‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches thither,[134] a path untrodden by men, a path I know of.’
The Persians, too, knew the bridge under the name of Kinvad or Chinvad. And from the Persians the Mohammedans get the same notion, which is embodied in the Koran. There the Bridge of Death is called Es-Sirat. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, along which, nevertheless, the soul of the good Moslem will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but the wicked man or the unbeliever will fall headlong thence into an abyss of fire beneath.
The Norsemen had their Bridge of Souls in the Gjallarbrû, ‘The Resounding Bridge,’ over which Balder had to ride.[135] And when we read the mediæval accounts of journeys to the other world, to Purgatory or Hell, in almost every one we find that the passage over a Bridge—the Brig’ o’ Dread of the ballad—is a part of the journey.
Among the sleepers underground whose legend reproduces the image of death as simply a life within the tomb, the most celebrated are Kaiser Karl in the Unterberg—the under-hill, or hill leading to the under-world; or, as another legend goes, in the Nürnberg, which is really the Niederberg (im niedern Berg), the down-leading hill; and Frederick Red-Beard sleeping in like manner at Kaiserslautern, or under the Rabenspurg (raven’s hill). Deep below the earth the old Kaiser sits, his knights around him, their armour on, the horses harnessed in the stable ready to come forth at Germany’s hour of need. His long red beard has grown through the table on which his head is resting. Once, it is said, a shepherd chanced upon the cave which leads down to the under-ground palace, and awoke the Emperor from his slumber. ‘Are the ravens still flying round the hill?’ asked Frederick. ‘Yes.’ ‘Then must I sleep another hundred years.’
We cannot speak of all the images of Death which reappear in the popular tales. Very many of these are taken from the funeral fire. We constantly meet with stories of maidens who lie (asleep probably) surrounded by a circle of flame, a hedge of fire. Through this the knight or hero must ride to awaken his beloved. When Skirnir went down to woo the maiden Gerda—the winter earth[136]—he found her house all surrounded by such a hedge of fire. But oddly enough, there is another way of representing the funeral fire symbolically as a circle of thorns, because thorns were constantly used to form the funeral pyre of the Northmen. Thence a thorn hedge takes the place of a hedge of flame, and it, or even a single thorn, may become the symbol of the funeral fire, and so of death.
Here are two stories in which we see how one image may pass into the other.
In the tale of Sigurd the Volsung both these symbols are used; when Sigurd first finds Brynhild she has been pricked by Odin with a sleep-thorn, in revenge, because she took part against his favourite Hialmgunnar; for she was a Valkyria. Sigurd awakes her. At another time he rides to her through a circle of fire which she has set round her house, and which no other man dared face. In the myth of Sigurd, twice as it were riding through death to Brynhild, we see first of all a nature-myth precisely of the same kind as the myth of Freyr and Gerda ([p. 230]),[137] precisely the reverse of the myth of Persephone. Brynhild is the dead earth restored by the kiss of the sun, or of summer. Afterwards the part of Brynhild is taken by the Sleeping Beauty, and Sigurd becomes the prince who breaks through the thorn-hedge. Observe one thing in the last story. The prick from the sleep-thorn becomes a prick from a spinning-wheel, and thus loses all its original meaning, while the circle of fire is transformed into a thorn-hedge—proof sufficient that they were convertible ideas.
Lastly, it remains to say that the stories of glass mountains ascended by knights are probably allegories of death—heaven being spoken of to this day by Russian and German peasants as a glass mountain.
CHAPTER XII.
PICTURE-WRITING.
Lateness of the discovery of letters.