In the voyage of Gylfi in the Edda of Snorri, we find that the cow Audhumla, the cow of abundance, was the parent of the supreme Scandinavian god Odin, as it was of the supreme Vedic god Indras. The cow Audhumla nourishes with her milk Ymir, the first of the giants. She licks the salt mountain of ice (the Esthonian ice-mountain, the twelve glasses of the Russian princess, through which the young hero Ivan penetrates to kiss her). From the ice which the cow has licked, comes forth, first the hair, then the head, then the whole body, of the hero Buri. (The sun arises little by little from the mountain of the east, warmed, attracted by the cow-aurora, and shows, first a few rays, then his disc, and then himself in all his splendour and strength; and that which the sun does every day he repeats on a larger scale once a year, rising again from the ice of winter through the tepidity of spring.) Of Buri, who is at birth strong, is born Bör, who has, by Bestla, the daughter of the giant Bölthorn, three sons, Odin, Wili, and We (the usual three brothers of the legends), who correspond to the three sons of Mannus in German tradition, that is, Inguis, Istio, and Irminius. The Swedish king Eistein had a great veneration for the cow Sibilia, and used to take her with him to battle, that she might terrify the enemy by her lowing. (The lowing of cows plays an important part in the battles of the Vedic hero Indras. In the Pańćatantram, as we have noticed, the bellowing of the bull fills the lion with terror.) The Scandinavian king, Ögwaldr, was accompanied everywhere by a sacred cow, of which he drank the milk, and with which he desired to be buried. In the Ṛigvedas, as we have seen, the hero Indras makes the cow fruitful; and the thunderbolt of the god, penetrating the cloud, takes the form of a phallos. Afterwards, as a symbol of the rod-phallos, the branch or rod of the tree palâças was adopted, with which the cow was struck to make it fruitful; such a magic rod is used in Germany to this day, where it is in many parts the custom to strike the cow, in the belief that it will render her fruitful.[427]
It is with the head of the most beautiful of the giant Hymir's oxen fastened to his hook that, in Snorri's Edda, the god Thor goes to fish up the immense serpent of Midgard from the bottom of the sea, and destroys it upon the sea-shore. (This myth, if I am not mistaken, has the following meaning:—The head of the solar, or lunar, bull is devoured by the monster of night; this same head, tossed about, draws up, towards morning as sun, and towards evening as moon, upon the shore of the sea of night, that is to say, on the eastern mountain, the monster-serpent: thus Hanumant, in the Râmâyaṇam, passes over to the opposite shore of the sea, crossing the body of the marine monster, which he causes to burst; thus Indras kills Ahis the serpent upon the mountain).
Nor is there the cow of abundance only. Scandinavian tradition, in the short poem on the dwarf Allwis, offers us the cornucopia in the cup formed of the defence of oxen (i.e., with their horns), in which the god Thor drinks hydromel. Thus Sigurd offers to Brünhilt a horn full of mead to drink. And this horn, moreover, besides serving as a cornucopia, becomes as a golden horn the war-trumpet of Odin (the Giallarhorn).
The Scandinavian hero then, it appears also, has his relationship with cows, though his life has far more of a warlike character than a pastoral one; he therefore accuses Loki, and in so doing fills him with shame, with having passed eight winters underground occupied in milking the cows like a woman. (It is known that the Hindoo word duhitar, whence Tochter, means she who milks). The Scandinavian hero, instead of milking cows, eats bulls. We find more than once in the Eddas the heroes occupied in roasting oxen. Atli, the husband of Gudrun, boasts of having killed some oxen and having eaten them with her. Gudrun, the Scandinavian Medea, gives Atli the hearts of his two sons to eat, assuring him that they are calves' hearts. The god Thor, disguised as the goddess Freya, drinks three barrels of mead, and eats a whole bull, when he sets out on the enterprise of recovering his marvellous hammer. The bull's or cow's horn, moreover, not only supplies mead to the hero, nor is it only used to call his friends to his aid and to throw down the enemy; it also forms the hero's bow, which therefore, in the Vilkina Saga,[428] also takes the name of Hornboge, and, as such, assists the greatest hero, Thidrek or Dîtrich, and is the parent of the celebrated hero Sigurd (Sîfrit, or Siegfried). And, in conclusion, the horns are considered such an important weapon of the cow and bull, that a proverb, which is at once Slavonic, German, and Italian, says, "To a wicked cow, God gives short horns" (that it may do no harm, or rather, because it wears them away by use); to cut off the cow's horns means, in a German proverb, to surmount a difficulty; and to take the bull or cow by the horns, is to disarm them.[429]
In the Greenland poem on Atli, in the Edda of Sömund, Högni says, that when many cattle are killed much blood is seen, and that when one dreams of eagles, oxen are not far distant. In the Edda of Snorri, whilst Odin, Loki, and Hönir are cooking an ox under a tree, an eagle on its summit prevents the meat from being cooked, till the heroes consent to give him part of it. The heroes consent, but the eagle carries off no less than the two thighs and the two shoulders of the ox. The eagle has in the Edda the same demoniacal and infernal character that is in other traditions ascribed to the crow, the funereal stork, and the vulture: it searches for oxen; and therefore to dream of eagles is an intimation that an ox is near, in the same way as they say the presence of a vulture is a sign of the proximity of a corpse.
