Myths of the Rhine

CONTENTS





Primitive Times.—The First Settlers on the Rhine.—Masters going to School.—Sanskrit and Breton.—Ax Idle God.—Microscopic Deities.—Tree Worship.—Birth-Trees and Death-Trees.
The Rhine is born in Switzerland, in the Canton of Grisons; it skirts France and passes through it, and after a long and magnificent career it finally loses itself in the countless canals of Holland; and yet the Rhine is essentially a German river.
Already in the earliest ages, long before towns were built on its banks, it saw all the Germanic races dwell here in tents, watch their flocks, and fight their interminable battles, although the clash of arms and the blast of trumpets never for a moment aroused the impassive historian from his deep slumbers.

His silence, long continued into later centuries, does not prevent us from supposing, however, that the Rhine was already at that time the great high- road on which the Germanic races wandered to and fro, and other races came to their native land. It was the Rhine that brought to them commerce and civilization; but on the Rhine came also invasions of a very different kind. We can allude here only to those religious invasions which are connected with our subject.