recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion
existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship. Moreover,
Nature is bigger than man, and this he was not slow to feel. Even if it be
conceded that sun-myth and sun-worship once arose through the nicknaming
of an ancestor as the Sun, we must take into account the force of that
imagination which enabled the unconscious myth-maker, or creed-maker, to
credit the moving orbs of heaven with personal life and will. The faculty
which could do that might well express itself in awe-struck forms without
intruding the ancestral ghost. Further, the records of the classic
religions, themselves preserving many traces of a primitive
nature-worship, point to an adoration of the great and bountiful, as well
as to a sense of the maleficent and fateful, in earth and heaven which
seem prior to the more concrete worship of forefathers and chieftains.
If for the worship of these last we substitute a general worship of
spirits, there seems little left on which to differ. As aids to the
explanation of the belief in animal ancestors and their subsequent
deification and worship, as of the lion, the bull, the serpent, etc., we
have always present in the barbaric mind the tendency to credit living
things, and indeed lifeless, but moving ones, with a passion, a will, and
a power to help or harm immeasurably greater than man’s. This is part and
parcel of that belief in spirits everywhere which is the key to savage
philosophy, and the growth of which is fostered by such secondary causes
as the worship of ancestors.
§ VII.
SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY.
For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy
and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the
beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution,
examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and
present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to
stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is
served when they are cited and classified as specimens. Not thus is it
with examples drawn nearer home from sources at which our young thirst for
the stirring and romantic was slaked. When we learn that famous names and
striking episodes are in some rare instances only transformed and
personified natural phenomena, or, as occurring everywhere, possibly
variants of a common legend, the far-reaching influence of primitive
thought comes to us in more vivid and exciting form. And although one
takes in hand this work of disenchantment in no eager fashion, the loss is
more seeming than real. Whether the particular tale of bravery, of
selflessness, of faithfulness, has truth of detail, matters little
compared with the fact that its reception the wide world over witnesses to
human belief, even at low levels, in the qualities which have given man
empire over himself and ever raised the moral standard of the race.
Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or
favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or
Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober
history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of
tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the
purity of which is now subject of analysis. As a familiar and interesting
example let us take the story of William Tell.
Everybody has heard how, in the year 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler,
Vogt (or Governor) of the Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole
as symbol of the Imperial power, and ordered every one who passed by to do
obeisance to it; and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm Tell, who hated
Gessler and the tyranny which the symbol expressed, passed by without
saluting the hat, and was at once seized and brought before Gessler, who
ordered that as punishment Tell should shoot an apple off the head of his
own son. As resistance was vain, the apple was placed on the boy’s head,
when Tell bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the apple, fell with it to
the ground. Gessler saw that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second
arrow in his belt, and, asking the reason, received this for answer: “It
was for you; had I shot my child, know that this would have pierced your
heart.”
Now, this story first occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who wrote
at the end of the fifteenth century, _i.e._ about one hundred and seventy
years after its reputed occurrence. The absence of any reference to it in
contemporary records caused doubt to be thrown upon it three centuries
ago. Guillimann, the author of a work on Swiss antiquities, published in
1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the current belief in it because
the tale is so popular! The race to which he belonged is not yet extinct.
A century and a half later a more fearless sceptic, who said that the
story was of Danish origin, was condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt
alive, and in the well-timed absence of the offender his book was ordered
to be burnt by the common hangman. But the truth is great, and prevails.
G. von Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out that the name of Wilhelm
Tell does not occur even once in the history of the three cantons, neither
is there any trace that a Vogt named Gessler ever served the house of
Hapsburg there. Moreover, the legend does not correspond to any fact of a
period of oppression of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian rulers.
