allusion, some ancient _rann_ or
_oran_, some _duan_ or _iorram_ of a later day, related to the mystery
and startling appealing beauty of the Silver Road. It has many names on
the lips of these simple men, who have little learning beyond the Bible
and what life on the waters and life in the hearts of other simple
men and women have taught them. Sometimes these names are beautiful,
as ‘Dust of the World’ (or universe, _an domhain_) or the ‘Kyle of
the Angels’ (the Strait or Sound): sometimes apt and natural, as ‘the
Herring Way,’ and ‘the Wake’: sometimes legendary, as ‘the Road of the
Kings’ (the old gods, from Fionn back to the Tuatha Dedannan) or as
‘the Pathway of the Secret People’: sometimes sombre or grotesque, as
‘The Shroud’ or as ‘the Bag of the Great Miller.’
There is especial interest for us, of course, in the legendary
associations of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian and Celtic or Gaelic
peoples. These, in common with the majority of western nations, image
the Milky Way more as a ‘road’ or ‘street’ than as a serpent or than
as a river--though the Norse have their _Midhgardhsormr_, connected in
association with the _Weltum-Spanner_ (‘Stretcher-round-the-World’) or
Ocean-Stream.
I do not know when the Milky Way as a designation first came into
common English use. Possibly there is no prior mention to that in
Chaucer’s _Hous of Fame_:
“_Se yonder, lo, the Galaxyë,
Which men clepeth the Milky Wey_”
--an allusion which certainly points to already familiar usage. It is
now, I fancy, almost universal. Perhaps the old translator Eden was
among the first to popularise it, with his rendering of the Latin _Via
Lactis_ and _Via Lactea_ as ‘the Mylke way’ and ‘Mylke whyte way.’
There has been no need to derive the term from the Italian _Via lattea_
or the French _Voie lactée_, since Eden’s use and Chaucer’s preceded
that of any French poet or romanticist. Certainly the phrase became
part of our literature after it passed golden from the mint of Milton
(paraphrasing Ovid)--
“Broad and ample road whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars, as stars to thee appear
Seen in the Galaxy, that milky way
Which nightly as a circling zone thou seest
Powdered with stars....”
It is rarely now alluded to as the Galaxy, and probably never by
unlettered people. In most parts of England for centuries, and it is
said in many parts still, the common designation is ‘The Way of Saint
James.’ This has a singular correspondence in the name popular among
the French peasants, ‘the Road of Saint Jacques of Compostella.’
Originally a like designation was common in Spain, though for a
thousand years the popular epithet runs _El Camino de Santiago_, after
the Warrior-Saint of the Iberian peoples. I am told that ‘the Way of
Saint James’ is common in certain counties of England, but I have
never heard it, nor do I wholly recall the reason of this particular
nomenclature. In some form the road-idea continually recurs. How
many readers of these notes will know that the familiar ‘Watling
Street’--that ancient thoroughfare from Chester through the heart of
London to Dover--was also applied to this Galaxy that perchance they
may look at to-night from quiet country-side, or village, or distant
towns, or by the turbulent seas of our unquiet coasts, or by still
waters wherein the reflection lies and scintillates like a phantom
phosphorescence. Watling Street does not sound a poetic equivalent
for the Milky Way, but it has a finer and more ancient derivation
than ‘the Way of Saint James.’ The word goes back to Hoveden’s
‘Watlinga-Strete,’ itself but slightly anglicised from the Anglo-Saxon
_Waetlinga Straet_, where the words mean the Path of the Waetlings,
the giant sons of King Waetla, possibly identical with the giant Sons
of Turenn of ancient Gaelic legend, heroes who went out to achieve
deeds impossible to men, and traversed earth and sea and heaven itself
in their vast epical wanderings. Another curious old English name of
the Galaxy, of great beauty in its significance, is ‘Walsyngham Way.’
Why the Galaxy should be so called might well puzzle us, were it not
explained by the fact that up till near the middle of the sixteenth
century one of the most common English names of the Virgin Mary was
‘Our Lady of Walsyngham,’ from the fact that the Blessed Mother’s chief
shrine in the country was at Walsyngham Abbey in Norfolk. Further, as
‘the Way to Walsyngham’ in common parlance signified the road to the
earthly tabernacle of Mary, so ‘Walsyngham Way,’ as applied to the
Galaxy, signified the celestial road to the virgin Mother in heaven.
Much more barbaric is a name for the Milky Way still to be heard in
Celtic Wales, _Caer Gwydyon_, the Castle or Fortress of Gwython. This
Gwython or Gwydyon was a kind of Merlin Sylvestris. He was known as
the Enchanter, the Wizard as we would say now, and was feared on this
account, and because he was the son of Don, King of the Otherworld,
Lord of the Secret People, the ‘fairies’ of later tradition. Like
Grania, the beautiful wife of Fionn, whose elopement with Dermid and
their subsequent epical odyssey is the subject of one of the greatest
and to this day most popular of Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of
Gwython fled from his following vengeance from land to land, across
seas, over mountains, ‘to the ends of the earth,’ and at last with her
faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of the remote skies. But
long before they could reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet
to which they fled, Gwython overtook them, led by the dust which these
mortal if semi-divine fugitives made along the soundless dark blue
roads of heaven. He slew them and their winged horses and their aerial
hounds, and standing on the verge of space flung the heads and limbs
and bodies into infinitude. Hence the meteors and falling stars which
at the season of the autumnal equinox and at the approach of winter may
still be seen whirling adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible
in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all eternity, or as long as
our world endures, the phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance
shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of Gwython the Enchanter. Is
there not convincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that silent
highway of the doomed lovers ... the dust of the trampled star-way that
no wind of space has blown to this side or to that, that no alchemy of
sun or moon has burned up or like dew dissolved?
Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_
or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous
descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the
Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge
came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets
applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s _Teutonic
Mythology_ will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus
the Vikings knew the Galaxy as _Wuotanes Straza_, or ‘Woden’s Street’;
the Dutch have in common use _Vronelden Street_, ‘the women’s Street’;
and the German peasants commonly call it _Jakob’s Weg_. The Westphalian
term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there
is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated
with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains
with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact
that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather
is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who
delight in the term _Linnunrata_, the Birds’ Way, either from an old
Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of
all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny
wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged
spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course,
a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the
phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the
Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading
from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal Youth. It is strange
and suggestive that not only the North American aborigines called it
‘the Trail to Ponemah’ (the Hereafter), but that people so rude as
the Eskimo and the Bushmen of South Africa call it ‘the Ashen Path,’
the road of fire-ember signals, for the ghosts of the dead. Even the
Patagonians speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas where their dead
are immortal huntsmen rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.
But of all popular names I do not think any is more apt and pleasant
than that common to the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy _Winter
Gatan_--_i.e._, ‘Winter Street.’ It is the Winter Street we must all
travel some day, if the old poets say true, when the green grass grows
on our quiet beds, when the loudest wind will not fret the silence
in our tired minds, and when day and night are become old forgotten
dreams. May we too find it the Pathway of Peace ... not the least
beautiful of the names of the Milky Way, not the least beautiful of the
legends connected with that lovely wonder of our nocturnal skies.