A German legend, cited by Kuhn and Schwartz,[430] makes a battle begin "as soon as a red cow is led over a certain bridge." We remember the Russian story of the girl who, by means of the magical towel of her brother, makes a bridge arise over the river, over which the monster-serpent, in the form of a handsome young man, crosses to take her; how the brother is sacrificed in the battle which he is obliged to fight against the monster, who disarms him by fraud; and how the battle between the hero and the monster begins when the maiden, passing the bridge, abandons the hero, her brother, who falls and sheds his blood in the unequal struggle. I have already remarked that in the popular belief the bloody sun of evening forebodes war, and the red cow of German tradition represents no other than this sky. As to the bridge, an interesting note of Kuhn and Schwartz[431] seems to confirm the hypothesis which I have already hinted at in connection with the Slavonic story, i.e., that it represents the milky way; from this note, too, in which a resemblance is noticed between the bridge of the red cow, which determines the beginning of a battle, and the Scandinavian celestial Bîfröst (as perhaps there is between it and even the Persian bridge Ćinvant itself), I gather that in Frisia the milky way is called Kau-pat (or Kuh-pfad, cow's-path). That is to say, it is supposed that the red cow of evening passes during the night along the milky way, scattering her milk over it; whence perhaps is derived the German proverb, "Even red cows yield white milk,"[432]—like that other which we have already seen current in India, and met with again in Turanian tradition, and which exists as a German, Slavonic, and Italian proverb, "Even the black cow yields white milk"—(the black night which produces the alba or white dawn of morning, and we might add, the silver moon and the milky way).
Since it seems to me, therefore, as I trust it also does to the reader, that the maiden who crosses the bridge in the Slavonic stories is, without doubt, the same as the red cow which does the like in German legend, and if I have not been mistaken in identifying the maiden who travels with her brother to the kingdom of the dead with the evening aurora and the dying sun, I shall here adduce a few other German proverbs, which may also be said to be universal in European tradition, relating to the cow, all pointing to a similar conclusion. They are as follows:—"Shutting the stable after the cow has been stolen." "He who has lost a cow, and recovers her tail, has not much, but he has more than nothing." "A cow's tail might reach heaven, if it were only a long one."[434] "A cow does not know what her tail is worth till she loses it." "To take the cow by her tail." "The black cow has crushed him, or has got upon him." "A cow cannot overtake a hare." "The cow has outrun the hare." "Not all who sound the horn hunt the hare." "When the cows laugh." "As a blind cow can find a pea." "He must be carried about in an old cow's hide." "If the cow-maid spins, there will be little yarn." "The cow will learn to spin first."[435]
Meditating upon all these German proverbs, it is, it appears to me, not difficult to recognise in them a reminiscence of ancient myths with which we are already acquainted. When we reflect that almost every proverb has passed into contradictory forms and varieties, and as in these varieties we may trace the elements of the history of a great number of strange proverbs, it does not seem rash to affirm that the said history generally had, in like manner, its origin in a myth. Not to wander from the subject in hand, that the same proverb is attributed to different animals, not only by different nations, but in the oral traditions of the same people, I must refer the reader to what I have remarked in the preface to this volume concerning the contradiction which exists between certain superstitious beliefs. The contradiction between many proverbs, as also between many superstitions, compared with each other, can only be reconciled by referring both back to the battle-field of mythology, where an inconceivable number of myths arise, and can only arise, out of contradictions; that is, out of contrasted aspects which celestial phenomena present, even to the same observer, still more so to different observers. The comparative history of mythical proverbs is yet to be written, and perhaps it is not yet possible to write it according to rigorous scientific method in all its completeness. A preliminary study of the details is necessary to understand a proverb as well as a popular custom, a superstitious belief, a legend, or a myth; and this study will demand some labour; for one proverb, completely illustrated, may involve the development of an entire epical history. I shall not presume here to solve the enigma of the