“There exist in contemporary records no instances of wanton outrage and
insolence on the Hapsburg side. It was the object of that power to obtain
political ascendancy, not to indulge its representatives in lust or wanton
insult,” and, where records of disputes between particular persons occur,
“the symptoms of violence, as is natural enough, appear rather on the side
of the Swiss than on that of the aggrandising Imperial house.”[51]
Candour, however, requires that the “evidence” in support of the legend
should be stated. There is the fountain on the supposed site of the
lime-tree in the market-place at Altdorf by which young Tell stood, as
well as the colossal plaster statue of the hero himself which confronts us
as we enter the quaint village. But more than this, the veritable
cross-bow itself is preserved in the arsenal at Zurich!
However, although the little Tell’s chapel, as restored, was opened with
a national _fête_, in the presence of two members of the Federal Council,
in June 1883,[52] the Swiss now admit in their school-teaching that the
story of the _Apfelschusz_ is legendary.
Freudenberger, who earned his death-sentence for affirming that the story
came from Denmark, was on the right track, for the following variant of it
is given by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of the twelfth century, who
puts it as happening in the year 950:--
Nor ought what follows to be enveloped in silence. Palnatoki, for some
time in the body-guard of King Harold (Harold Gormson, or Bluetooth),
had made his bravery odious to many of his fellow-soldiers by the zeal
with which he surpassed them. One day, when he had drunk too much, he
boasted that he was so skilled a bowman that he could hit the smallest
apple, set on the top of a stick some way off, at the first shot,
which boast reached the ears of the king. This monarch’s wickedness
soon turned the confidence of the father to the peril of the son, for
he commanded that this dearest pledge of his life should stand in
place of the stick, adding a threat that if Palnatoki did not at his
first shot strike off the apple, he should with his head pay the
penalty of making an empty boast. This command forced him to attempt
more than he had promised, and what he _had_ said, reported by
slanderous tongues, bound him to accomplish what he had _not_ said.
Yet did not his sterling courage, though caught in the snare of
slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of heart. As soon as the
boy was led forth Palnatoki warned him to await the speeding of the
arrow with calm ears and unbent head, lest by any slight movement of
the body he should frustrate the archer’s well-tried skill. He then
made him stand with his back towards him, lest he should be scared at
the sight of the arrow. Then he drew three arrows from his quiver, and
with the first that he fitted to the string he struck the apple. When
the king asked him why he had taken more than one arrow from his
quiver, when he was to be allowed to make but one trial with his bow,
he made answer, “That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first
by the points of the others, lest perchance my innocence might have
been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.”[53]
Going farther northward we find tales corresponding in their main features
to the above, in the Icelandic _Saga_, the Vilkina; in the Norse _Saga_ of
Saint Olaf or Thidrik; and in the story of Harold, son of Sigurd. In the
Olaf _Saga_ it is said that the saint or king, desiring the conversion of
a brave heathen named Eindridi, competed with him in various athletic
sports, swam with him, wrestled with him, and then shot with him. Olaf
then dared Eindridi to strike a writing-tablet from off his son’s head
with an arrow, and bade two men bind the eyes of the child and hold the
napkin so that the boy might not move when he heard the whizz of the
arrow. Olaf aimed first, and the arrow grazed the lad’s head. Eindridi
then prepared to shoot, but the mother of the boy interfered and persuaded
the king to abandon this dangerous test of skill. The story adds that had
the boy been injured Eindridi would have revenged himself on the king.[54]
Somewhat like this, as from the locality might be expected, is the Faröe
Isles variant. King Harold challenges Geyti, son of Aslak, and, vexed at
being beaten in a swimming match, bids Geyti shoot a hazel-nut from off
his brother’s head. He consents, and the king witnesses the feat, when
Geyti
“Shot the little nut away,
Nor hurt the lad a hair.”
Next day Harold sends for the archer, and says:--
“List thee, Geyti, Aslak’s son,
And truly tell to me,
Wherefore hadst thou arrows twain
In the wood yestreen with thee?”
To which Geyti answers:--
“Therefore had I arrows twain
Yestreen in the wood with me,
Had I but hurt my brother dear
The other had pierced thee.”
