The star Septentrion is, for the peoples of the North and above all
for the shepherd, the seaman and the wayfarer, the star of stars. A
hundred legends embody its mystery, its steadfast incalculable service,
its unswerving isolation over the Pole. Polaris, the North Star, the
Pole-Star, the Lodestar, the Seaman’s Star, the Star of the Sea, the
Gate of Heaven, Phœnice, Cynosure, how many names, in all languages,
at all times. The Mongolian nomad called it the Imperial Ruler of
Heaven: the Himalayan shepherd, Grahadāra, the Pivot of the Planets:
the Arab knows it as the Torch of Prayer, burning for ever at the
portal of the heavenly Mecca. It shines through all literature, since
(and indeed long before) Euripides wrote his superb verse of how the
two great Northern constellations which encircle Polaris, Ursa Major
and Ursa Minor, the two ‘swift-wandering’ Bears, ‘guard the Atlantean
Pole,’ till a poet of our own time wrote the less majestic but not less
lovely line relating to these constellations which gives the title to
this paper. In all ages, too, the dreaming mind of man has imagined
here the Throne of the Gods, the Seat of the Mighty, the last Portal
of the Unknown. It is the Flatheansas of our Gaelic ancestors, the
ultimate goal of the heroic spirit: the Himinbiorg, or Hill of Heaven,
of the Norsemen of old, and the abode of Heimdallr, the guardian of the
bridge Bifröst (the Rainbow) which unites Asgard the Everlasting with
that brief whirling phantom, the Earth. It is Albordy, ‘the dazzling
mountain on which was held the Assembly of the Gods’ of the ancient
Teutonic peoples: the mysterious Mount Mēru, the seat of the gods, of
the Aryan dreamers of old, and the Hindû sages of later time: ‘the
holy mountain of God’ alluded to in Ezekiel--so, at least, it has been
surmised.
‘The blue Septentrions’ ... Boötes with Arcturus, the Great Bear, the
Lesser Bear, the Pointers or the Northern Hounds, the North Star ...
what legend, what poetry, what romance, what wonder belongs to these
stars and constellations which guard the marches of the Arctic North.
To the mass of what is already extant, what need to add further matter?
And yet there is ever new justification in that continual need of the
soul to hear over and over again and in ever-varying ways even the most
fragmentary runes or sagas of this unfathomably mysterious stellar
universe which encloses us with Silence and Beauty and Wonder, the
three Veils of God--as the Hebridean islesman, the Irish Gael of the
dreaming west, and the Arab of the Desert alike have it.
I have elsewhere spoken of the legendary association of Arthur (the
Celtic-British King and the earlier mythical Arthur, semi-divine, and
at last remote and celestial) with Arcturus, that lovely Lamp of the
North, the glory of Boötes. But now, I may add what there I had to omit.
In all European lands, and above all in the countries of the West,
there is none without its legend of King Arthur. The Bretons claim him
as theirs, and the places of his passage and exploit are familiar,
though only the echo, only the phantom of a great fame ever reached
Arvôr. In the Channel and Scilly Isles the story runs that there is
Lyonesse, and that Arthur sleeps in a cavern of the seas. The Cornish
folk and their kindred of Somerset and Devon believe there is not a
rood of ground between Camelot and Tintagel where the great King has
not dwelt or passed. Wales calls him her son, and his chivalry her
children, and the Cymric poets of a thousand mabinogion have sung his
heroic fame. Clydesdale, that more ancient home of the Cymri, has dim
memories older than what Taliesin sang: Arthur’s Seat hangs above
Edinburgh, a city so old that a thousand years ago its earlier name
was forgotten; and from the Sidlaw to the Ochil, from blue Demyat to
grey Schiehallion, old names and broken tradition preserve the obscure
trails of a memory fallen into oblivion, but not so fallen that the
names of Arthur and Queen Guinevere and wild-eyed Merlin of the Woods
have ceased to stir the minds of the few who still care for the things
that moved our fathers from generation to generation. The snow of the
Grampians have not stayed the wandering tale: and there are still a
few old people who recall at times, in the winter story-telling before
farm-kitchen fires, how the fierce Modred, King of the North, made
Queen Gwannolê his own, and how later, in a savage revenge, Arthur
condemned her to be torn asunder by wild horses. Lancelot passes from
the tale before it crosses the Border, and as it goes north (or is it
not that as it comes south?) Merlin is no more a courtier but a wild
soothsayer of the woods, Queen Wanders or Gwannolê or Guinevere is
tameless as a hawk, and Arthur himself, though a hero and great among
his kind, is of the lineage of fire and sword.