above-quoted German proverbs, but only to indicate what seems to me to be the way of arriving at their most probable solution. In the study of a proverb, it is necessary to lay great stress upon its intonation. Upon the different tones in which an ancient proverb was originally pronounced, and afterwards repeated, passing from tongue to tongue, and from people to people, depends a great part of the alteration in the meaning even of the most interesting of the proverbs, which are a patrimony we owe in common to Aryan tradition. A proverb, for instance, began by being a simple affirmation, the simple expression of a natural mythical image; with the lapse of time the expression remained, and the myth was forgotten; the expression then appeared to refer to a strange thing, and was accompanied, when pronounced, with a doubtful mark of interrogation; it was now adopted in the denial of an impossible thing, and became an instrument for satire. Thus many proverbs which have become satirical, must have been originally nothing more than mythical affirmative phrases.
"To shut the stable after the cow has been stolen." In England, instead of the cow, we have in the proverb a girl: "When your daughter is stolen, shut Peppergate" (the name of a little gate of the city of Chester, which it is said the mayor ordered to be shut when his daughter had been carried off). The proverb is now used to stir up a laugh at the expense of those who are at pains to guard their property after it has been robbed; but it perhaps had not always the same meaning. We are already familiar in Hindoo tradition with the hero who delivers the beautiful maiden out of the enclosure, and have seen how she is scarcely free, when she is led away by iniquitous brothers or companions, after shutting up the legitimate proprietor of the cow or maiden in the cave whence the cow or girl came forth; how the ravishing brothers shut the door of the stable or cavern, after having carried off the maiden. The hero imprisoned in the stable, the hero shut up in the darkness of night, often assumed in mythology the form of a fool. Hence from the idea of shutting the gate of the stable upon the hero, by the ravishers of his cow, the transition seems natural, in my opinion, to the hero lost in the cavern, to the hero become foolish, to the peasant who shuts the door of the stable when the cow has been robbed, or to the mayor of Chester, who, being shut up in the town, shuts the Peppergate, through which the girl who had been carried off passed.
"He who has lost a cow and recovers its tail has not much, but he has more than nothing." This proverb also appears to me to have a mythical meaning. I have already remarked that the tail, the heel, the feet, that is to say, the lower or hinder extremities, betray the mythical animal; which we shall see more convincingly when we come to examine the legends which refer to the wolf, the fox, and the serpent. It is the footprint which, in all the European traditions, betrays the beautiful maiden in her flight; and when the brigand Cacus carried off the oxen of Hercules, the hero, to recover them, searches for their footprints. But in order that these may not be recognised, the cunning brigand, instead of leading the oxen by their heads, takes them by their tails,[436] and makes them walk backwards. Hence, to take by the tail, means to take hold of the wrong way, and it is applied to the ass as well as the cow. It is said in Germany that a cow once fell into a ditch from which none of the bystanders dared to extricate it. The peasant to whom the cow belonged came up, and, according to some, took it fearlessly by the horns, while, according to others, he dragged it out by its tail, whence can be explained the double proverb to take by the horns, i.e., to take by the right side, and to take by the tail, or, as we have said, to take by the wrong. But the peasant could only take his cow out by the horns, or by the tail, according to the way in which it had fallen in; that is, if it had fallen down head foremost, it could only be dragged out by the tail, and if, on the contrary, it had fallen in tail foremost, he could only extricate it by laying hold of its horns. The cow-aurora is taken by surprise and devoured by the wolf, bear, wild-boar, or serpent of night, who takes her by the shoulders (it is on this account that, in the Russian story, we have seen the bull recommend the fugitive hero, accompanied by his sister, to keep his face turned in the direction whence the pursuing monster might be expected to come up). The monster (the shadow, or the cloud) clutches the cow by her tail and devours her, or drags her into his cave. The hero, in order to deliver his cow out of the cave, can take her by the horns only on condition that he penetrates into the cavern by the same way by which the cow entered, that is, by the monster's mouth; but, as the monster endeavours to surprise the hero from behind, so the hero often wounds the monster from behind, catches hold of him by the tail, and in this way drags him out of the cavern, ditch, or mud—his fallen cow. In a Hindoo fable in the second book of the Pańćatantram, we have the story of a jackal, who, to satisfy a desire of his wife, follows the bull for whole years together, in the hope that his two hanging testicles might fall some day or another. In a joke of Poggius, and in Lessing,[437] we find the same subject spoken of, of which a variation is given in a German proverb, "Though the cow's tail moves, it does not fall."