With ourselves it is the burden of the ballad of William of Cloudeslee,
where the brave archer says:--
“I have a sonne seven years old;
Hee is to me full deere;
I will tye him to a stake--
All shall see him that bee here--
And lay an apple upon his head,
And goe six paces him froe;
And I myself with a broad arroe
Shall cleave the apple in towe.”
In the _Malleus Maleficarum_ Puncher, a magician on the Upper Rhine, is
required to shoot a coin from off a lad’s head; while, travelling
eastwards as far as Persia, we find the Tell myth as an incident in the
poem _Mantic Ultraïr_, a work of the twelfth century.
Thus far the variants of the legend found among Aryan peoples have been
summarised, and it is tempting to base upon this diffusion of a common
incident a theory of its origin among the ancestors of the Swiss and the
Norseman, the Persian and the Icelander. But it is found among non-Aryans
also. The ethnologist, Castrén, whose researches in Finland have secured a
valuable mass of fast-perishing materials, obtained this tale in the
village of Ultuwa. “A fight took place between some freebooters and the
inhabitants of the village of Alajärai. The robbers plundered every house,
and carried off amongst their captives an old man. As they proceeded with
their spoils along the strand of the lake a lad of twelve years old
appeared from among the reeds on the opposite bank, armed with a bow and
amply provided with arrows; he threatened to shoot down the captors unless
the old man, his father, was restored to him. The robbers mockingly
replied that the aged man would be given to him if he could shoot an apple
off his head. The boy accepted the challenge, pierced the apple and freed
his father.” Among a people in close contact with an Aryan race as the
Finns are in contact with both Swedes and Russians, the main incident of
the Tell story may easily have been woven into their native tales. But in
reference to other non-Aryan races Sir George Dasent, who has treated of
the diffusion of the Tell story very fully in the Introduction to his
_Popular Tales from the Norse_ (a reprint of which would be a boon to
students of folk-lore), says that it is common to the Turks and
Mongolians, and a legend of the wild Samoyedes, who never heard of Tell or
saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their
marksmen. What shall we say, then, but that the story of this bold
mastershot was prominent amongst many tribes and races, and that it only
crystallised itself round the great name of Tell by that process of
attraction which invariably leads a grateful people to throw such mythic
wreaths, such garlands of bold deeds of precious memory, around the brow
of its darling champion. Of course the solar mythologists see in Tell the
sun or cloud deity; in his bow the storm-cloud or the iris; and in his
arrows the sun-rays or lightning darts.
This is a question which we may leave to the champions concerned to
settle. Apart from the evidence of the survival of legend in history, and
the lesson of caution in accepting any ancient record as gospel which we
should learn therefrom, it is the human element in the venerable tale
which interests us most.
Remote in time, far away in place, as is its origin, it moves us yet. The
ennobling qualities incarnated in some hero (whether he be real or ideal
matters not) meet with admiring response in the primitive listeners to the
story, else it would have been speedily forgotten. Thus does it retain for
us witness to the underlying oneness of the human heart beneath all
surface differences.
Widespread as a myth may be, it takes depth of root according to the more
or less congenial soil where it is dropped. That about Tell found
favourable home in the uplands and the free air of Switzerland; with us S.
George, falling on times of chivalry, had abiding place, as also, less
rugged of type than the Swiss marksman, had Arthur, the “Blameless King,”
who, if he ever existed, is smothered in overgrowth of legends both native
and imported.
For such cycle of tales as gathered round the name of Arthur, and on which
our youthhood was nourished, is as mythical as the wolf that suckled
Romulus and Remus. Modern criticism and research have thoroughly sifted
the legendary from the true, and if the past remains vague and shadowy, we
at least know how far the horizon of certainty extends. The criticism has
made short work of the romancing chronicles which so long did duty for
sober history, and has shown that no accurate knowledge of the sequence of
events is obtainable until late in the period of the English invasions.
