1

received the by-name of yityatya (Nilsson 4, 32). The Indian Mahâbhârata also represents Hidimbas the râkshasa (giant) 1 as a man-eater, misshapen and red-bearded: man's flesh he smells from afar, and orders Hidimba his sister to fetch it him; but she, like the monster's wife or daughter in the nursery-tales, pities and befriends the slumbering hero (see Suppl.).

2

Our own giant-stories know nothing of this grim thirst for blood, even the Norse iötunn is nowhere depicted as a cannibal, like the Greek and Oriental giants; our giants are a great deal more genial, and come nearer to man's constitution in their shape and their way of thinking: their savagery spends itself mainly in hurling huge stones, removing mountains and rearing colossal buildings.

Saxo Gram. pp. 10. 11 invests the giantess Harthgrepa with the power to make herself small or large at pleasure. This is a gift which fairy-tales bestow on the ogre or the devil, and folktales on the haulemutter (Harrys 2, 10; and Suppl.).

It is in living legend (folktale) that the peculiar properties of our native giants have been most faithfully preserved; the poets make their giants far less interesting, they paint them, especially in subjects borrowed from Romance poetry, with only the features common to all giants. Harpîn, a giant in the Iwein, demands a knight's daughter, hangs his sons, and lays waste the land (4464. 4500):3 when slain, he falls to the ground like a tree (5074). Still more vapid are the two giants introduced at 6588 seq. Even in the Tristan, the description of giant Urgân (15923) is not much more vivid: he levies blackmail on oxen and sheep, and when his hand is hewn off, he wants to heal

1 Tevetat's second birth (Reinhart cclxxxi.) is a râkshasî, giantess, not a beast.

2 Mightily works man's smell, and amazingly quickens my nostrils,' Arjuna's Journey, by Bopp, p. 18. The same in our fairy-tales (supra, p. 486). Epithets of these Indian dæmons indicate that they walk about by night (Bopp's gloss. 91. 97).

3 One giant is 'hagel al der lande,' hail-storm to all lands, Bit. 6482.

4 N.B., his bones are treasured up outside the castle-gate (5881), as in Fischart's Garg. 41: they tell of riesen and haunen, shew their bones in churches, under town halls.' So there hangs in a church the skeleton of the giantess struck by lightning (p. 531 n.), the heathen maiden's dripping rib (Deut. sag. 140), and her yellow locks (ibid. 317); in the castle is kept the giant's bone (ibid. 324). At Alpirsbach in the Black Forest a giant's skeleton hangs outside the gate, and in Our Lady's church at Arnstadt the 'riesenribbe,' Bechst. 3, 129; conf. Jerichow and Werber in Ad. Kuhn, no. 56. The horns of a giant ox nailed up in the porch of a temple (Niebuhr's Rom. Hist. 1, 407).

it on again (16114). The giants shew more colour as we come to poems in the cycle of our hero-legend. Kuperân in the Hürn. Sîfrit (Cüpriân of the Heldens. 171) rules over 1000 giants, and holds in durance the captive daughter of a king. The Rother brings before us, all alive, the giants Aspriân, Grimme, Widolt, the last straining like a lion at his leash, till he is let loose for the fight (744. 2744. 4079); in the steel bar that two men could not lift he buries his teeth till fire starts out of it (650. 4653-74), and he smites with it like a thunderbolt (2734); the noise of his moving makes the earth to quake (5051), his hauberk rings when he leaps over bushes (4201); he pitches one man over the heads of four, so that his feet do not touch the ground (1718), smashes a lion against the wall (1144-53), rubs fire out of millstones (1040), wades in mould (646. 678) up to the knee (935), a feature preserved in Vilk. saga, cap. 60, and also Oriental (Hammer's Rosenöl 1, 36). Aspriân sets his foot on the mouth of the wounded (4275). And some good giant traits come out in Sigenôt when he breathes in his sleep, the boughs bend (60),2 he plucks up trees in the fir-wood (73-4), prepares lint-plugs (schübel) of a pound weight to stuff into his wounds (113), takes the hero under his armpit and carries him off (110. 158. Hag. 9, Lassb.). A giantess in the Wolfdiet. picks up horse and hero, and, bounding like a squirrel, takes them 350 miles over the mountains to her giant cell; another in the folk-song (Aw. 1, 161) carries man and horse up a mountain five miles high, where are two ready boiled and one on the spit (a vestige of androphagi after all); she offers her daughter to the hero, and when he escapes, she beats her with a club, so that all the flowers and leaves in the wood quiver. Giant Welle's sister Rütze in the Heldenbuch takes for her staff a whole tree, root and branch, that two waggons could not have carried; another woman of wild kin' walks over all the trees, and requires two bullocks' hides for a pair of shoes, Wolfd. 1513. Giant Langbein (Danske viser 1, 26) is asleep in the wood, when the heroes wake him up (see Suppl.).

