Denmark -- History -- To 1241; Folklore -- Scandinavia
The giants now resolved to attack Ansegard; and Woden, under the name of
Yggr, warned the gods, who recall him after ten years' exile.
But for Saxo this part of the story of the wars of the gods would be
very fragmentary.
The "Hildiger story", where a father slays his son unwittingly, and
then falls at his brother's hand, a tale combining the Rustam and
the Balin-Balan types, is one of the Hilding tragedies, and curiously
preserved in the late "Saga of Asmund the Champions' bane". It is an
antithesis, as Dr. Rydberg remarks, to the Hildebrand and Hadubrand
story, where father and son must fight and are reconciled.
The "story of Orwandel" (the analogue of Orion the Hunter) must be
gathered chiefly from the prose Edda. He was a huntsman, big enough and
brave enough to cope with giants. He was the friend of Thor, the husband
of Groa, the father of Swipdag, the enemy of giant Coller and the
monster Sela. The story of his birth, and of his being blinded, are
lost apparently in the Teutonic stories, unless we may suppose that the
bleeding of Robin Hood till he could not see by the traitorous prioress
is the last remains of the story of the great archer's death.
Great part of the troubles which befell the gods arose from the
antagonism of the sons of Iwalde and the brethren Sindre and Brokk
(Cinder and Brank), rival artist families; and it was owing to the
retirement of their artist foster-parents that Frey and Freya were left
among the giants. The Hniflung hoard is also supposed to have consisted
of the treasures of one band of primaeval artists, the Iwaldings.
Whether we have here the phenomenon of mythological doublets belonging
to different tribes, or whether we have already among these early names
that descent of story which has led to an adventure of Moses being
attributed to Garibaldi, given to Theodoric the king the adventures
of Theodoric the god, taken Arthur to Rome, and Charles the Great to
Constantinople, it is hard to say.
The skeleton-key of identification, used even as ably as Dr. Rydberg
uses it, will not pick every mythologic lock, though it undoubtedly has
opened many hitherto closed. The truth is that man is a finite animal;
that he has a limited number of types of legend; that these legends, as
long as they live and exist, are excessively prehensile; that, like the
opossum, they can swing from tree to tree without falling; as one tree
dies out of memory they pass on to another. When they are scared away
by what is called exact intelligence from the tall forest of great
personalities, they contrive to live humbly clinging to such bare plain
stocks and poles (Tis and Jack and Cinderella) as enable them to find a
precarious perch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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