Save in scattered hints here and there, we are quite in the dark as to the
condition of this island during the Roman occupation, whilst for anything
that is known of times prior to this, called for convenience
“pre-historic,” we are dependent upon unwritten records preserved in tombs
and mounds. The information gathered from these has given us some clue to
what manner of men they were who confronted the first Aryan immigrants,
and, enriched by researches of the ethnologist and philologist, enabled us
to trace the movements of races westwards, until we find old and new
commingled as one English-speaking folk.
All or any of which could not be known to the earlier chroniclers. When
Geoffry of Monmouth set forth the glory and renown of Arthur and his Court
he recorded and embellished traditions six hundred years old, without
thought of weighing the evidence or questioning the credibility of the
transmitters. Whether there was a king of that name who ruled over the
Silures, and around whom the remnant of brave Kelts rallied in their final
struggle against the invading hordes, and who, wounded in battle, died at
Glastonbury, and was buried, or rather sleeps, as the legend has it, in
the Vale of Avilion, “hath been,” as Milton says, “doubted heretofore, and
may again, with good reason, for the Monk of Malmesbury and others, whose
credit hath swayed most with the learned sort, we may well perceive to
have known no more of this Arthur nor of his doings than we now
living.”[55]
In the group of legends both of the Old and New World, which, the solar
theorists tell us, symbolise the long sleep of winter before the sweet
awakening of the spring, Arthur of course has place. “Men said he was not
dead, but by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ was in another place, and
men say that he will come again ... that there is written on his tomb this
verse:
‘Hic jacet Arthurus rex quondam, Rexque futurus.’”
So Charlemagne reposes beneath the Untersberg, waiting for the appointed
time to rise and do battle with anti-Christ; Tell slumbers ready-panoplied
to save Switzerland when danger threatens; the hero-deity of the
Algonquins, when he left the earth, promised to return, but has not,
wherefore he is called Glooskap, or the Liar; St. John sleeps at Ephesus
till the last days are at hand; and the Church militant awaits the return
of her Lord at the Second Advent.
The comparative mythologists say that Arthur is a myth, pure and simple, a
variant of Sigurd and Perseus; the winning of his famous sword but a
repetition of the story of the Teutonic and Greek heroes; the gift of
Guinevere as fatal to him as Helen to Menelaus; his knights but
reproductions of the Achaian hosts--much of which may be true; but the
romance corresponded to some probable event; it fitted in with the
national traditions. There were struggles between the Kelts and subsequent
invaders--Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes. There were brave chieftains who
led forlorn hopes or fought to the death in their fastnesses. There were,
in the numerous tribal divisions, petty kings and queens ruling over mimic
courts, with retinues of knights bent on chivalrous, unselfish service.
These were the nuclei of stories which were the early annals of the tribe,
the glad theme of bards and minstrels, and from which a long line of poets
to the latest singer of the _Idylls of the King_ have drawn the materials
of their epics. The fascination which such a cycle of tales had for the
people, especially in days when the ballad was history and poetry and all
literature rolled into one, was so strong, that the Church wisely imported
an element which gave loftier meaning to the knightly life, and infused
religious ardour into the camp and court. To the stories of Tristram and
Gawayne, already woven into the old romance, she added the half-Christian,
half-pagan, legend of the knights who left the feast at the Round Table to
travel across land and sea that they might free the enslaved, remove the
spell from the enchanted, and deliver fair women from the monsters of
tyranny and lust, setting forth on what in her eyes was a nobler quest--to
seek and look upon the San Graal, or Holy Vessel used by Jesus at the Last
Supper, and into which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood and water
that streamed from the side of the crucified Jesus. This mystic cup, in
which we have probably a sacrificial relic of the old British religion
imported into the Christian incident with which it blended so well,
floated, according to Arthurian legend, suddenly into the presence of the
King and his Round Table knights at Camelot as they sat at supper, and was
as suddenly borne away, to be henceforth the coveted object of knightly
endeavour. Only the baptized could hope to behold it; to the unchaste it
was veiled: hence only they among the knights who were pure in heart and
life vowed to go in quest of the San Graal, and return not until they had
seen it. So to Sir Galahad, the “just and faithful,” Tennyson sings how
the sacred cup appeared--
“Sometimes on lonely mountain meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And, star-like, mingles with the stars.”