Where is Joyeuse Gard? Some say it is in the isle Avillion off the
Breton shores: some that it is in Avalon, under the sacred hill of
Glastonbury: some that it is wet with the foam of Cornish Seas: others
aver that it lies in fathomless silence under the sundown wandering
wave and plunging tide. Another legend tells that it leaned once upon
the sea from some lost haven under Berwick Law, perhaps where North
Berwick now is, or where Dirleton looks across to Fidra, or where the
seamews on ruined Tantallon scream to the Bass.
Arthur himself has a sleeping-place (for nowhere is he dead, but
sleeps, awaiting a trumpet-call) in ‘a lost land’ in Provence, in
Spain, under the waters of the Rhine. To-day one may hear from
Calabrian shepherd or Sicilian fisherman that the Great King sleeps in
a deep hollow underneath the Straits of Messina. And strangest of all
(if not a new myth of the dreaming imagination, for I have not been
able to trace the legend beyond a modern Slavonic ballad) among the
Carpathian Highlands is a nameless ancient tomb lost in a pine-forest,
where at mid-winter a bear has been seen to rise, walking erect like
a man, crowned with a crown of iron and gold holding a single shining
stone magnificent as the Pole Star, and crying in a deep voice, ‘_I am
Arthur of the West, who shall yet be king of the World_.’
Strange indeed, for here among the debris of the lost history of
Arthur, that vast shadowy kingly figure whose only kingdom may have
been the soul of primitive races, and whose sword may have been none
other than the imagination that is for ever on its beautiful and
perilous quest, here among that débris of legend scattered backward
from the realms of the north across Europe is one, remote as it is,
which brings us back to the early astronomical myth which identifies
the great Celtic champion with the chief constellation of the north.
But as I have heard this fragment of our old lost mythology related
in a way I have not seen in any book, I will give it here altered but
slightly if at all from one of the countless legends told to me in my
childhood.
* * * * *
At sunset the young son of the great King Pendragon came over the
brow of a hill that stepped forward from a dark company of mountains
and leaned over the shoreless sea which fills the west and drowns the
north. All day he had been wandering alone, his mind heavy with wonder
over many things. He had heard strange tales of late, tales about his
heroic father and the royal clan, and how they were not as other men,
but half divine. They were not gods, he knew, for they could be slain
in battle or could die with the crowding upon them of many years:
but they were more terrible in battle than were the greatest of men,
and they had vision and knowledge beyond the vision and knowledge of
the druids, and were lordly beyond all men in mien and the beauty of
courtesy, and lived beyond the common span of years, and had secret
communion with the noble and invisible company. He had heard, too, of
his destiny: that he, too, was to be a great king, as much greater than
Pendragon, than Pendragon was above all the kings of the world. What
was Destiny, he wondered. Then, again, he turned over and over in his
mind all the names he could think of that he might choose for his own:
for the time was come for him to put away the name of his childhood and
to take on that by which he should be known among men.
He came over the brow of the hill, and out of the way of the
mountain-wind, and, being tired, lay down among the heather and stared
across the grey wilderness of the sea. The sun set, and the invisible
throwers of the nets trailed darkness across the waves and up the wild
shores and over the faces of the cliffs. Stars climbed out of shadowy
abysses, and the great chariots of the constellations rode from the
west to the east and from the north to the south. His eyes closed,
but when he opened them again to see if a star quivering on the verge
of the horizon had in that brief moment sprung like a deer above the
drowning wave or had sunk like a white seabird passing out of sight, he
saw a great and kingly figure standing beside him. So great in stature,
so splendid in kingly beauty was the mysterious one who had so silently
joined him, that he thought this must be one of the gods.
