To carry these matters further is not within my plan, for they would lead us into the mazes of comparative mythology, which it is my purpose to avoid as far as possible, restricting myself to history, sayings, and allusions that pertain to real, not imaginary, birds.[[B]]
[B]. Nevertheless, I have made one exception by devoting a chapter to “a fabulous flock” of wholly fictitious birds, namely, the phenix, rukh (roc), simurgh and their fellows—all hatched from the same solar nest—because they have become familiar to us, by name, at least, in literature, symbolism, and proverbial sayings.
The distinction I try to make between the mythical and the legendary or real, may be illustrated by the kingfisher—in this case, of course, the common species of southern Europe. Let us consider first the mythical side. Alcyone, daughter of Æolus, the wind-god, impelled by love for her husband Ceyx, whom she found dead on the shore after a shipwreck, threw herself into the sea. The gods, rewarding their conjugal love, changed the pair into kingfishers. What connection exists between this, which is simply a classic yarn, and the ancient theory of the nidification of this species, I do not know; but the story was—now we are talking of the real bird, which the Greeks and Latins saw daily—that the kingfisher hatched its eggs at the time of the winter solstice in a nest shaped like a hollow sponge, and thought to be solidly composed of fish-bones, which was set afloat, or at any rate floated, on the surface of the Mediterranean. The natural query how such a structure could survive the shock of waves led to the theory that Father Æolus made the winds “behave” during the brooding-time. As Pliny explains: “For seven days before the winter solstice, and for the same length of time after it, the sea becomes calm in order that the kingfishers may rear their young.” Simonides, Plutarch, and many other classic authorities, testify to the same tradition, which seems to have belonged particularly to the waters about Sicily. More recent writers kept alive the tender conceit.
Along the coast the mourning halcyon’s heard
Lamenting sore her spouse’s fate,
are lines from Ariosto’s verse almost duplicated by Camoens; and Southey—
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles,
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles.
while Dryden speaks of “halcyons brooding on a winter sea,” and Drayton makes use of the legend in five different poems. It is a fact that in the region of southern Italy a period of calm weather ordinarily follows the blustering gales of late autumn, which may have suggested this poetic explanation; but one student believes that the story may have been developed from a far earlier tradition. “The Rhibus of Aryan mythology, storm-demons, slept for twelve nights [and days] about the winter solstice ... in the house of the sun-god Savitar.”
Such is the history behind our proverbial expression for tranquillity, and often it has been used very remotely from its original sense, as when in Henry VI Shakespeare makes La Pucelle exclaim: “Expect St. Martin’s summer, halcyon days,” St. Martin’s summer being the English name for that warm spell in November known to us as Indian summer. All this is an extended example of the kind of poetic myth which has been told of many different birds, and which in this book is left to be sought out in treatises on mythology.