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A good many giant-stories not yet discovered and collected.

The Romance giants are often porters and bridge-keepers, conf. the dorper in Fergût (supra, p. 535); yet also in Nib. 457, 4. 458, 1: 'rise portenare.'

The same token of gianthood is in Vilk. saga, cap. 176, and in a Servian lay.

must still be living in the popular traditions of Norway and Sweden,1 and even we in Germany may gather something from oral narration, though not much from books. The monk of St. Gall (Pertz 2, 756) has an Eishere (i.e. Egisheri, terribilis) of Thurgau, but he is a giant-like hero, not a giant.2

Of sacrifices offered to giants (as well as to friendly elves and home-sprites), of a worship of giants, there is hardly a trace. Yet in Kormakssaga 242 I find blôtrisi, giant to whom one sacrifices; and the buttered stone (p. 546) may have been smeared for the giantess, not by her, for it was the custom of antiquity to anoint sacred stones and images with oil or fat, conf. p. 63. As to the 'gude lubbe' whose worship is recorded by Bp. Gebhard (p. 526), his gianthood is not yet satisfactorily made out. Fasolt, the giant of storm, was invoked in exorcisms; but here we may regard him as a demigod, like Thorgerðr and Irpa, who were adored in Scandinavia (see Suppl.).

The connexion pointed out between several of the words for giant and the names of ancient nations is similar to the agreement of certain heroic names with historic characters. Mythic traits get mysteriously intergrown with historic, and as Dietrich and Charles do duty for a former god or hero, Hungarians and Avars are made to stand for the old notion of giants. Only we must not carry this too far, but give its due weight to the fact that iötunn and purs have in themselves an intelligible meaning.

3

1 Hülphers 3, 47 speaks of 'löjlige berättelse om fordna jättar,' without going into them.

2 It is quite another thing, when in the debased folktale Siegfried the hero degenerates into a giant (Whs. heldensage, pp. 301-16), as divine Oden himself (p. 155) and Thôrr are degraded into düvels and dolts. A still later view (Altd. bl. 1, 122) regards riese and recke (hero) as all one.

3 Schafarik (Slov. star. 1, 258) sees nothing in them but Geta and Thyrsus; at that rate the national name Thussagetæ must include both.

CHAPTER XIX.

CREATION.

Now that we have treated of gods, heroes, elves, and giants, we are at length prepared to go into the views of ancient times on cosmogony. And here I am the more entitled to take the Norse ideas for a groundwork, as indications are not wanting of their having equally prevailed among the other Teutonic races.

Before the creation of heaven and earth, there was an immense chasm called gap (hiatus, gaping), or by way of emphasis gap ginnûnga (chasm of chasms), corresponding in sense to the Greek Xáos.1 For, as xáos means both abyss and darkness, so ginnûnga-gap seems also to denote the world of mist, out of whose bosom all things rose. How the covering and concealing 'hel' was likewise conceived of as 'nifl-hel' with yawning gaping jaws, has been shewn above, pp. 312-314.

