Finally, such as we have found the blind girl in the Vedic hymns, so we meet her again in Russian tradition.[421] A servant-maid takes out the eyes of the maiden her mistress, after having put her to sleep by means of a herb, and marries the king in her stead. The girl awakens, hears but does not see; an old shepherd receives her into his house; during the night she, although blind, sews a crown for the Tzar and sends the old man to court to sell it for an eye (this is a variation of Queen Berta in the forest). The servant-maid, now become queen, tempted by the beauty of this crown, takes one of the girls eyes out of her pocket and gives it to the old man. The maiden arises at the aurora, washes her eye in her own saliva (i.e., the dew. In Tuscany, the peasants believe that whoever washes his face in the dew before the sun rises on St John's Day, will have no illness all the year following), puts it in the socket and sees. She then sews another crown, and, in the same manner, recovers her other eye at the next aurora. Then the servant-queen learns that she is alive, and makes hired murderers cut her to pieces. Where the maiden is buried, a garden arises and a boy shows himself. The boy goes to the palace and runs after the queen, making such a din that she is obliged, in order to silence him, to give him the girl's heart, which she had kept hidden. The boy then runs off contented; the king follows him, and finds himself before the resuscitated maiden. He marries her, and the servant-girl is blinded, and then torn to pieces by being fastened to the tails of horses. Like the German Geneviève and the Hindoo Çakuntalâ, the Russian wife is recognised by her husband by means of a boy. This is the young sun, who enables the old one to be born again, to arise again and be young once more; this is the son who, in the Hindoo legend, gives his father his eyesight back, and by doing so, naturally imparts to him the means of recognising his wife, whom he had forgotten, or rejected, or lost, according to the various forms assumed by the celestial myth of the separation of husband and wife.
I might now carry on this comparison by entering the mythical field of the more Western Slavonic nations;[422] but it is not my intention to convert this modest volume into an entire library of legends; neither is it necessary for my purpose, as by so doing I should not add much more evidence to that which I have thus far attempted to collect, in order to prove how zoological mythology is the same in existing Slavonic tradition as it was in Hindoo antiquity. I have, moreover, gone rather minutely into the contents of Russian tradition in particular, because, on account of our ignorance of the language, which is beautiful and worthy of study, it is little known, and because it is of especial importance in our present inquiry. I believe, if I do not deceive myself, that I have, up to this point, given an account of all the more essential legends developed in the Eastern Aryan world relating to the myth of the cow and the bull; and now, in moving towards the West, I think I may venture to proceed with greater expedition, because we shall find ourselves in a region already familiar to us. It seemed to me that it was especially necessary, for a just comparison, to determine and fix the character of Oriental tradition, in order that it may be easy for the student to classify the interminable stories and traditions which have already been collected in Western Europe, and which are published in languages which are, certainly, different from each other, but all, comparatively speaking, readily accessible. If I have succeeded in imparting to the reader an understanding of the more authentic sources of legendary traditions and their most probable meanings, I shall go on with more courage and a greater confidence to the investigations that follow.
SECTION V.
The Bull and the Cow in the Germanico-Scandinavian and Franco-Celtic Traditions.
SUMMARY.
