Meanwhile Elsa had summoned her chieftains and retainers to a meeting in Antwerp. Precisely on the day of the assembly, a swan was sighted swimming up stream (river Schelde) and drawing behind him a skiff, in which Lohengrin lay asleep on his shield. The swan promptly came to land at the shore, and the prince was joyfully welcomed. Hardly had his helmet, shield and sword been taken from the skiff, when the swan at once swam away again. Lohengrin heard of the wrong which had been done to the duchess, and willingly consented to become her champion. Elsa then summoned all her relatives and subjects. The place was prepared in Mayence, where Lohengrin and Friedrich were to fight in the emperor’s presence. The hero of the Grail defeated Friedrich, who confessed having lied to the duchess, and was executed with the axe. Elsa was alloted to Lohengrin, they having long been lovers; but he secretly insisted upon her avoiding all questions as to his ancestry, or whence he had come, saying that otherwise he would have to leave her instantaneously and she would never see him again.
For some time, the couple lived in peace and happiness. Lohengrin was a wise and mighty ruler over his land, and also served his emperor well in his expeditions against the Huns and the heathen. But it came to pass that one day in throwing the javelin he unhorsed the Duke of Cleve, so that the latter broke an arm. The Duchess of Cleve was angry, and spoke out amongst the women, saying: “Lohengrin may be brave enough, and he seems to be a good Christian; what a pity that his nobility is not of much account for no one knows whence he has come floating to this land.” These words pierced the heart of the Duchess of Brabant, and she changed color with emotion. At night, when her spouse was holding her in his arms, she wept, and he said “What is the matter, Elsa, my own?” She made answer, “the Duchess of Cleve has caused me sore pain.” Lohengrin was silent and asked no more. The second night, the same came to pass. But in the third night, Elsa could no longer retain herself, and she spoke: “Lord, do not chide me! I wish to know, for our children’s sake, whence you were born; for my heart tells me that you are of high rank.” When the day broke, Lohengrin declared in public whence he had come, that Parsifal was his father, and God had sent him from the Grail. He then asked for his two children, which the duchess had borne him, kissed them, told them to take good care of his horn and sword which he would leave behind, and said: “Now, I must be gone.” To the duchess he left a little ring which his mother had given him. Then the swan, his friend, came swimming swiftly, with the skiff behind him; the prince stepped in and crossed the water, back to the service of the Grail. Elsa sank down in a faint. The empress resolved to keep the younger boy Lohengrin, for his father’s sake, and to bring him up as her own child. But the widow wept and mourned [72] the rest of her life for her beloved spouse, who never came back to her.
On inverting the Lohengrin saga in such a way that the end is placed first,—on the basis of the rearrangement, or even transmutation of motives, not uncommonly found in myths,—we find the type of saga with which we have now become familiar: The infant Lohengrin, who is identical with his father of the same name, floats in a vessel upon the sea and is carried ashore by a swan. The empress adopts him as her son, and he becomes a valorous hero. Having married a noble maiden of the land, he forbids her to enquire as to his origin. When the command is broken he is obliged to reveal his miraculous descent and divine mission, after which the swan carries him back in his skiff to the Grail.
Other versions of the saga of the Knight with the Swan have retained this original arrangement of the motives, although they appear commingled with elements of fairy tales. The saga of the Knight with the Swan, as related in the Flemish People’s Book (Deutsche Sagen, I, 29), contains in the beginning the history of the birth of seven children, [73] borne by Beatrix, the wife of King Oriant of Flanders. The wicked mother of the absent king, Matabruna, orders that the children be killed, and the queen be given seven puppy dogs in their stead. But the servant contents himself with the exposure of the children, who are found by a hermit, named Helias, and are nourished by a goat until they are grown. Beatrix is thrown into a dungeon. Later on Matabruna learns that the children have been saved and her repeated command to kill them causes the hunter, who has been charged with the murder, to bring her as a sign of apparent obedience to her behest, the silver neck chains which the children wore already at the time of their birth. One of the boys, named Helias, after his foster father, alone keeps his chain, and is thereby saved from the fate of his brothers, who are transformed into swans, as soon as their chains are removed. Matabruna volunteers to prove the relations of the queen with the dog, and upon her instigation, Beatrix is to be killed, unless a champion arises to defend her. In her need, she prays to God, who sends her son Helias as a rescuer. The brothers are also saved by means of the other chains, except one, whose chain has already been melted down. King Oriant now transfers the rulership to his son Helias, who causes the wicked Matabruna to be burned. One day, Helias sees his brother, the swan, drawing a skiff on the lake surrounding the castle. This he regards as a heavenly sign, he arms himself and mounts the skiff. The swan takes him through rivers and lakes to the place where God has ordained him to go. Next follows the liberation of an innocently accused duchess, in analogy with the Lohengrin saga; and his marriage to her daughter Clarissa, who is forbidden to ask for her husband’s ancestry. In the seventh year of their marriage she disobeys and puts the question, after which Helias returns home in the swan’s skiff. Finally, his lost brother swan is likewise released.
