7. Loki is accused of being 7. Not he who threw the fatal
guilty of the murder. missile is accused, but the God
who predicted Atys's fate in
the dream.
8. The innocent murderer is 8. The innocent murderer slain. commits suicide.
We must consider it as an additional proof of the theory that the southern version has been taken from northern sources when we find incidental features which have sense only so long as they appear connected with their original surroundings. The Ilias also contains a modified version of the Baldur myth in the account of Patroclus's death. Patroclus is the kind hero, obliging and friendly to all who knew him, the brightest and purest figure of the whole poem. He falls by the intrigues of a God. When Patroclus's body is burned the same thing happens as with Baldur. Achilles lights the funeral pyre but it will not burn, and as in the Edda a giant-woman is called in, so in the Iliad, Iris is sent for in order to call Boreas and Zephyr who by the promise of considerable sacrifices are induced to make the fire burn. There is no reason here why the fire should not burn, but in the Edda there is a very obvious reason, for all the elements had promised by oath not to harm Baldur's body. The flames were not allowed to burn him, the logs on which the funeral ship should roll into the waves were not allowed to carry him down, and the waves were not allowed to receive him.
Great interest attaches also to the similarities between the Baldur myth and Christianity, and not long ago a Danish theologian has attempted to show that the sagas of the Edda were imported into the North by Christian monks, the world-tree Yggdrasil was said to be the biblical tree of life, the same from which the wood of Christ's cross had been taken, Loki was identified with Lucifer, the blind Höder with Longinus, the Roman captain who thrust the lance into the side of Christ, etc. It is a strange coincidence that Longinus was blind, according to the Gospel of Nicodemus, which may have been written in the eighth century. Longinus, it is told, acquired sight through the blood of Jesus, thus interpreting the passage "they shall look at him whom they pierced" in the sense as if Longinus had not been able to look at Jesus before.
A Jewish libel against Christianity, Toledoth Jeshu, (reprinted in Eisenmenger's "Entdecktes Judenthum") contains a very striking similarity with the Baldur myth. It is told:
"When the wise had ordered Jesus, after he had been stoned, to be hanged to the wood and the wood would not bear him but broke, his disciples saw it and they wept and said: 'Lo the justice of our Lord Jesus; no wood will bear him.' The disciples did not know that he had extorted an oath from all the wood while he had still the name (viz., the mystical and miracle-working name of God) in his power, for he knew his fate that he would be condemned to be hanged…. But when Judas saw that no wood would bear him, he said to the wise: Consider the shrewdness of his mind. He has taken oaths from all wood that it should not bear him, but in my garden grows an enormous cabbage-stock. I shall go and bring it; perhaps it will bear him. The wise said: Do as you say. Then Judas went and brought the cabbage-stock, and they hanged Jesus on it."
This account being older than 1278, it was supposed to have contributed to form the Baldur myth of the Edda, but Müllenhoff refuted all the attempts to attribute a recent origin to the Edda. The mistle does not grow in Iceland, accordingly the main parts of the Baldur myth in which the mistle plays so prominent a part must have existed before the Icelanders left their Scandinavian homes.
Dr. Krause's investigations strongly tend to corroborate the new view of placing the home of the Aryas in Europe.
By Aryas in the old sense of the name were understood those families of nations which spoke the Aryan languages, viz., the Hindoo, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Slaves, the Germans, and the Celts, and some few smaller ones. These Aryas were formerly considered as kin in blood and their home was sought somewhere in Asia. Of late, however, many considerations tend to prove that these Aryan nations were by no means one family; they are the product of a mixture of several races among which one has forced its language upon the others. If we call this race the Aryans proper we find that they are represented most purely in the Teutonic nations, the Saxons, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. These Aryans are a tall, blond, and dolichocephalic race. They appear as the conquerors of India, the masters of Persia, the Dorian immigrators of Greece, showing everywhere the same attributes. It is natural that they were swallowed up again by the dark brachycephalic races whom they had conquered, because the latter were better adapted to the southern climate than their masters.
There are three long-headed races: (1) the blond long-heads or Aryas, (2) the dark South European long-heads, and (3) the dark and woolly-haired long-heads of Africa or the Negroes. There are also several broad-headed races, among them the Ugro-Finnians, Turanians, South European broad-heads are represented as the Savoyards. The original Aryans (by A. de Quatrefages called the Cannstadt race) were extremely long-headed, the proportion sinking below 75 : 100. This race, so called after the discovery of graves in Cannstadt, shows a strong similarity with, and must be considered as, an evolution from the Neanderthal type. The eyebrows of the male Neanderthal type skulls protrude (slightly reminding us of the Gorilla) making the smallness of the forehead still more noticeable. The hind part of the head is well developed. The bones are extremely strong, the skull is thick, and the proportion of length to breadth averages in both, the Neanderthal and Cannstadt types, 71·3. This race inhabited the banks of the Rhine and Seine and has been called the Germanic type by Hölder, the Saxon type by Englishmen, Cymrians by Broca, while Dr. Krause calls them Aryans. The South European long-heads with dark hair are called by A. de Quatrefages the Cro-Magnon type, named after a place in the Vésère valley where as its first specimen a tall old man had been discovered. The Cro-Magnon type varies greatly from the Cannstadt type; the forehead is broad and high, and the cranium is also well formed. The proportion of breadth to length is also dolichocephalic, it averages 73·76. The orbits are broad but closely set, and the size of the lower parts of the face from the middle downward is strongly lessened in proportion to the higher parts, ending in a pointed and protruding chin. This race lived in Greece, Southern Italy, France, and Spain, and is found also in England, where its descendants even to-day can be traced in some of the Silurian inhabitants of South Wales and Ireland. Tacitus says that the Silurians have come from Spain, and even to-day the people of Berkshire resemble greatly, as Boyd-Dawkins says, the Basques of the Western Pyrenees, near Bagnères de Bogorre. Their stature is sometimes small but not always, they are sometimes tall, their gait is light, their nose narrow and long, sometimes approaching Jewish features, their skin dark, their hair coarse, black, and usually curled.