Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

§ VII.

SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY.

For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution, examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is served when they are cited and classified as specimens. Not thus is it with examples drawn nearer home from sources at which our young thirst for the stirring and romantic was slaked. When we learn that famous names and striking episodes are in some rare instances only transformed and personified natural phenomena, or, as occurring everywhere, possibly variants of a common legend, the far-reaching influence of primitive thought comes to us in more vivid and exciting form. And although one takes in hand this work of disenchantment in no eager fashion, the loss is more seeming than real. Whether the particular tale of bravery, of selflessness, of faithfulness, has truth of detail, matters little compared with the fact that its reception the wide world over witnesses to human belief, even at low levels, in the qualities which have given man empire over himself and ever raised the moral standard of the race. Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the purity of which is now subject of analysis. As a familiar and interesting example let us take the story of William Tell.

Everybody has heard how, in the year 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler, Vogt (or Governor) of the Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole as symbol of the Imperial power, and ordered every one who passed by to do obeisance to it; and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm Tell, who hated Gessler and the tyranny which the symbol expressed, passed by without saluting the hat, and was at once seized and brought before Gessler, who ordered that as punishment Tell should shoot an apple off the head of his own son. As resistance was vain, the apple was placed on the boy’s head, when Tell bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the apple, fell with it to the ground. Gessler saw that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second arrow in his belt, and, asking the reason, received this for answer: “It was for you; had I shot my child, know that this would have pierced your heart.”

Now, this story first occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who wrote at the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. about one hundred and seventy years after its reputed occurrence. The absence of any reference to it in contemporary records caused doubt to be thrown upon it three centuries ago. Guillimann, the author of a work on Swiss antiquities, published in 1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the current belief in it because the tale is so popular! The race to which he belonged is not yet extinct. A century and a half later a more fearless sceptic, who said that the story was of Danish origin, was condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive, and in the well-timed absence of the offender his book was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. But the truth is great, and prevails. G. von Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out that the name of Wilhelm Tell does not occur even once in the history of the three cantons, neither is there any trace that a Vogt named Gessler ever served the house of Hapsburg there. Moreover, the legend does not correspond to any fact of a period of oppression of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian rulers.

“There exist in contemporary records no instances of wanton outrage and insolence on the Hapsburg side. It was the object of that power to obtain political ascendancy, not to indulge its representatives in lust or wanton insult,” and, where records of disputes between particular persons occur, “the symptoms of violence, as is natural enough, appear rather on the side of the Swiss than on that of the aggrandising Imperial house.”[51]

Candour, however, requires that the “evidence” in support of the legend should be stated. There is the fountain on the supposed site of the lime-tree in the market-place at Altdorf by which young Tell stood, as well as the colossal plaster statue of the hero himself which confronts us as we enter the quaint village. But more than this, the veritable cross-bow itself is preserved in the arsenal at Zurich!

However, although the little Tell’s chapel, as restored, was opened with a national fête, in the presence of two members of the Federal Council, in June 1883,[52] the Swiss now admit in their school-teaching that the story of the Apfelschusz is legendary.

Freudenberger, who earned his death-sentence for affirming that the story came from Denmark, was on the right track, for the following variant of it is given by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of the twelfth century, who puts it as happening in the year 950:—

Nor ought what follows to be enveloped in silence. Palnatoki, for some time in the body-guard of King Harold (Harold Gormson, or Bluetooth), had made his bravery odious to many of his fellow-soldiers by the zeal with which he surpassed them. One day, when he had drunk too much, he boasted that he was so skilled a bowman that he could hit the smallest apple, set on the top of a stick some way off, at the first shot, which boast reached the ears of the king. This monarch’s wickedness soon turned the confidence of the father to the peril of the son, for he commanded that this dearest pledge of his life should stand in place of the stick, adding a threat that if Palnatoki did not at his first shot strike off the apple, he should with his head pay the penalty of making an empty boast. This command forced him to attempt more than he had promised, and what he had said, reported by slanderous tongues, bound him to accomplish what he had not said. Yet did not his sterling courage, though caught in the snare of slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of heart. As soon as the boy was led forth Palnatoki warned him to await the speeding of the arrow with calm ears and unbent head, lest by any slight movement of the body he should frustrate the archer’s well-tried skill. He then made him stand with his back towards him, lest he should be scared at the sight of the arrow. Then he drew three arrows from his quiver, and with the first that he fitted to the string he struck the apple. When the king asked him why he had taken more than one arrow from his quiver, when he was to be allowed to make but one trial with his bow, he made answer, “That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first by the points of the others, lest perchance my innocence might have been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.”[53]

