_i.e._, "I am very sharp and hard; Galaan made me with very great care; fourteen years old was Jesus Christ when Galaan tempered and made me." Other romances furnish with swords of Galant's workmanship both Julius Cæsar and Alexander the Great, and by inheritance from the latter, Ptolemy, Judas Maccabæus, and the Emperor Vespasian.[257] Such spurious inventions, however, lack all the value of the original symbolic legend. We read indeed in the romance of Fierabras d'Mixandre, of three famous swords made by Galans and his two brothers; of one of which it is related,-- "Césars li emperères l'ot maint jor en demagne, Engleterre en conquist, Angou et Alemagne, Et France et Normendie, Saisone et Aquitaigne, Et Puille et Hungerie, Provence et Moriaigne."[258] If this idea stood alone, or was conceived in the simple spirit of the Scandinavian Vœlund-Chaunt, we might imagine it to be designed as a symbolic myth representing the advent of the Iron Period and its irresistible progress over the north; but the general spirit of the romance is characterized by the usual extravagance of medieval poetry. The Greeks assigned to the history of Dædalus a very high antiquity, carrying him back to somewhere about the thirteenth century before the Christian era; but it may admit of doubt if Greece had then passed her own primitive stage. Among the relics of the European Stone Period preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries are some small flint-flakes and arrow-heads, gathered on the elevated mound of the tomb of the Plateans at Marathon, which it will not greatly outrage the ideas of the critical historian to assume as weapons used by the Greek patriots in repelling the Persian invader. At first the word Dædalus was, among the Greeks, like that of Weland among the Scandinavians, a generic name. Δαιδαλλω signified to work artistically, as _Voelundr_ signified a smith in Islandic; and Dædalus was, like Weland, pre-eminently the artist and the workman. The word became a proper name only because of their attributing to this mythological being all the perfections of the art. For this reason also, it appears equally erroneous to regard the Islandic word voelund, a smith, as derived from Weland: it is the contrary that should be assumed. The word _voelund_ existed before the history of the famous smith Weland had been invented, just as the word δαιδαλλω existed before the personification Dædalus had been adopted into the mythology of the Greeks.[259] This is no new idea. It was obviously from a recognition of it that King Alfred, when translating the _De Consolatione Philosophiæ_ of Boethius into Anglo-Saxon, used the name of the northern Weland as synonymous with _Fabricius_. Mr. Singer has employed the Greek fable of Dædalus to restore the connexion of the arts of the north with the elder civilisation of Europe, and Dr. Sickler has applied the same classic legend with great ingenuity in his argument of the Phœnician origin