[438] In the hope of this it is that the wolf, or the fox, runs after the tail of the cow or bull. There is a Piedmontese story which I heard in my infancy, one comic feature of which lingers vividly in the memory: a boy who took the hogs to pasture, cut off their tails and stuck them in the mud, and then made off with the animals. The owner of the hogs, seeing their tails, is under the impression that they have sunk into the mud. He tugs at them, brings away their tails, but cannot fish up their bodies. In a Russian story given by Afanassieff,[439] we read that the cunning Little Thomas (Thomka, Fomka) cheats the priest of his horse (in some versions his ass) by cutting off its tail and planting it in the mud of a marsh. He makes the priest believe that his horse has fallen into the marsh; the priest, thinking to pull it out, gives one stiff tug, and falls down on his back with the tail in his hand; upon which Tom persuades him to believe that he has broken it off himself, and to be content with the recovery of so much of the lost animal. In the fifty-seventh Gaelic story of Campbell,[440] a priest endeavours to pull out of the water a drowning sheep, but the tail comes away, and the story-teller adds, "If the tail had not come off, the story would have been longer." And so the owner of the cow, the robber of which has left the tail behind as a consolation, has in reality but little, but yet this little is something; for, just as the slipper left behind her by the fugitive girl, although it is of little value, enables the hero to identify her, so in the tail of his cow the owner has something in hand to set out on its search with, and to recover his lost property; either because the tail of an animal is like its shadow and serves to trace it, as the slipper does the maiden by showing the footstep; or else, because tailless cows are evidently stolen ones. (In the myth of Cacus, in which Hercules traces the stolen oxen by the footprints, and Cacus drags them by their tails, the mythical figure of the slipper and that of the lost tail are perhaps united. It is possible that the tails of the oxen came off in the hands of Cacus when dragging them into the cavern, and that, thrown away by the brigand, and found by Hercules, they may have served him as a guide to recover his oxen. It is also possible that Cacus, pursued by Hercules, had not time to drive the oxen in entirely, but that their tails still protruded and betrayed their whereabouts. Relative to the Latin legend of Cacus, these are simply hypotheses, and I have therefore enclosed them in a parenthesis; but inasmuch as in the above-quoted Russian story, we find the horse's tail cut off by the robber, and as in the chapter on the fox, we shall see the fox who betrays himself by not drawing in his tail, whence the proverb, "Cauda de vulpe testatur," the two hypotheses advanced above are, after all, not so visionary.) In Pausanias[441] the hero Aristomenes, who has been thrown into a deep cistern, liberates himself in a marvellous manner by means of an eagle, after a fox had opened a passage. The fox's tail has such a bewitching power of attraction, that according to popular tradition, when it is moved the cock falls down unable to resist the charm. According to popular belief, the tail (as well as the nose and mouth) is the most splendid part of the body of an animal. The great monkey Hanumant, with his tail on fire, burns Lanka (in the same way as the burning tails of the foxes of the biblical Samson burn the ripe harvests of the Philistines). The grey, or black, horse of mythology (having devoured the solar white, or red horse) emits fire from his mouth or tail. This black horse being the night, the horse's jaws and tail, which emit fire, represent the luminous heavens of evening and of morning; when, therefore, the tail of his horse (stolen by the robber in the same way as the bull and the cow[442]) remains in the mythical hero's hand, this light-streaming tail is enough to enable him to find the whole animal, i.e., the solar hero comes out of his hiding-place (Hanumant comes out of the hinder parts of the marine monster, the dwarf comes out of