Yet this void of space had two extremities opposed to one another, muspell (fire) the southern, and nifl (fog) the northern ; from Muspellsheim proceed light and warmth, from Niflheim darkness and deadly cold. In the middle was a fountain Hvergelmir, out of which flowed twelve rivers named elivagar. When they got so far from their source, that the drop of fire contained

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1 Xáos, from xaivw=OHG. gînan, ON. gîna = Lat. hiare; conf. OHG. ginunga, hiatus. But we need not therefore read 'gap ginûnga,' for the ON. ginna, which has now only the sense of allicere, must formerly have had that of findere, secare, which is still found in OHG. inginnan, MHG. enginnen (see above, p. 403, Ganna): Otfried iii. 7, 27 says of the barleycorn, thoh findu ih melo thâr inne, inthiu ih es biginne (if I split it open); inkinnan (aperire), Graff 4, 209; ingunnen (sectus), N. Ar. 95. So in MHG., sîn herze wart ime engunnen' (fissum), Fundgr. 2, 268; enginnen (secare), En. 2792. 5722; engunnen (secuerunt), En. 1178. Nearly related is ingeinan (fissiculare), N. Cap. 136. From a literal splitting open' must have arisen the more abstract sense of 'beginning,' Goth. duginnan, AS. onginnan, OHG. inkinnan, pikinnan. Then gîna hiare, gin hiatus, further suggest gin (amplus), and ginregin (p. 320). Singularly Festus, in discussing inchoare, comes upon chaos, just as begin' has led us to gînan. Cohus, from which some derive incohare inchoare, is no other than chaos. Fest. sub v. cohum. [Nearly all the above meanings appear in derivatives of the Mongol. root khag, khog to crack, etc., including khoghôson empty, chaos]. Beside gînan, the OHG. has a chinan hiscere (Graff 4, 450), Goth. keinan, AS. cîne (rima, chine, chink). The AS. has also a separate word dwolma for hiatus, chaos.-Extr. from SUPPL.

in them hardened, like the sparks that fly out of flame, they turned into rigid ice. Touched by the mild air (of the south), the ice began to thaw and trickle: by the power of him who sent the heat, the drops quickened into life, and a man grew out of them, Ymir, called Örgelmir by the Hrîmpurses, a giant and

evil of nature.

Ymir went to sleep, and fell into a sweat, then under his left hand grew man and wife, and one of his feet engendered with the other a six-headed son; hence are sprung the families of giants.

But the ice dripped on, and a cow arose, Audumbla, from whose udder flowed four streams of milk, conveying nourishment to Ymir. Then the cow licked the salty ice-rocks, and on the evening of the first day a man's hand came forth, the second day the man's head, the third day the whole man; he was beautiful, large, strong, his name was Buri, and his son's name Börr (p. 349).1 Börr took to him Bestla, the giant Bölporn's daughter, and begat three sons, Oðinn, Vili, Ve (p. 162), and by them was the giant Ymir slain. As he sank to the ground, such a quantity of blood ran out of his wounds, that all the giants were drowned in it, save one, Bergelmir,2 who with his wife escaped in a lûðr (Sæm. 35, Sn. 8), and from them is descended the (younger) race of giants (see Suppl.)."

The sons of Börr dragged the dead Ymir's body into the middle of ginnûnga-gap, and created out of his blood the sea and water, of his flesh the earth, of his bones the mountains, of his teeth and broken bones the rocks and crags. Then they took his skull and made of it the sky, and the sparks from Muspellsheim that floated about free they fixed in the sky, so as to give light to all. The earth was round, and encircled by deep sea, on

4

1 In the Zend system, the firs man proceeds from the haunch of the primeval bull Kayomer.

2 Ymir, i.e., Örgelmir, begot Thrúðgelmir, and he Bergelmir.

3 The meaning of lûor has not been ascertained; elsewhere it stands for culeus, tuba, here it is supposed to be a mill-chest. The OHG. lûdara f. means a cradle (Graff 2, 201) as well as pannus, involucrum (swaddling-band), and this would fit remarkably well, as some accounts of the Deluge do make the rescued child float in its cradle. True, Snorri speaks not of a child, but of a grown-up giant, who sits in the ludr with his wife; this may be a later version. [Slav. lốt is shallow basket, trough, tray.]

4 Snorri at all events conceived the earth to be round, he says p. 9: hon er kringlôtt utan, ok þar utan um liggr hinn diupi siâr.' So in the Lucidarius: 'dise