204b) and 'der liebe froue henje,' our lady's hen (Alb. Schott's Deutsche in Piemont 297), in contrast to herra-chüeli the coccinella (Tobler 265), though the name probably wavers between the two. By the same process which we observed in the names of plants and stars, Mary seems to have stept into the place of Freyja, and Marihöne was formerly Freyjuhona, which we still have word for word in Froue henje, and the like in Frauachüeli. And of Romance tongues, it is only that of France (where the community of views with Germany was strongest) that has a bête à dieu, vache à dieu; Span. and Ital. have nothing like it. At all events our children's song: Marienkäferchen, flieg aus! (fly away) dein häuschen brennt, (burns) dein vätercher sitzt auf der schwelle; (sits on the threshold) must be old, for in England also they sing: 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire, and your children will burn [all but little Bessie that sits in the sun].' With us too the children put the Marienkäfer or sonnenkäfer on their finger, and ask it, like the cuckoo: 'sunnenkieken (sun's chicken), ik frage di, wo lange schal ik leven?' 'Een jaar, twee jaar,' etc., till the chafer flies away, its home being in the sun or in heaven. In Switzerland they hold the goldbeetle on their hand, and say: 'cheferli, cheferli, flüg us! i getter milech ond brocka ond e silberigs löffeli dezue.' Here the chafer, like the snake, is offered 'milk and crumbs and a silver spoon thereto.' In olden times he must have been regarded as the god's messenger and confidant (see Suppl.). Lastly the bee, the one insect that is tamable and will live among men, and whose wise ways are such a lesson to them, may be expected to have old mythic associations. The bee is believed to have survived from the golden age, from the lost paradise (Chap. XXX.); nowhere is her worth and purity more prettily expressed than in the Servian lay of the rich Gavan, where God selects three holy angels to prove mankind, and bids them descend from heaven to earth, as the bee upon the flower,' kako pchela po tsvetu (Vuk 1, 128 ed. 2). The clear sweet honey, VOL. II. S which bees suck out of every blossom, is a chief ingredient of the drink divine (p. 319), it is the deîa ¿dwdń of the gods, Hymn. in Merc. 560; and holy honey the first food that touches the lips of a new-born child, RA. 457. Then, as the gift of poesy is 'closely connected with Oðhræris dreckr, it is bees that bring it to sleeping Pindar : μέλισσαι αὐτῷ καθεύδοντι προσεπέτοντό τε καὶ ἔπλασσον πρὸς τὰ χείλη τοῦ κηροῦ· ἀρχὴ μὲν Πινδάρῳ Tоieîv aoμaтa éyéveтO Tоlαúтn, Pausan. ix. 23, 2. And therefore they are called Musarum volucres (Varro de re rust. 3, 16). A kindermärchen (no. 62) speaks of the queen-bee settling on her favourite's mouth; if she flies to any one in his sleep, he is accounted a child of fortune. It seems natural, in connexion with these bustling winged creatures, to think of the silent race of elves and dwarfs, which like them obeys a queen. It was in the decaying flesh of the first giant that dwarfs bred as maggots; in exactly the same way bees are said to have sprung from the putrefaction of a bullock's body : apes nascuntur ex bubulo corpore putrefacto,' Varro, 2, 5; 'amissas reparari ventribus bubulis recentibus cum fimo obrutis,' Plin. 11, 20 (23); conf. Virg. Georg. 4, 284–558. Ov. Met. 15, 364. To this circumstance some have ascribed the resemblance between apis bee and Apis bull, though the first has a short a, and the last a long. What seems more important for us is the celebrated discovery of a golden bullock's-head amongst many hundred golden bees in the tomb of the Frankish king Childeric at Doornik (repres. in Eccard's Fr. or. 1, 39. 40). Natural history informs us that clouds of bees fall upon the sweet juice of the ash-tree; and from the life-tree Yggdrasil the Edda makes a dew trickle, which is called a 'fall of honey,' and nourishes bees (Sn. 20).2 The Yngl. saga cap. 14 says of Yngvifrey's son, king Fiölnir (Siolm in the O. Swed. chron.), that he fell into a barrel of mead and was drowned; so in Saxo, king Hunding falls into sweet mead, and the Greek myth lets Glaucus drown in a honey-jar, the bright in the sweet. According to a legend of the Swiss Alps, 1 Sederunt in ore infantis tum etiam Platonis, suavitatem illam praedulcis eloquii portendentes. Plin. 11, 17 (18). 2 Ceram ex floribus, melliginem e lacrimis arborum quae glutinum pariunt, salicis, ulmi, arundinis succo. in the golden age when the brooks and lakes were filled with milk, a shepherd was upset in his boat and drowned; his body, long sought for, turned up at last in the foaming cream, when they were churning, and was buried in a cavity which bees had constructed of honeycombs as large as town-gates (Mém. de l'acad. celt. 5, 202). Bees weave a temple of wax and feathers (Schwenk's Gr. myth. p. 129. Herm. Müller's Griechenth. 