In Sweden the corresponding water-spirit—if that may be called a spirit which, as in all these cases, is regarded as essentially corporeal—is called the Neck, a word connected with Hnikarr, the Old Norse appellation of Odin regarded as a water-god, and with the Nicors, or water-monsters referred to in Beowulf. The Neck is said to appear in various forms. Sometimes he is a grown man, and then “particularly dangerous to haughty and pert damsels”; sometimes he is a comely youth with his lower extremities like those of a horse; sometimes he is an old man with a long beard; occasionally a handsome youth with yellow locks flowing over his shoulders and a red cap, sitting in a summer evening on the surface of the water with a golden harp in his hand. In return for a black lamb he is not unwilling to communicate his skill in music; and if the offering be accompanied by the expression of a hope of his salvation, he is rendered especially gracious. For above all things he longs for eternal happiness; nor can deeper distress be inflicted upon him than by denying this possibility. A Neck who takes up his abode under a bridge, or in a stream, is commonly called a Strömkarl. He usually plays not on the harp but on the viol. Near Hornborgabro in West Gothland a Strömkarl was once heard singing to a pleasant melody these words thrice repeated: “I know—and I know—and I know—that my Redeemer liveth.” He is acquainted with a measure which, if played, will cause even inanimate things, as trees and stones, to dance; so powerful is his music.
But he appears in other forms. A favourite is that of a horse, sometimes described as with hoofs reversed. At Bohuus in West Gothland he was caught by means of a cunningly contrived halter, from which he could not break loose. His captor kept him all the spring and made him plough his fields. Only when once the halter accidentally slipped off was the Neck able to escape this slavery. He sprang like lightning into the water, dragging the harrow after him. The Neck also causes disease. His appearance forbodes tempest. He haunts wells and must be propitiated with offerings, or measures must be taken to render him innocuous.[166.1]
Without pausing to analyse the complex character assigned to the Neck, it will be abundantly clear that he belongs to the same category as the foregoing, and may be subdued by similar means. To fetch parallels to the spirit of the Jabbok from Scotland and Sweden may be thought going far afield. It is going no farther than Dr Frazer himself goes for examples of the custom of propitiating river-spirits. The protest often uttered by cautious anthropologists against those who would cast the net so widely has its reason. When we are dealing with customs it is well to remember that customs superficially alike may spring from quite different social organizations, and their real intentions may be divergent or even opposite: in short, they may have nothing in common but external resemblance. They cannot be understood without taking into account the sequences of which they are often part, and the social organization and cultural condition from which they spring. It is otherwise when those great products of human imagination that animate the world about us are concerned. The personalities believed to haunt mountain and stream, air and water, heaven and earth, are elemental conceptions, the inevitable offspring of the human mind in its intercourse with nature. Analogies discovered between them are real analogies; they are the proofs of the essential oneness of mankind in the snow-hut of an arctic winter and the tree-shelter of a tropical forest. And when we find the relations believed to exist between such personalities and human beings, the need of their conciliation or coercion in order to obtain benefits for their human worshipper or antagonist, and the means taken for this purpose, the same, with only such variations as may be accounted for by differences of environment, then we may with confidence appeal to them as mutually illustrative.