Going farther northward we find tales corresponding in their main features to the above, in the Icelandic Saga, the Vilkina; in the Norse Saga of Saint Olaf or Thidrik; and in the story of Harold, son of Sigurd. In the Olaf Saga it is said that the saint or king, desiring the conversion of a brave heathen named Eindridi, competed with him in various athletic sports, swam with him, wrestled with him, and then shot with him. Olaf then dared Eindridi to strike a writing-tablet from off his son’s head with an arrow, and bade two men bind the eyes of the child and hold the napkin so that the boy might not move when he heard the whizz of the arrow. Olaf aimed first, and the arrow grazed the lad’s head. Eindridi then prepared to shoot, but the mother of the boy interfered and persuaded the king to abandon this dangerous test of skill. The story adds that had the boy been injured Eindridi would have revenged himself on the king.[54]

Somewhat like this, as from the locality might be expected, is the Faröe Isles variant. King Harold challenges Geyti, son of Aslak, and, vexed at being beaten in a swimming match, bids Geyti shoot a hazel-nut from off his brother’s head. He consents, and the king witnesses the feat, when Geyti

“Shot the little nut away,
Nor hurt the lad a hair.”

Next day Harold sends for the archer, and says:—

“List thee, Geyti, Aslak’s son,
And truly tell to me,
Wherefore hadst thou arrows twain
In the wood yestreen with thee?”

To which Geyti answers:—

“Therefore had I arrows twain
Yestreen in the wood with me,
Had I but hurt my brother dear
The other had pierced thee.”

With ourselves it is the burden of the ballad of William of Cloudeslee, where the brave archer says:—

“I have a sonne seven years old;
Hee is to me full deere;
I will tye him to a stake—
All shall see him that bee here—
And lay an apple upon his head,
And goe six paces him froe;
And I myself with a broad arroe
Shall cleave the apple in towe.”

In the Malleus Maleficarum Puncher, a magician on the Upper Rhine, is required to shoot a coin from off a lad’s head; while, travelling eastwards as far as Persia, we find the Tell myth as an incident in the poem Mantic Ultraïr, a work of the twelfth century.

Thus far the variants of the legend found among Aryan peoples have been summarised, and it is tempting to base upon this diffusion of a common incident a theory of its origin among the ancestors of the Swiss and the Norseman, the Persian and the Icelander. But it is found among non-Aryans also. The ethnologist, Castrén, whose researches in Finland have secured a valuable mass of fast-perishing materials, obtained this tale in the village of Ultuwa. “A fight took place between some freebooters and the inhabitants of the village of Alajärai. The robbers plundered every house, and carried off amongst their captives an old man. As they proceeded with their spoils along the strand of the lake a lad of twelve years old appeared from among the reeds on the opposite bank, armed with a bow and amply provided with arrows; he threatened to shoot down the captors unless the old man, his father, was restored to him. The robbers mockingly replied that the aged man would be given to him if he could shoot an apple off his head. The boy accepted the challenge, pierced the apple and freed his father.” Among a people in close contact with an Aryan race as the Finns are in contact with both Swedes and Russians, the main incident of the Tell story may easily have been woven into their native tales. But in reference to other non-Aryan races Sir George Dasent, who has treated of the diffusion of the Tell story very fully in the Introduction to his Popular Tales from the Norse (a reprint of which would be a boon to students of folk-lore), says that it is common to the Turks and Mongolians, and a legend of the wild Samoyedes, who never heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their marksmen. What shall we say, then, but that the story of this bold mastershot was prominent amongst many tribes and races, and that it only crystallised itself round the great name of Tell by that process of attraction which invariably leads a grateful people to throw such mythic wreaths, such garlands of bold deeds of precious memory, around the brow of its darling champion. Of course the solar mythologists see in Tell the sun or cloud deity; in his bow the storm-cloud or the iris; and in his arrows the sun-rays or lightning darts.

This is a question which we may leave to the champions concerned to settle. Apart from the evidence of the survival of legend in history, and the lesson of caution in accepting any ancient record as gospel which we should learn therefrom, it is the human element in the venerable tale which interests us most.

Remote in time, far away in place, as is its origin, it moves us yet. The ennobling qualities incarnated in some hero (whether he be real or ideal matters not) meet with admiring response in the primitive listeners to the story, else it would have been speedily forgotten. Thus does it retain for us witness to the underlying oneness of the human heart beneath all surface differences.

