THE SWAN SISTER,
ST. GEORGE’S CHAPEL,
WINDSOR.
An unusual compound is that of a swan with the agreeable head of a young woman, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. This may be one of the swan-sisters in the old story of the “Knight of the Swan.”
The initial letter of this section is a fine grotesque rendering of the Egyptian goddess Athor, Athyr, or Het-her (meaning the dwelling of God.) She was the daughter of the sun, and bore in images the sun’s disc. Probably through a lapse into ignorance on the part of the priest-painters, she became of less consideration, and the signification even of her image was forgotten. She had always had as one of her representations, a bird with a human head horned and bearing the disc; but the disc began to be shewn as a tambourine, and she herself was styled “the mistress of dance and jest.” As in the cosmogony of one of the Egyptian Trinities she was the Third Person, as Supreme Love, the Greeks held her to be the same as Aphrodite. The name of the sun-disc was Aten, and its worship was kindred to that of Ra, the mid-day sun. The Hebrew Adonai and the Syriac Adonis have been considered to be derived from this word Aten.
Several examples of bird-compounds are in the Exeter series of misericordes of the thirteenth century. They are renderings in wood of the older Anglo-Saxon style of design, and are ludicrously grotesque.
It is scarcely to be considered that the compound figures were influenced by the prevalence of mumming in the periods of the various carvings. In this, as in many other respects, the traditions of the carvers’ art protected it from being coloured by the aspect of the times, except in a limited degree, shewn in distinctly isolated examples.
BIRD-COMPOUND, EXETER.