Dagmar—the favourite queen of the Danes, whose only fault was lacing her sleeves on a Sunday—is called only by her epithet, Danes' joy. Her true name was Margaret of Bohemia, and the Danish princess Dagmar, who was christened after her, was on her Russian marriage called Marie.[[121]]
[121]. Blackwell, Mallet; Munch; Butler; Grimm; Thierry; Michaelis.
Section II.—The Wolf.
It is for the place that he occupies in the Teutonic imagination, rather than for his own merits, that the wolf stands foremost among the creatures that have supplied Teutonic names.
He is also the most universal. Zeeb, Lycos, and Lupus, have been already mentioned; and the midnight prowler, as the most terrible animal of Europe, held his place in imaginations, whence the lion and tiger faded for want of personal acquaintance. The French have no less than forty-nine proverbs about wolves, many no doubt remains of the beast epic.
Wolves called Geri and Freki sat on either side of Odin’s throne, and devoured his share of the bears' flesh of Valhalla, a banquet he was too ethereal to require. Wolves chase the sun and moon round their daily courses; and a terrible wolf called Mangarmr, or moon-gorger, is to devour the moon at the coming of the wolf-age, which, in the Voluspa, shadows the last days of the world. Fenris, the wolf of the abyss, is the son of Loki; and though bound by the Æsir at the cost of Tyr’s right hand, will finally break loose, destroy Odin himself, and only be rent asunder by Vidur in his resistless shoes.
Nevertheless, ulf, vulf, wolf was highly popular as a name-root; perhaps more common at the end than the beginning of a word, but often standing alone. It was the diminutive Vulfila that was the right name of that good bishop whose Mæso-Gothic version of the Gospels goes by his Latinism of Ulphilas.
Ulf was twenty-three times in the Landnama-bok; and ulf in every possible form ravaged the coasts of Europe. Wolf was again the hereditary prefix in the House of Bavaria, where the dukes varied between Wolf and Wolfart, till Wolfen became the designation of the family, and a legend was invented to account for it. An ancestress had, it was said, given birth to twelve infants all at once, and in the spirit of the child who, being shown his twin brothers, asked “Which shall we keep,” sent her maid to dispose of the eleven unnecessary ones in the river. The father met her, and asked what she had in her apron. “Only whelps,” she answered; but he was not to be thus put off, made an inspection, saved the children’s lives, and called them the Wolfen, or wolf-whelps! The Book of Heroes, however, makes the Wolfings descend from the brave Sir Hildebrand, and be so called from a wolf on their shield granted them by the Emperor Wolfdietrich, in remembrance of an adventure of his own infancy, when he had been carried off by a she-wolf to her den, and remained there unhurt—whence his name of Wolfdietrich. The male line of the Wolfen, however, in time became extinct, and the heiress married one of the Italian House of Este, which adopted the German Wolf in the Italianized form of Guelfo, and constantly used it as a name. Thence when the popes set up Otto d'Este, one of the Wolfen of Bavaria, as anti-emperor in opposition to the House of Hohenstaufen, his partisans were called Welfen; those of the Fredericks, Waiblingen, from the Swabian castle of Waibling. The Italian cities rang with the fierce cries of Guelfo and Zibelino, for the pope or the emperor, and Europe learnt to identify the Guelph with the cause of the Church; the Ghibelline with that of the State, when the origin of the words had long been forgotten.
One of the Bavarian Wolfen d'Este became Duke of Brunswick Luneburg, and from him descended the Hanoverian line of English sovereigns, who in the time of Revolution thence were said to be properly sumamed Guelf, or even Whelps, with about as much correctness as when Louis XVI. was styled Louis Capet.