the wolf's back[443]), the bull-sun finds his cow the aurora again; the prince sun, the princess aurora; the peasant recovers his ass or his cow; Hercules, his oxen; the white horse comes out of the tail of the black horse, who had eaten him, and then, by means of the tail, ascends to heaven;[444] the white bull comes out of the black one; the white, or the red, cow comes out of the black cow; the tail comes out of the body; the hero comes out of the sack, or hide, in which he had been enclosed or sewed up. The sack plays a great part in the tradition of the hidden or persecuted hero; this sack is the night or the cloud, or the winter; the hero shut up in the sack, and thrown into the sea, is the sun. The hero enclosed in the sack and thrown into the sea, and the heroine shut up in a chest (covered, moreover, with a cow's hide, in the myth of Pasiphäe) or barrel, and abandoned to the water,[445] are equivalent to each other, and so are the heroes shut up in the well, in the cavern, in the stables, and even in the cow. Inasmuch as the sack in which, according to the proverb quoted above, the delinquent hero is to be sewed, is an old cow's-hide, or else the hide of an old cow, or a dark one (of the night), when this black cow sits on the eggs of the bird of evening, to hatch them, the eggs come to evil; whence I derive the German proverb, "When the cow sits upon the eggs, do not expect fowls."[446] And when the night was observed to overwhelm the sun and withdraw him from human sight, this other proverb took its origin, "The black cow has crushed him." The black cow does not only crush the hero, but, as the wolf does, shuts him up in her own hide,[447] in her own sack, i.e., devours him—to fill the sack is the same as to fill the body, and to empty the sack as to empty the body. In the Piedmontese story of the dwarf child (the Norwegian Schmierbock), whom the wolf[448] encloses in the sack, the dwarf comes out of the sack while the wolf is emptying his body. Of two Russian stories given by Afanassieff, which we shall examine in the chapter on the wolf, one shows us the wolf who puts the peasant in a sack, and the other the wolf who puts the dwarf-hero in his body; and both peasant and dwarf save themselves. The two variations took their origin in the comparison drawn between the body and a sack, which, in mythical speech, are therefore the same thing. The hide of the black bull, black ox, black or grey horse, or black or grey wolf, and the sack which wraps up the hero or the devil, play a great part in popular Indo-European tradition.[449] From the sack of the funeral stork (the night), in a Russian story,[450] come forth two young heroes (the Açvinâu), defeaters of their enemies, who spread out the tablecloth of abundance (the aurora), and a horse which drops gold (the sun). The hero shut up in the sack, or the cow's hide, and thrown into the water, escapes from shipwreck in the same way as those navigators of the Chinese sea described in his voyages by Benjamin of Tudela, who, he says, when shipwrecked, escaped being swallowed up by the waves by covering themselves with the whole hide of a cow or an ox; for the eagles, mistaking them for real, flew to the spot and pouncing upon them, drew them ashore. The ship with the buffalo's hide is found again in popular stories. This is evidently a reminiscence of mythical derivation (from which was, perhaps, afterwards derived the idea of torture, as in the famous bull of Phalaris, in which many see a symbol of the god of the waters, the bull's hide in which the tetrarch Acarnides, vanquished by Memnon, was sewed up,[451] in antiquity, and, in the Middle Ages, the ox's hide in which, according to the chronicles, the horrid Duke of Spalato Euroia orders Paulus Chuporus, prefect of the Emperor Sigismond, to be sewed, to revenge himself upon him, because he had, out of contempt, saluted him by bellowing like an ox). Thus with the Celtic hero Brian,[452] the pretended fool, who speculates upon the stupidity of those who are reputed wise. When one of these so-called sages, deceived by him, proposes to throw him into the sea shut up in a sack, he makes another man take his place by means of a witty invention, as Goldoni's liar would say, whilst he himself comes back to the shore with a whole herd of cattle. In the other Celtic, Slavonic, German, and Italian variations of this story, the would-be fool begins his fortune-making, in one version, by putting a few coins into his dead cow's hide, and then selling it at a very high price as a purse which will give out money whenever shaken; and in another, by palming off his ass or horse, persuading the purchaser, by means of an easy deceit, to believe that it yields gold and silver, and thus obtaining a high price for it. With the cow are also connected the two horns, by blowing into which