Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets: And Other Old Testament Characters from Various SourcesBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets: And Other Old Testament Characters from Various Sources
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Bible. Old Testament -- Legends
A Welsh legend is this:--“One of the most dreadful of events was the
outbreak of Llyn Llion, the sea of seas, which overwhelmed the world
and drowned all men except Dwyan and Dwyvach, who escaped in a bare
boat and colonized Britain. This ship was one of the three masterpieces
of Hu, and was built by the heavenly lord, Reivion; and it received
into it a pair of every kind of beasts when the Llyn Llion burst
forth.” Reivion is the same as Hu Cadarn, the discoverer of the vine;
and it is said of him that “he built the ark laden with fruit, and it
was stayed up in the water, and carried forward by serpents;” and of
the rainbow it was said, that the Woman of the silver wheel, Arianrhod,
to control the wizards of night and evil spirits of tempest, and out of
love to the Britons, “wove the stream of the rainbow,--a stream which
drives the storm from the earth, and makes its former destruction stay
far from it, throughout the world’s circle.”[228]
The Norse legend in the younger Edda is, “Bör’s sons (Odin, Vilj, and
Ve) slew the giant Ymir; and when he fell, so much blood (in poetic
phraseology Ymir’s blood signified water) ran out of the wounds, that
the whole race of the giants was drowned in it, except one, who with
his family escaped; this one was called Bergelmr. He got into a boat
along with his wife, and was thus saved.”[229]
The Lithuanian myth was this:--When Pramzimas, the most high God,
looked out of his heavenly house upon the world through a window, he
saw that it was filled with violence. Then he sent Wind and Water to
devastate the earth, and this they did for twenty days and nights.
Pramzimas looked on, and as he looked on, he ate nuts at his window,
and threw the shells down. One shell fell on the top of a mountain, and
some men, women, and beasts scrambled into it and were saved alive,
while all the rest of the inhabitants of the world were drowned. When
the flood drained away, the pairs in the nutshell left it, and were
scattered over the earth. Only one aged couple remained, and they
complained; then God sent them the rainbow to console them, and bade
them jump over the bones of the earth. They jumped nine times, and nine
pairs of living human beings started to life, and founded the nine
races of Lithuanian blood.[230]
Among the negroes of Africa, traditions are faint, or have been little
sought after and collected. The Jumala negroes say that once when the
earth was full of cruelty and wickedness, the good Til destroyed it
with fire, and that one man alone was saved alive, named Musikdgen, _i.
e._, the mountain chief, because he was found without blame.
In America the crop of traditions is abundant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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