Where the forest murmurs : $b Nature essaysSharp, William
History
Where the forest murmurs : $b Nature essays
Sharp, William
Natural history -- Outdoor books
and to this day most popular of Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of
Gwython fled from his following vengeance from land to land, across
seas, over mountains, ‘to the ends of the earth,’ and at last with her
faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of the remote skies. But
long before they could reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet
to which they fled, Gwython overtook them, led by the dust which these
mortal if semi-divine fugitives made along the soundless dark blue
roads of heaven. He slew them and their winged horses and their aerial
hounds, and standing on the verge of space flung the heads and limbs
and bodies into infinitude. Hence the meteors and falling stars which
at the season of the autumnal equinox and at the approach of winter may
still be seen whirling adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible
in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all eternity, or as long as
our world endures, the phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance
shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of Gwython the Enchanter. Is
there not convincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that silent
highway of the doomed lovers ... the dust of the trampled star-way that
no wind of space has blown to this side or to that, that no alchemy of
sun or moon has burned up or like dew dissolved?
Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had _Iringes Weg_
or _Wec_ and _Bil-Idun’s Weg_; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous
descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the
Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge
came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets
applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s _Teutonic
Mythology_ will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus
the Vikings knew the Galaxy as _Wuotanes Straza_, or ‘Woden’s Street’;
the Dutch have in common use _Vronelden Street_, ‘the women’s Street’;
and the German peasants commonly call it _Jakob’s Weg_. The Westphalian
term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there
is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated
with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains
with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact
that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather
is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who
delight in the term _Linnunrata_, the Birds’ Way, either from an old
Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of
all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny
wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged
spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course,
a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the
phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the
Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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