For these reasons it would appear that we must regard such tales as those of the kelpie and the water-bull of Scotland and the Isle of Man, or the Neck of Sweden, as illuminating the legend of Jacob’s struggle at the ford of the Jabbok. Professor Frazer rightly adduces as in some degree analogous the story of Menelaus catching the shy sea-god Proteus sleeping on the sands, and compelling him to say his sooth, as Jacob compels the angel to pronounce a blessing, and that of Peleus catching and conquering the sea-goddess Thetis to be his bride. Here we are reminded of a cycle of traditions found all over the world, and known as the Swan-maiden cycle. The heroine of the tale is a supernatural being, usually in the form of a bird which casts its feathers like a robe and becomes human. The hero, possessing himself of the robe, acquires power over her and makes her his wife, only to lose her again when she recovers it. As told in Scotland and the adjacent isles, in the Faeroe Islands and Iceland, the lady is a seal.[167.1] It may be doubtful whether Thetis was ever so represented; but it is certainly most suggestive that Proteus was discovered sleeping among the seals. For it is not only for matrimonial purposes that these supernatural beings are caught in modern märchen. In a Tamil tale the hero steals the dress of one of a band of divine maidens, and thereby compels her to bring him a certain divine parijata, or flower of the coral tree, which was demanded by another lady as the price of her hand.[168.1] In the Spanish tale of The Marquis of the Sun, the Marquis is a great gamester. A man who played with him lost all he had, and then staked his soul and lost it. To get it back he was advised to watch on the banks of a river. Three princesses would come in the guise of doves, cast their feathers and bathe. He was to take the dress of the smallest and thus compel her to show him the road to the Marquis her father’s castle.[168.2] It is true that both these adventures do result in the hero’s union with the bird-maiden. Such union is, however, incidental. In a Samoyed Swan-maiden story the heroine, captured in the usual way, flings the hearts of herself and her husband, as well as of other members of his family, into the air; and their owners in consequence remain neither living nor dead. The husband’s father’s sister goes in search of the hearts to the lake where the bride was captured, and finds her six sisters there swimming as before. She takes possession of the clothes of one of them, and thus compels her to restore the hearts of her relatives.[168.3] So the hero of a tale told by a tribe on Vancouver Island is sent in search of his daughter, who has eloped with a wolf. He sees a number of young wolves playing at ball, having laid aside their mantles. He sets himself down beside the mantles, and in this way putting their owners to shame at being found naked, compels them to bring him to his son-in-law’s abode.[168.4] The mantles are obviously the wolf-skins, laid aside to enable their owners to appear in human form.
Wolves are of course not water-spirits, like swans or seals; but they obey the same law as that imagined for the latter. The man who seizes something which is at once the symbol of their supernatural character and the source of their power, renders them helpless and compels them to his will. The contest is in these cases one of trickery and determination, rather than of strength. The captures of Proteus and of Thetis, however, seem to have been effected by main force and a wrestler’s skill. This is often the case with the capture of mermaids in the west of Europe. Hugh Miller long ago translated into literature a local legend of Cromarty which told how John Reid captured on the shores of the Firth a mermaid, from whom he extracted as a ransom the grant of three wishes, including prosperity and union with the maiden of his choice.[169.1] Mermaid-stories thus agree with kelpie-stories and with those of Proteus and the spirit of the Jabbok in assigning victory to the strength and skill of the human wrestler.
Water-spirits are not the only supernatural beings with whom men are represented in story as matching themselves. The Lushei clans of Assam believe in various demons that inhabit hills, streams and trees. They are called Huai, those inhabiting the water being known as Tui-huai, and those residing on the land as Rām-huai. A certain sacrifice, generally of a big sow, is offered to the Rām-huai. It is called Sakhua. One night, towards morning, it is related, a Rām-huai appeared to a man who had unwittingly neglected his Sakhua sacrifice. It came into the straw where he was sleeping and wrestled with him until daylight. Even then it followed him and wrestled with him again; nor does the man seem to have been loth. At last he conquered the Rām-huai, who then told him that his Sakhua sacrifice was over-due; and he performed it at once. Sometimes the Rām-huai appears as a tiger and sometimes as a man. On this occasion he seems to have been in human form.[170.1]