“Do you not know me, my son?” said the kingly stranger.
The boy looked at him in awe and wonder, but unrecognisingly.
“Do you not know me, my son?” he heard again ... “for I am your father
Pendragon. But my home is yonder, and there I go before long, and that
is why I have come to you as a vision in a dream ...” and, as he spoke,
he pointed to the constellation of the _Arth_, or Bear, which nightly
prowls through the vast abysses of the polar sky.
When the boy turned his gaze from the great constellation which hung
in the dark wilderness overhead, he saw that he was alone again. While
he yet wondered in great awe at what he had seen and heard, he felt
himself float like a mist and become like a cloud, and, as a cloud,
rise beyond the brows of the hills, and ascend the invisible stairways
of the sky.
When for minutes that were as hours he had moved thus mysteriously into
the pathless and unvisited realms of the air, he saw that he had left
the highest clouds like dust on a valley-road after one has climbed to
the summit of a mountain: nor could he see the earth save as a blind
and obscure thing that moved between the twilights of night and dawn.
It seemed to him thereafter that a swoon came over him, in which he
passed beyond the far-off blazing fires of strange stars. At last,
suddenly, he stood on the verge of Arth, or Arth Uthyr, the Great Bear.
There he saw, with the vision of immortal not of mortal eyes, a company
of most noble and majestic figures seated at what he thought a circular
abyss but which had the semblance of a vast table. Each of these seven
great knights or lordly kings had a star upon his forehead, and these
were the stars of the mighty constellation of the Bear which the boy
had seen night after night from his home among the mountains by the sea.
It was with a burning throb at his heart that he recognised in the King
of all these kings no other than himself.
While he looked, in amazement so great that he could hear the pulse
of his heart, as in the silence of a wood one hears the tapping of a
woodpecker, he saw this mighty phantom-self rise till he stood towering
over all there, and heard a voice as though an ocean rose and fell
through the eternal silences.
“Comrades in God,” it said, “the time is come when that which is great
shall become small.”
And when the voice was ended, the mighty figure faded into the blue
darkness, and only a great star shone where the uplifted dragon-helm
had brushed the roof of heaven. One by one the white lords of the sky
followed in his mysterious way, till once more were to be seen only the
stars of the Bear.
The boy-king dreamed that he fell as a falling meteor, and then that
he floated over land and sea as a cloud, and then that he sank as mist
upon the hills of his own land.
A noise of wind stirred in his ears, and he felt the chill dew creep
over his hands like the stealthy cold lip of the tide. He rose
stumblingly, and stood, staring around him. He was on the same spot,
under the brow of the hill that looked over the dim shoreless seas, now
obscure with the dusk. He glanced upward and saw the stars of the Great
Bear in their slow majestic march round the Pole. Then he remembered.
He went slowly down the hillside, his mind heavy with thought. When he
was come to the place of the King his father, lo, Pendragon and all his
fierce chivalry came out to meet him, for the archdruid had foretold
that the great King to be had received his mystic initiation among the
holy silence of the hills.
“I am no more Snowbird the child,” the boy said, looking at them
fearlessly, and as though already King. “Henceforth I am Arth-Uthyr,[2]
for my place is in the Great Bear which we see yonder in the north.”
[2] Pronounced _Arth-Uir_, or _Arth-Ur_. In ancient British _Arth_
means Bear, and _Uthyr_ great, wondrous.
So all there acclaimed him as Arthur, the wondrous one of the stars,
the Great Bear.
“I am old,” said Pendragon, “and soon you shall be King, Arthur my son.
So ask now a great boon of me and it shall be granted to you.”
Then Arthur remembered his dream.