Widespread as a myth may be, it takes depth of root according to the more or less congenial soil where it is dropped. That about Tell found favourable home in the uplands and the free air of Switzerland; with us S. George, falling on times of chivalry, had abiding place, as also, less rugged of type than the Swiss marksman, had Arthur, the “Blameless King,” who, if he ever existed, is smothered in overgrowth of legends both native and imported.

For such cycle of tales as gathered round the name of Arthur, and on which our youthhood was nourished, is as mythical as the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. Modern criticism and research have thoroughly sifted the legendary from the true, and if the past remains vague and shadowy, we at least know how far the horizon of certainty extends. The criticism has made short work of the romancing chronicles which so long did duty for sober history, and has shown that no accurate knowledge of the sequence of events is obtainable until late in the period of the English invasions. Save in scattered hints here and there, we are quite in the dark as to the condition of this island during the Roman occupation, whilst for anything that is known of times prior to this, called for convenience “pre-historic,” we are dependent upon unwritten records preserved in tombs and mounds. The information gathered from these has given us some clue to what manner of men they were who confronted the first Aryan immigrants, and, enriched by researches of the ethnologist and philologist, enabled us to trace the movements of races westwards, until we find old and new commingled as one English-speaking folk.

All or any of which could not be known to the earlier chroniclers. When Geoffry of Monmouth set forth the glory and renown of Arthur and his Court he recorded and embellished traditions six hundred years old, without thought of weighing the evidence or questioning the credibility of the transmitters. Whether there was a king of that name who ruled over the Silures, and around whom the remnant of brave Kelts rallied in their final struggle against the invading hordes, and who, wounded in battle, died at Glastonbury, and was buried, or rather sleeps, as the legend has it, in the Vale of Avilion, “hath been,” as Milton says, “doubted heretofore, and may again, with good reason, for the Monk of Malmesbury and others, whose credit hath swayed most with the learned sort, we may well perceive to have known no more of this Arthur nor of his doings than we now living.”[55]

In the group of legends both of the Old and New World, which, the solar theorists tell us, symbolise the long sleep of winter before the sweet awakening of the spring, Arthur of course has place. “Men said he was not dead, but by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ was in another place, and men say that he will come again ... that there is written on his tomb this verse:

‘Hic jacet Arthurus rex quondam, Rexque futurus.’”

So Charlemagne reposes beneath the Untersberg, waiting for the appointed time to rise and do battle with anti-Christ; Tell slumbers ready-panoplied to save Switzerland when danger threatens; the hero-deity of the Algonquins, when he left the earth, promised to return, but has not, wherefore he is called Glooskap, or the Liar; St. John sleeps at Ephesus till the last days are at hand; and the Church militant awaits the return of her Lord at the Second Advent.

The comparative mythologists say that Arthur is a myth, pure and simple, a variant of Sigurd and Perseus; the winning of his famous sword but a repetition of the story of the Teutonic and Greek heroes; the gift of Guinevere as fatal to him as Helen to Menelaus; his knights but reproductions of the Achaian hosts—much of which may be true; but the romance corresponded to some probable event; it fitted in with the national traditions. There were struggles between the Kelts and subsequent invaders—Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes. There were brave chieftains who led forlorn hopes or fought to the death in their fastnesses. There were, in the numerous tribal divisions, petty kings and queens ruling over mimic courts, with retinues of knights bent on chivalrous, unselfish service. These were the nuclei of stories which were the early annals of the tribe, the glad theme of bards and minstrels, and from which a long line of poets to the latest singer of the Idylls of the King have drawn the materials of their epics. The fascination which such a cycle of tales had for the people, especially in days when the ballad was history and poetry and all literature rolled into one, was so strong, that the Church wisely imported an element which gave loftier meaning to the knightly life, and infused religious ardour into the camp and court. To the stories of Tristram and Gawayne, already woven into the old romance, she added the half-Christian, half-pagan, legend of the knights who left the feast at the Round Table to travel across land and sea that they might free the enslaved, remove the spell from the enchanted, and deliver fair women from the monsters of tyranny and lust, setting forth on what in her eyes was a nobler quest—to seek and look upon the San Graal, or Holy Vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper, and into which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood and water that streamed from the side of the crucified Jesus. This mystic cup, in which we have probably a sacrificial relic of the old British religion imported into the Christian incident with which it blended so well, floated, according to Arthurian legend, suddenly into the presence of the King and his Round Table knights at Camelot as they sat at supper, and was as suddenly borne away, to be henceforth the coveted object of knightly endeavour. Only the baptized could hope to behold it; to the unchaste it was veiled: hence only they among the knights who were pure in heart and life vowed to go in quest of the San Graal, and return not until they had seen it. So to Sir Galahad, the “just and faithful,” Tennyson sings how the sacred cup appeared—

“Sometimes on lonely mountain meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And, star-like, mingles with the stars.”