Yet even in such a contest the skill displayed may be much more than a trick of jiu-jitsu. An example or two will suffice. In the Wild Huntsman of Teutonic lands anthropologists agree in recognizing traditions of the god Woden. He is well known to the German rustic as Wod. A tale from Mecklenburg represents a peasant as encountering him one dark night in the form of a tall man on a white horse. The peasant accepts the stranger’s challenge to pull against him, and grasps one end of a heavy chain, while the stranger ascends into the clouds with the other end. The peasant knows that, if he lose, he is himself lost. He quickly twists the end around a stalwart oak, and the Huntsman tugs in vain. A second and a third time the contest is renewed, after he has persuaded the stranger that he is holding the chain, and it is only his own strength that is being put forth. The oak-tree creaks and crackles to its roots, but finally holds its ground. Wod owns himself vanquished, and rewards his courageous antagonist with a share of his game—a haunch of venison, which turns to a rich booty of gold and silver ere he reaches home.[170.2] We are indebted to Ovid for another example. He tells us how Numa by the advice of Egeria entrapped Picus and Faunus, two ancient rustic deities who were wont to drink of a certain stream. The king tempted them by means of wine placed beside the fountain; and when they had fallen into the slumber of intoxication he issued from his ambush and put them in chains. As the price of freedom he compelled them to bring down Jupiter from the sky, to give him the famous formula for averting the thunderbolt.[171.1] Innocents like these are of course easily caught with strong drink. In Greek tradition Silenus, who as the son of a nymph was described as of condition inferior to the gods, but superior to mortals and to death, was not superior to some mortal weaknesses. Indeed, he was notoriously convivial. Hence he fell victim to a similar wile on the part of Midas, the Phrygian king. Nor was he released before he had revealed some astounding geographical and ethnological information, that staggered the sceptical Ælian when he found it placed on record in the now lost pages of Theopompus.[171.2]
Such legends of contest are not confined to merely second-rate personages like these subordinate or superseded divinities. When in the Iliad Diomed attacks and wounds Aphrodite, she goes crying to her mother. Dione by way of consolation recounts a list of Olympian gods who have grievously suffered in fight with headstrong and violent men. It includes Ares, Hera, and Hades, all of them potent figures in Greek mythology. Ares was bound by Otus and Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, and kept in durance vile for thirteen moons, until Hermes came to his rescue. Even he, it seems, was obliged to have recourse to secret means to steal him away. The arrows of Herakles inflicted grievous wounds on Hera and Pluto. And though naturally Dione denounces untimely death as the penalty for such presumption, the injuries received in the conflict are not all on one side.[171.3] Odin himself fights more than once in the Scandinavian lays and sagas against human antagonists. Nay, if M. A. J. Reinach’s interpretation be accepted, Jacob’s opponent at the ford of the Jabbok was no other than “Elohim in person.” The growth of religious feeling, on this theory, found this coarse representation abhorrent; and while the incident, being part of the sacred legends, could not be ignored or repudiated, it was so altered as to obscure its real significance.[172.1]
However this may be, tales like these are echoes of belief in the possibility of a successful corporeal struggle with the mysterious powers. They are blurred memories of the practice of threatening and even attacking what we call supernatural beings under their material manifestations. Those beings were conceived, if not always in human form, at least as human in their wills and passions, hence in their motives and modes of action. The only way in which they differed from humanity was in their vaster and undefined powers. They were, to adopt Matthew Arnold’s phrase, magnified, non-natural—that is to say, mysterious—men.[172.2] Thus conceived, they were accessible to every sort of influence that affected mankind, including coercion. But it took a bold man to coerce them, though the task might be attempted upon occasion, even by ordinary mortals—not always with success. Sometimes the contest is of a more distinctly intellectual character. The trial of musical skill between Apollo and Marsyas will occur to everyone. The Egyptian king called by Herodotus Rhampsinitus is said to have penetrated to Hades and there played at dice with Demeter. Varying fortune attended him; but he was so far successful that he returned with a golden handkerchief, the gift of the goddess. And the Egyptians still in the historian’s time celebrated a feast in memory of the adventure.[173.1]
If we turn from legend to fact, we find the belief translated into action, into the attempt to control the supernatural by force. Thus did Xerxes when he lashed the Hellespont and let down fetters into it, for destroying the bridge he had endeavoured to build.[173.2] Thus did the ancient priestesses of the Canary Islands when rain was too long in coming: they beat the sea with rods to punish the spirit of the waters for withholding the boon they needed.[173.3] In the same way (the tale is probably at least founded on fact), when the Nile had risen to the height of eighteen cubits—higher than it had ever risen before—Pheros, the son and successor of Sesostris, is declared to have taken a spear and driven it into the midst of the whirling waters. It is added—and here we have a testimony to the recognition by the ancient Egyptians of the awful divinity whom the king had thus challenged—that he was thereupon struck with a disease of the eyes and made blind.[173.4] The vengeance mentioned by Dr Frazer as taken by the Kakhyeen of Upper Burmah points distinctly to the same intention. “If some friend or relative has been drowned in crossing a river, the avenger repairs once a year to the banks, and, filling a bamboo vessel with the water, hews it through with his dah [sword] as if he were despatching a living enemy.”[174.1] The Korwas of Chota Nagpur on a similar occasion shoot arrows into the river.[174.2]