Whilst in such legends as the Arthurian group the grain of truth, if it
exists, is so embedded as to be out of reach, there are others concerning
actual personages, notably Cyrus and Charlemagne, not to quote other names
from both “profane” and sacred history, in which the fable can be
separated from the fact without difficulty. Enough is known of the life
and times of such men to detach the certain from the doubtful, as, _e.g._,
when Charlemagne is spoken of as a Frenchman and as a Crusader before
there was a French nation, or the idea of Crusades had entered the heads
of most Christian kings; and as in the legends of the infancy of Cyrus,
which are of a type related to like legends of the wonderful round the
early years of the famous.
This, however, by the way. Leaving illustration of the fabulous in heroic
story, it will be interesting to trace it through such a tale of pathos
and domestic life as the well-known one of Llewellyn and his faithful
hound, Gellert.
Whose emotions have not been stirred by the story of Llewellyn the Great
going out hunting, and missing his favourite dog; of his return, to be
greeted by the creature with more than usual pleasure in his eye, but with
jaws besmeared with blood; of the anxiety with which Llewellyn rushed into
the house, to find the cradle where had lain his beautiful boy upset, and
the ground around it soaked with blood; of his thereupon killing the dog,
and then seeing the child lying unharmed beneath the cradle, and sleeping
by the side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous maw the faithful Gellert
had delivered it? Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, have stood by
Gellert’s grave at Beddgelert, little suspecting that the affecting story
occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan people, and of several
non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chinese.
Probably it comes to us as many other tales have come, through collections
like the well-known _Gesta Romanorum_, compiled by mediæval monks for
popular entertainment. In the version given in that book the knight who
corresponds to Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers that it had
saved his child from a serpent, and thereupon breaks his sword and departs
on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the monks were no inventors of such
tales; they recorded those that came to them through the pilgrims,
students, traders, and warriors who travelled from west to east and from
east to west in the Middle Ages, and it is in the native home of fable and
imagery the storied Orient, that we must seek for the earliest forms of
the Gellert legend. In the _Panchatantra_, the oldest and most celebrated
Sanskrit fable-book, the story takes this form:--An infirm child is left
by its mother while she goes to fetch water, and she charges the father,
who is a Brahman, to watch over it. But he leaves the house to collect
alms, and soon after this a snake crawls towards the child. In the house
was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a house pet, who sprang at
the snake and throttled it. When the mother came back, the ichneumon went
gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with the snake’s blood. The
horrified mother, thinking it had killed her child, threw her water-jar at
it, and killed it; then seeing the child safe beside the mangled body of
the snake, she beat her breast and face with grief, and scolded her
husband for leaving the house.
We find the same story, with the slight difference that the animal is an
otter, in a later Sanskrit collection, the _Hitopadesa_, but we can track
it to that fertile source of classic and mediæval fable, the Buddhist
_Jâtakas_, or _Birth Stories_, a very ancient collection of fables, which,
professing to have been told by the Buddha, narrates his exploits in the
550 births through which he passed before attaining Buddhahood. In the
_Vinaya Pitaka_ of the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, according to
Mr. Beal, dates from the fifth century A.D., and is translated from
original scriptures supposed to have existed near the time of Asoka’s
council in the third century B.C., we have the earliest extant form of
the tale. That in the _Panchatantra_ is obviously borrowed from it, the
differences being in unimportant detail, as, for example, the nakula, or
mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his return home, the wife having
neglected to take the child with her as bidden by him. He is filled with
sorrow, and then a Deva continues the strain:--