[73] The ancient Longobard tale of the exposure of King Lamissio, related by Paulus Diaconus (L, 15), gives a similar incident. A public woman had thrown her seven newborn infants into a fish pond. King Agelmund passed by, and looked curiously at the children, turning them around with his spear. But when one of the children took hold of the spear, the king considered this as of good augury; he ordered this boy to be taken out of the pond, and to be given to a wet nurse. As he had taken him from the pond, which in his language is called “lama,” he named the boy Lamissio. He grew up into a stalwart champion, and after Agelmund’s death, became king of the Longobards.
[74] Scaf is the high German “Schaffing” (barrel), which leads Leo to assume, in connection with Scild’s being called Scefing, that he had no father Sceaf or Schaf at all, but was himself the boy cast ashore by the waves, who was named the “son of the barrel” (Schaffing). The name Beowulf itself, explained by Grimm as Bienen-wolf (bee-wolf), seems to mean originally (according to Wolzogen) Bärwelf, namely Jungbär (bear cub or whelp), which is suggestive of the saga of the origin of the Guelphs (Ursprung der Welfen, Grimm, II, 233), where the boys are to be thrown into the water as “whelps.”
[75] The possibility of further specification of separate items of this schedule will be seen from the compilation as given by H. Lessmann, at the conclusion of his work on “The Kyros Saga in Europe.”
[76] See also Wundt, who psychologically interprets the hero as a projection of human desires and aspirations (loc. cit., p. 48).
[77] Compare Freud, “Hysterical Fancies, and their Relation to Bisexuality,” with references to the literature on this subject. This contribution is contained in the second series of the “Collection of Short Articles on the Neurosis Doctrine,” Vienna and Leipsic, 1909.
[78] For the idealizing of the parents by the children, compare Maeder’s comments (Jahrb. f. Psychoanalyse, p. 152, and Centralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, I, p. 51) on Varendonk’s essay, “Les idéals d’enfant,” Tome VII, 1908.
[79] Dream Interpretation (Traumdeutung), II ed., p. 200. See Brill’s Translation, Macmillan & Co., 1913.
[80] Compare the “birth dreams” in Freud’s “Traumdeutung” (see Brill’s translation, Macmillan & Co., p. 207 et seq.), also the examples quoted by the author in the “Lohengrin saga” (p. 27 et seq.).
[81] In fairy tales, which are adapted to infantile ideation, and especially to the infantile sexual theories (compare Freud in the December number of Sexuelle Probleme), the birth of man is frequently represented as a lifting of the child from a well or a lake (Thimme, l. c., p. 157). The story of “Dame Holle’s Pond” (Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, I, 7) relates that the newborn children come from her well, whence she brings them forth. The same interpretation is apparently expressed in certain national rites; for example, when a Celt had reason to doubt his paternity, he placed the newborn child on a large shield and put it adrift in the nearest river. If the waves carried it ashore, it was considered as legitimate, but if the child was drowned, this was proof of the contrary and the mother was also put to death (see Franz Helbing, “History of Feminine Infidelity”). Additional ethnological material from folklore has been compiled by the author in his “Lohengrin saga” (p. 20 et seq.).
[82] The “box” in certain myths is represented by the cave, which also distinctly symbolizes the womb; aside from statements in Abraham, Ion, and others, especially in case of Zeus, who is born in a cave of the Ida mountains, and nourished by the goat Amalthea, his mother concealing him for fear of her husband, Kronos. According to Homer’s Iliad (XVIII, 396, et seq.), Hephaistos is also cast into the water by his mother, on account of his lameness, and remains hidden, for nine years, in a cave surrounded by water. By exchanging the reversal, the birth (the fall into the water) is here plainly represented as the termination of the nine months of the intrauterine life. More common than the cave birth is the exposure in a box, which is likewise told in the Babylonian Marduk-Tammuz myth, as well as in the Egyptian-Phoenician Osiris-Adonis myth (compare Winckler, “Die Weltanschauung des alten Orients, Ex Oriente Lux” I, 1, p. 43, and Jeremias, loc. cit., p. 41). Bacchus, according to Paus, III, 24, is also removed from the persecution of the king, through exposure in a chest on the Nile, and is saved at the age of three months by a king’s daughter, which is remarkably suggestive of the Moses legend. A similar story is told of Tennes, the son of Kyknos, who has been mentioned in another connection (Siecke: Hermes, p. 48, annotation), and of many others.