This carol is full of apocryphal reminiscences and mythical elements. The contest between Satan and God, and between the evil and good powers is here described under the form of Satan, stealing the sun from heaven and plunging the world into darkness, but the angels, with the prophet Ilie (Elijah) at their head, are able to defeat the machinations of Satan, and to restore the sun to Paradise. Cf. among others the English poem, “The Harrowing of Hell,” and the literature connected with the Gospel of Nicodemus. Wesselofsky has studied the transformation of the prophet Elijah into the Ilie of the popular faith, who rides the heavens with a thunderbolt in his hands, and smites the devil wherever he finds him. It is a combination of the prophet Elijah with a modified form of the Greek Helias. The archangels Gabriel and Michael are here in their proper place, whilst in the story of the dragon-fly they have been supplanted by St. George. We shall find the same saint disguised as a knight and almost forgotten as a saint in the legend of the Fly of Kolumbatsh, No. 21.
XVI.
WHY IS IT CALLED THE BULL-FLY?
The Story of God, the Sun and the Bulls.
In those days when God used to walk through fields and lanes carrying his knapsack on his back and feeding his herds and flocks, his oxen and cows, his sheep and goats, it is told that, once upon a time, feeling very tired, he went to sleep with his head upon a hillock of earth. He slept for a long while, and woke up very late. Before lying down, he told the older and stronger oxen to take care to behave themselves well, and also to look after the younger ones, so that there should not be any fight or trouble among them. But no sooner had he closed his eyes, when such a shouting and bellowing was started that one might think that the hills were falling and the earth was breaking up. The Lord sprang upon his feet as if he had been touched by fire, for the holy sun had come to him, and waking him up had said:—“O Lord, these creatures of yours have bellowed all night long so loud and so vigorously that you might have thought that they intended driving me away from the face of the earth. Look and see what they have done to me. They have fought against me so long that they have well-nigh torn my clothes into shreds and tatters, and with great difficulty I saved myself behind that flower-bed.”
“What beetles are you speaking of?” asked the Lord.
“I mean your oxen which have behaved so badly. They are not worthy to be anything else but horned beetles.”
“Let it be so! But I must first look into the matter, and if I find them guilty, I will punish them just as you wish.”
And as the Lord had said, so he did. For, finding them guilty, he drove them away into the forest. There they climbed up the oak-trees, and suddenly they all became horned beetles, bull-flies, with larger and smaller horns, viz. the cows became cow-flies with smaller horns and the oxen bull-flies with larger horns, through God’s punishment. That is why they are called the Lord’s bulls and cows (Lucanus cervus).