he causes his wife, who feigns death, to rise to life again, which horns he thus prevails on his brothers or companions to buy at a great ransom, who, thinking themselves cunning, and wishing by means of the horns to speculate upon corpses,[453] begin by killing people, and are ruined. I have said above, that the sack in which the hero is generally enclosed is the same as the chest in which the heroine is usually shut up on account of her beauty, that is to say, in which the beautiful heroine hides her splendour, or in which the red cow, the evening aurora with the sun, loses herself. The fourteenth Scottish story of Mr J. F. Campbell's contains the following narrative:—A king, whose first wife (the morning aurora) is dead, engages to marry the woman whom the dead queen's dresses will fit, and finds no one who can wear them except his own daughter (the evening aurora). She makes her father give her gold and silver dresses and shoes (that is, she takes from her father, the sun, the splendour of the morning aurora); she shuts herself up with them in a chest, and lets herself be thrown into the sea. The chest drifts about on the waves, and comes at last to the shore; the beautiful maiden enters the service of a young king; she shows herself in church with her splendid robes; the young king, who does not recognise his servant-maid in this beautiful princess, becomes enamoured of her, and hastens to overtake her; she flees and loses her golden slipper; the king finds it, and to discover her, has it measured on every foot; many maidens cut off their toes to make the slipper go on, but a bird divulges the deceit; the young king marries the beautiful maiden who came out of the wooden chest. Here we have again, not only the heroine who escapes, but the walking heroine; this heroine is the aurora, and the aurora is often a cow. Another swift cow passes in the proverb before the hare (the leaping moon), in the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, of which the former represents the cloud or the night, or Indras or the aurora in the cloud of night, or the earth,[454] and the latter, the leaping one, the moon; the ant passes the grasshopper in the race, not because it walks faster, but because the two runners must necessarily meet, and therefore the one must pass the other. The English infantile rhyme, "Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon," refers to the myth of the cow which jumps over the hare. The observation of celestial phenomena being afterwards neglected, and it being forgotten that the running ant or cow meant the cloud, or the sun, or the aurora, or the earth, and the jumping hare or grasshopper the moon, only a regular and parallel race, on the terrestrial soil, between cow and hare, or ant and grasshopper, was seen; and from the myth of the two animals which meet and pass each other in the sky, was derived, according to the different characters of nations or eras, a double proverb—one deriding the slow and rash animal which presumes to try and overtake the swift one in the race, the other serving as an example to prove the truth of the sentence, "Tarde sed tute," which, in Italian, is "Chi va piano va sano e va lontano" (he who goes slowly, goes well and far). The first proverb has for its parent the Greek one, "to hunt the hare with an ox," which, in Italian, is "pigliar la lepre col carro" (to take the hare with a car);[455] referring to cases where means disproportionate to the end are made use of. When the hare and the cow meet, if the cow is obliged to stop the hare, she crushes it, as we have seen above that she crushes the bird's eggs instead of hatching them. The idea, moreover, of the ox hunting the hare arose naturally out of the idea of the ox or cow overtaking and passing beyond the hare. To these proverbs can perhaps be joined the next German one:—"All who blow the horn do not hunt hares," which is now directed against those who think by an easy method, such as blowing a horn, to accomplish a difficult enterprise, such as hunting a hare; in the same way as in Germany it is said, that all thunder-clouds do not give rain, and the cow must do more than low in order to have much milk, or the cow that lows most is not the one that yields most milk.[456] In fact, a cow which lows much is unwell, neither while it is lowing can it eat and make milk; so he who fatigues himself with blowing the horn is not able, at the same time, to run after the hare; as in the Italian proverb, "Il can che abbaia non morde" (the dog that barks does not bite), for the simple reason that whilst he opens his mouth to bark, he cannot shut it to bite. The hen that clucks, on the other hand, is the one that lays the egg, because the act of clucking with the mouth does not interfere with the operation of egg-laying; there is no incompatibility of offices.