The four bulls, sons of the virgin Gefion.—The bull which comes out of the sea.—The bull progenitor of royal races.—The bull who carries the maiden.—The cow of abundance, Audhumla, nurse and mother of heroes.—The three brothers of Scandinavian and German mythology.—The warrior-cow.—The sacred cow of Ögwaldr burned upon the hero's tomb.—The rod-phallos used to strike the cow, as an augury of abundance and fecundity.—The head of the ox used as a hook to catch the sea-serpent.—The Scandinavian cornucopia made of the horns of oxen.—The horn full of honey.—The horn-trumpet.—The daughter that milks.—The hero who eats oxen.—Atli eats the hearts of his sons, believing them to be the hearts of calves.—Hornboge.—To a wicked cow God gives short horns; to cut off the cow's horns; to take the bull or cow by the horns, three Germanic proverbs.—To dream of eagles announces the vicinity of cows; Scandinavian corresponding legend.—A red cow on a certain bridge announces a battle.—The Germanico-Scandinavian mythical bridge.—The red cow and the black cow yield white milk.—Digression upon mythical proverbs, and the explanation which seems to be the most likely.—To shut the stable after the cow has been stolen.—When the daughter is stolen, shut Peppergate.—He who has lost a cow and gets its tail back again has not much, but he has more than nothing.—To take by the horns.—Even if the cow's tail moves it does not fall.—The tails in the mud.—The virtues of the tail.—The ascent to heaven by means of the tails.—The hero in the sack made of a cow's hide thrown into the sea.—The punishment of the bull.—When the cow places herself upon the eggs, do not expect fowls.—The black cow has crushed him.—The sack of the wolf or of the black beast is his body itself.—The trial between hero and monster to take off their skins; the hero gives cows' skins, but the monster is obliged to give his own.—The cow's hide, when sold, is the beginning of good luck.—The daughter flees from her father, who wishes to seduce her; the story of the slipper again.—The cow can pass before the hare.—The cow jumped over the moon.—Tarde sed tute.—To take the hare with the chariot.—All those who blow the horn do not hunt hares.—As a blind cow finds a pea.—Marvellous pipkins and amphoræ.—The cow that laughs.—The princess who laughs.—The cow that speaks.—The language of animals.—Phallical mysteries.—What the king said in the queen's ear.—Because they have spoken, the husband and wife are separated.—Bulls that speak at Rome.—Women know everything, even how Zeus married Hêra.—The mythical laugh is in the sun's ray and in the lightning.—The fishes that laugh; Phallic meaning of the myth.—If the cow-maid must spin, there will be little yarn.—The cows that spin.—The spinning Berta.—Berchta and Holda.—The time is passed when Berta spun.—The times of King Pipino.—Berta with the large foot.—Berta with the goose's foot.—St Lucia and St Luke.—Virgins after parturition.—The old husband Pepin, a form of St Joseph.—The wife Berta changed.—The Italian proverbs dare la Berta and dare la Madre d'Orlando.—Continuation of the story of Berta persecuted in the forest.—Orlando and Charlemagne.—The bull-priest and the priest-bull.—The bull in funerals, in pregnancy, and as the food of the hero.—The dwarf and the giant.—A French dwarf explains a myth to us; a Scandinavian explains other myths to us.
I shall here combine under one category the Germanico-Scandinavian and Franco-Celtic traditions, as traditions which, in the Middle Ages especially, had a close and continual correlation of correspondence with each other.
The Edda of Snorri begins with the voyage of Gefion, with the four oxen, her sons (although she is a virgin), yoked to a plough. The king Gylfi concedes to her the right of occupying and possessing as much ground as she can plough in twenty-four hours. When they come to the western sea-board, the four oxen rush forward and drag Gefion with them into the sea, until they arrive at the land of Seelund (Seeland).[423] In which, it is obvious we have again the Vedic bull with a thousand horns which comes out of the sea, and the bull which carries off the maiden. The bull which comes out of the sea is also found in Irish legends, and in German ones. According to a German legend, of which several variations exist, a shepherd received a dinner every day and a clean shirt every Sunday from a variegated bull that came out of the sea.[424] A bull on the seaside begets, by the sleeping queen, the king Meroveus, the first of the Merovingians; perhaps it is on this account that we find a golden bull's head represented on the tomb of King Childeric. Charles Simrock[425] found a similar legend also in Spain. The bull which carries the girl, which we have already met with in the Russian stories, occurs again in the Norse tale[426] of "Katee Wooden Cloak (Dasent), endowed with the powers of wish. In its left ear is a cloth (which reminds us of that spun on the cow's horns), which, when spread out, is covered with dainties of all kinds for the dawn-maiden, who has been thrust out of her father's house; but when the step-mother informs her that she cannot rest until she has eaten the dun bull's flesh, the animal, hearing her, engages to deliver her, and offers, if she so wills, to carry her away."