This is merely the formula of the two children flying from cannibal parents by the aid of a friendly animal, often a sheep; in Samoyed a beaver which can speak.[1] In many variants of Cinderella the helpful sheep is the dead mother in that form. In Asterinos and Pulja, a tale from Epirus,[2] a dog is the helpful animal; but the boy is turned into a sheep, is slain by the girl's jealous mother-in-law, and from his bones grows a wonderful apple-tree. The girl is thrown into the deep water, but revives. In the Greek saga, Helle falls into the Hellespont off the ram's back: her name is eponymous, derived from the Hellespont. In some variants she does not escape on the ram. The later fortunes of Athamas and Ino are variously told.
But the Argo saga is continued by making the heroes of all Hellas join in "the classical Quest of the Grail," the search for the fleece of the Golden Ram. Where it was, Homer, we shall see, clearly did not know: the place was still in fairyland, unlocalised. Jason, as in a very common Märchen formula, collects companions with marvellous gifts, Keen Eye (Lynceus), the Strong Man (Heracles), the prophet (Orpheus), the winged men, sons of the North Wind, and so on. There is nothing historic here; even thus, in Celtic saga, the miraculously gifted heroes hunted the Twrch Trywyth, the boar. Even thus the miraculously gifted Finnish heroes seek for the mystic Sampo in the Kalewala. The Achaean heroes find the fleece in the hands of King Aietes, who represents the giant of fairy tale, and has a fair daughter (Medea) that aids the young adventurer, and enables him to plough the perilous field with the untamable bulls, like Ilmarinen in the Finnish Kalewala (Rune 19), like the hero of Kilwch and Olwen in the Welsh Mabinogion. She flees, as usual, with her lover from her father. Here this formula ends; the return voyage and the later adventures of the pair were fantastically told as geographical knowledge increased, after the home of Medea had been located at Aia in Colchis, at the east of the Euxine. Other formulae of Märchen were introduced, the venomed robe that burned up Glauce, the magic cauldron of youth that, in the wrong hands, is deadly. Medea is taken here and there, to Corinth, to Athens, mixed with the Theseus set of Märchen, made the eponymous heroine of the Medes.
The Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, again, is of the same character as the mythic boar hunt that ended in upper Ettrick; as the boar hunt of Diarmaid, in Irish; and the hunt of the Welsh Mabinogion, where Keen Eye and the rest reappear, in the Twrch Trywyth.
The growth of "Saga," or bardic tradition, is the same in all countries. First we have the Märchen, told in prose, as they still exist among European peasants and in many "non-Aryan" peoples, from the Samoyeds of the frozen north to the Red Indians, the Huarochiri of Southern America, the Samoans, the Bechuanas, the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the Santhals, and so forth. In the Märchen the characters are usually anonymous, a boy, a girl, a witch, a king, and the rest; real characters, as Charlemagne, may appear. The events are not localised. The situations are efforts of the primal romantic fancy; like the fragments of coloured glass in the kaleidoscope, they fall into any number of patterns.
As civilisation advances and a class of professional sennachies appears, they give names to the characters; the anonymous young adventurer becomes Jason or Theseus; the cunning man who plays tricks on Death becomes Sisyphus; the monster, giant or beast, who sets impossible tasks to the adventurer, becomes Minos or Aietes; his wife or fair daughter, who baffles him and helps the hero, becomes Ariadne or Medea. In place of the helpful old woman of fairy tale comes Hera, whom Jason carries across the ford; or it is Athene, who gives Bellerophon the golden bit that tames the magical horse; here he is Pegasus. The rescuer of the girl exposed to a ravening monster is now named Perseus or Heracles. The brother and sister who flee from cannibal parents, with the aid of a friendly animal, are named Phrixus and Helle. In place of throwing behind them combs or stones which baffle the pursuer by changing into forests or mountains, Medea and Jason leave the mangled limbs of Medea's brother Absyrtus.