The characteristic features of the Lohengrin saga,—that the divine hero disappears again in the same mysterious fashion in which he has arrived; also the transference of mythical motives from the life of the older hero, bearing the same name, to a younger one, a very universal process in myth-formation, are likewise embodied in the Anglian-Longobard saga of Scëaf, which is mentioned in the introduction to the Beowulf-Song, the oldest German epic, preserved in the Anglo-Saxon tongue (translated by H. v. Wolzogen, Reclam). The father of old Beowulf received his name, Scild Scéfing (meaning the son of Scëaf), because as a very young boy, he was cast ashore as a stranger, asleep in a boat on a sheaf of grain (Anglo-saxon, scéaf). The waves of the sea carried him to the coast of the country which he was destined to defend. The inhabitants welcomed him as a miracle, raised him, and later on made him their king, as an emissary of God. (Compare Grimm, German Mythology, I, p. 306; III, p. 391, and H. Leo: Beowulf, Halle, 1839.) What is told of the ancestor of the royal house, Scaf, [74] or Scëaf, appears in the Beowulf song transferred to his son, Scëafing Scild, according to the unanimous statement of Grimm (see above), and Leo (p. 24): His dead body is exposed at his behest, surrounded by kingly splendor, upon a ship without a crew, which is sent out into the sea. Thus he vanishes in the same mysterious manner in which his father arrived ashore; this trait being accounted for, in analogy with the Lohengrin saga, by the mythical identity of father and son.
A cursory review of these variegated hero myths forcibly brings out a series of uniformly common features, with a typical ground work, from which a standard saga, as it were, may be constructed. This schedule corresponds approximately to the ideal human skeleton which is constantly seen, with minor deviations, on transillumination of figures which outwardly differ from one another. The individual traits of the several myths, and especially apparently crude variations from the prototype, can only be entirely elucidated by the myth-interpretation. The standard saga itself may be formulated according to the following scheme:
The hero is the child of most distinguished parents; usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as continence, or prolonged barrenness, or secret intercourse of the parents, due to external prohibition or obstacles. During the pregnancy, or antedating the same, there is a prophecy, in form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth, and usually threatening danger to the father, or his representative. As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds) and is suckled by a female animal, or by a humble woman. After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents, in a highly versatile fashion; takes his revenge on his father, on the one hand, is acknowledged on the other, and finally achieves rank and honors. [75]
The normal relations of the hero towards his father and his mother regularly appearing impaired in all these myths, as shown by the schedule, there is reason to assume that something in the nature of the hero must account for such a disturbance, and motives of this kind are not very difficult to discover. It is readily understood—and may be noted in the modern epigones of the heroic age—that for the hero who is exposed to envy, jealousy and calumny to a much higher degree than all others, the descent from his parents often becomes the source of the greatest distress and embarrassment. The old saying that “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country and in his father’s house,” has no other meaning but this, that he whose parents, brothers and sisters, or playmates, are known to us, is not so readily conceded to be a prophet (Gospel of St. Mark, VI, 4). There seems to be a certain necessity for the prophet to deny his parents; also, the well-known opera of Meyerbeer is based upon the avowal that the prophetic hero is allowed, in favor of his mission, to abandon and repudiate even his tenderly beloved mother.
A number of difficulties arise, however, as we proceed to a deeper enquiry into the motives which oblige the hero to sever his family relations. Numerous investigators have emphasized that the understanding of myth formation requires our going back to their ultimate source, namely the individual faculty of imagination. [76] The fact has also been pointed out that this imaginative faculty is found in its active and unchecked exuberance only in childhood. Therefore, the imaginative life of the child should first be studied, in order to facilitate the understanding of the far more complex and also more handicapped mythical and artistic imagination in general.
Meanwhile the investigation of the juvenile faculty of imagination has hardly commenced, instead of being sufficiently advanced to permit the utilization of the findings for the explanation of the more complicated psychic activities. The reason for this imperfect understanding of the psychic life of the child is referable to the lack of a suitable instrument, as well as of a reliable avenue, leading into the intricacies of this very delicate and rather inaccessible domain. These juvenile emotions can by no means be studied in the normal human adult, and it may actually be charged, in view of certain psychic disturbances, that the normal psychic integrity of normal subjects consists precisely in their having overcome and forgotten their childish vagaries and imaginations: so that the way has become blocked. In children, on the other hand, empirical observation (which as a rule must remain merely superficial) fails in the investigation of psychic processes, because we are not as yet enabled to trace all manifestations correctly to their motive forces: so that we are lacking the instrument. There is a certain class of persons, the so-called psychoneurotics, shown by the teachings of Freud to have remained children, in a sense, although otherwise appearing grown up. These psychoneurotics may be said not to have given up their juvenile psychic life, which on the contrary, in the course of maturity, has become strengthened and fixed, instead of modified. In psychoneurotics, the emotions of the child are preserved and exaggerated, thus becoming capable of pathological effects, in which these humble emotions appear broadened and enormously magnified. The fancies of neurotics are, as it were, the uniformly exaggerated reproductions of the childish imaginings. This would point the way to a solution of the problem. Unfortunately, however, the access is still much more difficult to establish in these cases than to the child mind. There is only one known instrument which makes this road practicable, namely the psychoanalytic method, which has been developed through the work of Freud. Constant handling of this instrument will clear the observer’s vision to such a degree that he will be enabled to discover the identical motive forces, only in delicately shaded manifestations, also in the psychic life of those who do not become neurotics later on.