Now it is not the rats who follow, but the children:—
‘All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.’
And so he leads them away to Koppelberg Hill, and
‘Lo, as they reached the mountain side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern were suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed.
And when all were in, to the very last,
The door in the mountain side shut fast.’
Myths of death and the other world.
This too is a myth of death. It is astonishing when we come to examine into the origin of popular tales how many we find that had at first a funeral character. This Piper hath indeed a magic music which none can disobey, for it is the whisper of death; he himself is the soul-leading Hermes (the wind, the piper), or at least Odin, in the same office. But the legend is, in part at any rate, Slavonic; for it is a Slavonic notion which likens the soul to a mouse.[130] When we have got this clue, which the modern folk-lore easily gives us, the Odinic character of the Piper becomes very apparent. Nay, in this particular myth we can almost trace a history of the meeting of two peoples, Slavonic and German, and the junction of their legends. Let us suppose there had been some great and long-remembered epidemic which had proved peculiarly fatal to the children[131] of Hameln and the country round about. The Slavonic dwellers there—and in prehistoric times some Slavs were to be found as far west as the Weser—would speak of these deaths mythically as the departure of the mice (i.e. the souls), and perhaps, keeping the tradition, which we know to be universally Aryan, of a water-crossing, might tell of the mice as having gone to the water. Or further, they might feign that these souls were led there by a piping wind-god: he, too, is the common property of the Aryan folk. Then the Germans coming in, and wishing to express the legend in their mythological form, would tell how the same Piper had piped away all the children from the town. So a double story would spring up about the same event. The Weser represents one image of death, and might have served for the children as well as for the mice: to make the legend fuller, however, another image is selected for them, the dark, ‘concealed’ place, namely, Hel, or the cave of Night and Death.
The two images of death which occur in the last story rival each other through the field of middle-age legend and romance. When we hear of a man being borne along in a boat, or lying deep in slumber beneath a mountain, we may let our minds wander back to Balder sailing across the ocean in his burning ship Hringhorni, and to the same Balder in the halls of Hel’s palace. The third image of death is the blazing pyre unaccompanied by any sea-voyage. One or other of these three allegories meets us at every turn. If the hero has been snatched away by fairy power to save him from dying, and the last thing seen of him was in a boat—as Arthur disappears upon the lake Avalon—the myth holds out the hope of his return, and sooner or later the story of this return will break off and become a separate legend. Hence the numerous half-unearthly heroes, such as Lohengrin, who come men know not whence, and are first seen sleeping in a boat upon a river. These are but broken halves of complete myths, which should have told of the former disappearance of the knight by the same route. Both portions really belong to the tale of Lohengrin; he went away first in a ship in search of the holy grail, and in the truest version[132] returns in like manner in a boat drawn by a swan. In some tales he is called the Knight of the Swan. He comes suddenly, in answer to a prayer to Heaven for help, uttered by the distressed Else of Brabant. But he does not return at once again to the Paradise which has sent him to earth. He remains upon earth, and becomes the husband of Else, and a famous warrior; and part of another myth entwines itself with his story. Else must not ask his name; but she disobeys his imperative command, and this fault parts them for ever. Here we have Cupid and Psyche, or Prince Hatt and his wife, over again. The boat appears once more drawn by the same swan; Lohengrin steps into it, and disappears from the haunts of men. We have already seen how, through the Valkyriur, the swan is connected with ideas of death. It remains to notice how they are naturally so connected by the beautiful legend that the swan sings once only in his life, namely, when he is leaving it—that his first song is his own funeral melody. A much older form of the Lohengrin myth is referred to in the opening lines of Beowulf, where an ancestor of that hero is said to have been found, a little child, lying asleep in an open boat which had drifted, no one knows whence, to the shore of Gothland.
Death being thus so universally symbolized by the River of Death, it is easy to see the origin of the myth that ghosts will not cross living water. It meant nothing else than that a ghost cannot return again to life. Even witches cannot do so, as we know in the case of Tam O’Shanter, that when he reached the Brig’ o’ Doon the pursuit was baffled.
Many are the impressive stories connected with the myth of the soul’s transit over water—be it a River or a Sea of Death. In the dark days which followed the overthrow of the Western Empire, when all the civilization of its remoter territories had melted away, there grew up among the fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of this island were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, that in the villages of the Gaulish coast the fishermen were summoned by rotation to perform the dreadful task of ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knocking was heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the water as though heavily freighted, but yet to their eyes empty. Each stepping in, took his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night across a distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily compass scarcely in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore (our coast), they heard names called over, and voices answering as if by rota, and they felt their boats becoming light. Then when all the ghosts had landed they were wafted back to Gaul.[133]
The belief in the passage by the soul over a ‘Bridge’ which is the bridge over the River of Death is as universal almost as the notion of that River of Death itself. Many creeds see that bridge in the Milky Way. The Vedic hymns do so. They call the Milky Way by many names, of which the most common is the path of Yama, the way to the house of Yama, and Yama is the ruler of the Dead—‘a narrow path,’ as we have already quoted.