“Father and King,” he said, “when I am the King after you I shall make
a new order of knights, who shall be strong and pure as the Immortal
Ones, and be tender as women, and simple as little children. But first
I ask of you seven flawless virgin knights to be of my chosen company.
To-morrow let the wood-wrights make for me a round daïs or table such
as that where we eat our roasted meats and drink from the ale-horns,
but round and of a size whereat I and my chosen knights may sit at
ease.”
The King listened, and all there.
“So be it,” said the King.
Then Arthur chose the seven flawless virgin knights, and called them to
him.
“Ye are now Children of the Great Bear,” he said, “and comrades and
liegemen to me, Arthur, who shall be King of the West. And ye shall
be known as the Knights of the Round Table. But no man shall make a
mock of that name and live: and in the end that name shall be so great
in the mouths and minds of men that they shall consider no glory of
the world to be so great as to be the youngest and frailest of that
knighthood.”
* * * * *
And that is how Arthur, the son of Pendragon, who three years later
became King of the West, read the Rune of the Stars that are called the
Great Bear, and took their name upon him, and from the strongest and
purest and noblest of the land made Knighthood, such as the world had
not seen, such as the world since has not known.
* * * * *
Very different, a cruder legend of the Polestar, the drift of which I
heard some months ago from a fisherman of Ross, ‘foregathered with’ in
the Sound of Morvern.
One day, Finn, before he was born the King of the West, a thousand
years earlier than that and maybe thousands more on the top of that
thousand, went hunting a great bear beyond the highest mountains in
Ross and Sutherland. It came to the Ord, and then, seeing there was no
more land, it went into the sea with an awesome plunge, like Iceland
in the story before it swam away from Scotland, so that the fish were
knocked out of the nets and the fishing cobles were thrown on the
shores like buckies, and the tides ran like hares till they leaped into
the sea again at the rocks of Wick and over Cromarty Cliffs. Aye, it is
said a green wave ran right through the great Kirk at Inverness; and
that away across the lands of Mackenzie and Chisholm, of Fraser and
Gordon, a storm of foam blew like snow against the towers and steeples
of Aberdeen. At least all this might well have been, if in those old
ancient days there had been any Aberdeen or Inverness to see it, or if
there were cobles and nets then, as, for all you or I or the wind know,
there may have been. Well, the Bear swam away due north, and Finn after
it and his great hounds Luath and Dorch. It took them a month to come
up with it, and then it was among mountains of solid ice with the sea
between hard as granite. Then it came to the place where there’s an
everlasting Rainbow. The Bear climbed this, to jump to the other side
of the Pole, but Luath ran up one side and Dorch the other and Finn
hurled his great shining spears, one after the other: so that down the
bear came with a rush, and so great was the noise and stramash that the
icebergs melted, and out flew thousands of solanders and grey swans and
scarts and God knows what all, every kind of bird that is with a web to
its foot. The hounds fell into the water, and the Bear lay on a floe
like a wounded seal, but Finn never moved an inch but put spear after
spear into the Bear. “Well, you’re dead now,” he said; “and if you’re
not, you ought to be,” he added, seeing that the Bear was up again and
ready to be off.
“This can’t go on,” said God Allfather, so He swung a noose and sagged
up the Bear into the black Arctic sky. But the hounds hung on to
its tail, and so were carried up too. And as for Finn, he took the
hero-leap, and with one jump was on the Pole, and with the next was in
the Northman’s Torch (_Arcturus_), and with the third was on the Hill
of Heaven itself. And that’s where he went back to on the day he died
after his three hundred years of mortal life. He’s never moved since,
and he won’t move again, till Judgment Day. And by the same token, you
can see the Great Bear prowling round the Pole still, and Finn the
Watchman never letting him go by, night or day, day or night, and far
away down are the two Hounds that herd the Great Bear and his mate.
And when these come too near, Finn hurls his spears, and that’s when
we see the Northern Lights. And behind the streamers and the auroras
and the rainbows and the walls of ice Finn looks into the Garden of
Eden--Paradise as they say, just the Flatheanas of the old tales, the
old songs. And who would be doubting it?