Whilst in such legends as the Arthurian group the grain of truth, if it exists, is so embedded as to be out of reach, there are others concerning actual personages, notably Cyrus and Charlemagne, not to quote other names from both “profane” and sacred history, in which the fable can be separated from the fact without difficulty. Enough is known of the life and times of such men to detach the certain from the doubtful, as, e.g., when Charlemagne is spoken of as a Frenchman and as a Crusader before there was a French nation, or the idea of Crusades had entered the heads of most Christian kings; and as in the legends of the infancy of Cyrus, which are of a type related to like legends of the wonderful round the early years of the famous.

This, however, by the way. Leaving illustration of the fabulous in heroic story, it will be interesting to trace it through such a tale of pathos and domestic life as the well-known one of Llewellyn and his faithful hound, Gellert.

Whose emotions have not been stirred by the story of Llewellyn the Great going out hunting, and missing his favourite dog; of his return, to be greeted by the creature with more than usual pleasure in his eye, but with jaws besmeared with blood; of the anxiety with which Llewellyn rushed into the house, to find the cradle where had lain his beautiful boy upset, and the ground around it soaked with blood; of his thereupon killing the dog, and then seeing the child lying unharmed beneath the cradle, and sleeping by the side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous maw the faithful Gellert had delivered it? Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, have stood by Gellert’s grave at Beddgelert, little suspecting that the affecting story occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan people, and of several non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chinese.

Probably it comes to us as many other tales have come, through collections like the well-known Gesta Romanorum, compiled by mediæval monks for popular entertainment. In the version given in that book the knight who corresponds to Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers that it had saved his child from a serpent, and thereupon breaks his sword and departs on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the monks were no inventors of such tales; they recorded those that came to them through the pilgrims, students, traders, and warriors who travelled from west to east and from east to west in the Middle Ages, and it is in the native home of fable and imagery the storied Orient, that we must seek for the earliest forms of the Gellert legend. In the Panchatantra, the oldest and most celebrated Sanskrit fable-book, the story takes this form:—An infirm child is left by its mother while she goes to fetch water, and she charges the father, who is a Brahman, to watch over it. But he leaves the house to collect alms, and soon after this a snake crawls towards the child. In the house was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a house pet, who sprang at the snake and throttled it. When the mother came back, the ichneumon went gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with the snake’s blood. The horrified mother, thinking it had killed her child, threw her water-jar at it, and killed it; then seeing the child safe beside the mangled body of the snake, she beat her breast and face with grief, and scolded her husband for leaving the house.

We find the same story, with the slight difference that the animal is an otter, in a later Sanskrit collection, the Hitopadesa, but we can track it to that fertile source of classic and mediæval fable, the Buddhist Jâtakas, or Birth Stories, a very ancient collection of fables, which, professing to have been told by the Buddha, narrates his exploits in the 550 births through which he passed before attaining Buddhahood. In the Vinaya Pitaka of the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, according to Mr. Beal, dates from the fifth century A.D., and is translated from original scriptures supposed to have existed near the time of Asoka’s council in the third century B.C., we have the earliest extant form of the tale. That in the Panchatantra is obviously borrowed from it, the differences being in unimportant detail, as, for example, the nakula, or mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his return home, the wife having neglected to take the child with her as bidden by him. He is filled with sorrow, and then a Deva continues the strain:—

“Let there be due thought and consideration,
Give not way to hasty impulse,
By forgetting the claims of true friendship
You may heedlessly injure a kind heart (person)
As the Brahman killed the nakula.”

The several versions of the story which could be cited from German, Russian, Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would merely present certain variations due to local colouring and to the inventiveness of the narrators or transcribers; and, omitting these, it will suffice to give the Egyptian variant or corresponding form, in which the tragical has given place to the amusing, save, perhaps, in the opinion of the Wali. This luckless person “once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned, exhausted with his efforts at belabouring the man, he discovered among the herbs a poisonous snake.”

In pointing to the venerable Buddhist Birth Stories as the earliest extant source of Aryan fables, it should be added that these were with the Buddha and his disciples the favourite vehicle of carrying to the hearts of men those lessons of gentleness and tenderness towards all living things which are a distinctive feature of that non-persecuting religion.