The lad who effects wonders by knowing the language of beasts, is in Greece named Melampus; the giant, whose life-token is a lock of his hair, becomes Nisus of Megara; his daughter, who loves the adventurer, and cuts the giant's lock, purple or golden, so that he is defeated, becomes Scylla; and Minos, who answers to the giant of fairy tale in the Theseus Attic legend, in the Megarian fable is himself the adventurer aided by the giant's daughter.[3] He does not marry the treacherous daughter, but puts her to death; as Achilles, in the Lesbian story, does not marry Pisidice, who for love of him has betrayed her city, but has her slain. The man who, to fulfil a prophecy, unwittingly weds his mother (a favourite character in Märchen, as Comparetti has shown), becomes Oedipous: he is also the answerer of riddles, a character of Märchen found everywhere.[4]
Out of these originally anonymous and unlocalised personages and romantic situations of Märchen, the Greek States made the heroes and events of their legendary history. That history, as of Theseus, Heracles, Perseus, Jason, Sisyphus, even Odysseus, Pelops, Oenomaus, Athamas, Laomedon, is but a series of Märchen localised; while, in place of fairy godmothers, or anonymous benefactors, the old man or old woman of Märchen, the Olympian gods are introduced, with their fairy gifts, the cap of darkness, the winged shoon, the sword of sharpness (Perseus), the power of taking all animal disguises. Homer knows the attack of Heracles on the father and brothers of Nestor. Hesiod knew the cause of the feud, Neleus refused to purify Heracles who had slain his host under the hospitable roof. Hesiod knows that Poseidon had given to Periclymenus, brother of Nestor, the power to appear in any animal shape, eagle, ant, snake, or bee; and that while Periclymenus lived, Heracles failed in the fight, and could not take Pylos. But when Periclymenus, as a bee, settled on the chariot of Heracles, Athene shot that bee with an arrow (see fragment of the Eoiai 14 (33), with the scholia).[5] Other examples of the wildest absurdities of Märchen, retained and rejoiced in by the Ionic epic poets, are given later ("Homer and the Ionian Cyclic Poets"). But Homer, in the Iliad, takes his heroes forth from the prison of Märchen: whether the fairy tales had not yet become attached to Bellerophon, Achilles, and Meleager in his time, or whether his genius ignored such fanciful elements of tradition, Homer does not speak of the invulnerability of Achilles, save on his heel; or tell the wooing by his father, Peleus, of Thetis as she takes a variety of bestial forms. Either these situations had not yet become attached to the story of Achilles, or Homer chooses to ignore them. Such things do not come into the natural objective world of the Iliad. In the digression of Bellerophon he recurs to the human natural side of Märchen, the story of the woman who, vainly attacking a man's virtue, accuses him falsely; the message or letter of death,[6] his three strange adventures to achieve, that of the Chimaera and others, and his winning of the king's daughter. This Märchen, localised, is in a digression; but Homer usually keeps his Märchen for the Odyssey, and the incidents occur beyond the bounds of the world he knows.
Now, even when Homer touches on the tale of Meleager, he says nothing of that fairy property the "soul-box" or "life-token," the brand snatched from the burning; or of the visit of the Spaewives, the Fates, and their prophecy. He actually does not seem to know that incident. Althaea, mother of Meleager, in Homer (Iliad, ix. 565-572), prays to the Erinnyes and they hear her. She has not her son's "soul-box" or "life-token" in her hands to burn it, and slay him. In Pausanias (x. 31. 3), Meleager is killed by Apollo, who is fighting for the Curetes against the Aetolians. Meleager died, like Achilles, by Apollo's hand, though Paris was an accomplice of the God in the case of Achilles. Pausanias follows the Hesiodic Eoiai, which Kuhnert supposes to have known the same story as Homer.[7]
As Kuhnert justly observes, the poetry of Homer is knightly. "An der Hofen wurden die homerische Gedichte versungen ... the hero must find his death at a divine hand in glorious warfare." The Athenian tragedians are our oldest source for the Moirae and the fatal life-token: a property very common in Märchen; but when the incident first attached itself to Meleager we cannot know. This avoidance of the folk-element, the Märchen, in the Iliad is one of the things that distinguishes Homer from the Ionian Cyclic poets, the Hesiodic school, and the Athenian tragedians.
Homer, again, in another way, stands apart from the genealogising poets of the eighth to seventh century (such as the school of "Hesiod," and "Eumelus" of Corinth) by his method of handling tradition or saga. These genealogising poets aimed at constructing history, and preluded to the "logographers" in prose of the sixth century. Both they and the logographers have the same simple method, that of the would-be historic early mediaeval writers on Scotland and Ireland. Their plan is to invent for each town or people an eponymous hero, whose name is simply the name of the city or people (as, in Scotland, Fib for Fife, Loth for Lothian, Scota for the Scoti). The hero, or heroine, founds the city, or is first ancestor of the people. Next follow the legends about heroic characters, as Perseus, Athamas, Pelops, Theseus, Aietes, Phrixus, which are mere Märchen of world-wide diffusion, localised, with named persons for the characters.