455), and in our Kinderm. no. 107, p. 130-1 a palace of wax and honey. This reminds us of the beautiful picture in Lohengrin p. 191 of Henry 2.'s tomb in Bamberg cathedral: Sus lit er dâ in siner stift di'er het erbouwen, als diu bin ir wift ûz maneger blüete würket, daz man honc-seim nennet. (he lies in the minster he built, as the bee her web from many a blossom works, that we name honey-juice). In the various languages the working bee is represented as female, OHG. pîa, Lat. apis, Gr. μéλioσa, Lith. bitte, in contrast with the masc. fucus the drone, OHG. treno, Lith. tranas; but then the head of the bees is made a king, our weiser (pointer), MHG. wîsel, OHG. wîso, dux, Pliny's 'rex apium,' Lith. bittinis, M. Lat. chosdrus (Ducange sub v.), yet AS. beomôdor, Boh. matka. The Gr. éoonv is said to have meant originally the king-bee, and to have acquired afterwards the sense of king or priest, as périoσa also signified priestess, especially of Demeter and Artemis. Even gods and goddesses themselves are represented by the sacred animal, Zeus (Aristaeus) as a bee, Vishnu as a blue bee. A Roman Meilona (Arnob. 4, 131), or Mellonia (Aug. de civ. Dei 4, 24), was goddess of bees; the Lith. Austheia was the same, jointly with a bee-god Bybylus. Masculine too was the Lett. Uhsinsh, i.e., the hosed one, in reference to bees' legs being covered with wax ('waxen thighs,' Mids. Dream 3, 1). From all these fancies, mostly foreign, we might fairly make guesses about our own lost antiquities; but we should have to get more exact information as to the legend of the Bee-wolf (pp. 369, 673) and the mythic relationship of the woodpecker (Lith. melleta) to the bee (see Suppl.). CHAPTER XXII. SKY AND STARS. The visible heavens have in many ways left their mark on the heathen faith. Not only do gods, and the spirits who stand next them, have their dwelling in the sky, and get mixt up with the stars, but earthly beings too, after their dissolution, are transported thither, and distinguished heroes and giants shine as constellations. From the sky the gods descend to earth, along the sky they make their journeys, and through the sky they survey unseen the doings of men. And as all plants turn to the light of heaven, as all souls look up to heaven, so do the smoke of sacrifice and the prayers of mankind mount upwards. Heaven covers earth, and our word himmel' comes from the root hima (tego, involvo, vestio, Gramm. 2, 55; conf. Lith. dangus coelum, from dengiu tego; OHG. himilezi laquear). The Goths and Old Norsemen agree in preferring the form himins, himinn, and most other Teutons himil; even Swed. Norw. Dan. have himmel. The Saxon race has moreover two terms peculiar to itself: one is OS. hëbhan, hëvan, AS. hëofon, Engl. heaven, and still in Lower Saxony and Westphalia, heben, heven, häven, häwen. I have endeavoured to make out the area over which this name extends (Gramm. I, xiv.). The Frisians did not use it, for the N. and W. Fris. patois of to-day owns to nothing but 'himmel.'1 Nor does the Netherl. dialect know it; but it is found in Westphalia, in L. Saxony as far as Holstein, and beyond the Elbe in Mecklenburg and Pomerania. The AS. and Engl. are wholly destitute of the word himel; OS., like the present LS. and Westph., employs both terms alike, yet apparently so as to designate by hevan more the visible heaven, and by himil the supersensual. Alb. of Halberstadt (ed. 1545, 145b) uses 1 Himel, Lapekoer fen Gabe scroar, Dimter 1834, p. 101. 103. hemmel, Hansens Geizhalz, Sonderbg. 1833. p. 148. himel, Friesche wetten 348. himul, As. 274. hëben (rhym. nëben) of the place. Reinolt von der Lippe couples the two words: 'himel und heben von vreuden muz irkrachen,' burst with joy. People say: 'de heven steit nümmer to'; 'wenn de heven fallt, ligg wi der all unner;''de sterren an dem häven ; in Westphalia hebenscheer means a sky overcast without rain, and even heben alone can signify cloud.1 In hävenhüne (p. 156), in kukuk vam häven (p. 676), the physical sense preponderates, whereas one would hardly speak otherwise than of 'going to himel,' or himelrik. Yet this distinction seems to be comparatively recent as the AS. hëofon can be used in a purely spiritual sense, so the poet of our Heliand alternates between himilríki 149, 8 and hëbanríki 143, 24, himilfader 145, 12 and hëbancuning 143, 20. And of course himil had originally, and has everywhere in HG., the physical meaning too; hence uphimil in Hel. 88, 15, just like upheofon in Cædm. 270, 24. The root of hëbhan, hëvan, hëofon, is probably a lost Gothic, ‘hiba, haf,' cognate with Lat. capio, so that it is the all-capacious, ON. vidfedmir, wide-fathoming or encompassing sky.2 The other Saxon term may be placed on a level with the Gr. αιθήρ (thin upper air), whilst himil and hëvan answer to οὐρανός ; it is OS. radur, AS. rodor. In Cadmon we find rodor 183, 19. 207, 8. uprodor 179, 10. 182, 15. 205. 2. rodortungol (star), 100, 21. rodorbeorht 239, 10. Its root RAD lies buried as yet in obscurity; it has disappeared from all modern dialects [except as Rother in proper names?]. I am inclined to connect with it the ON. röðull (sol), which has nothing to do with rauðr (ruber). From the AS. poets using indifferently' wuldres gim’ and 'heofones gim' (Beow. 4142. Andr. 1269); heofonbeorht, rodorbeorht, wuldorbeorht; heofontorht, swegltorht, wuldortorht; we might almost infer that wuldor (glory) originally meant coelum, which would throw light on the OHG. name Woldarhilt. And the same with swegel (aether, coelum): conf. swegles begong, 1 Sanskr. nabas, Slav. nébo (coelum), pl. nebesá, Gr. védos, Lat. nubes, nebula; Ir. neamh, Wel. nêv, Armor. nef, Lett. debbes (coelum), debbess (nubes); conf. Lith. dangus above [and sky, welkin, with ON. scy, Germ. wolke, cloud]. 2 Hills of heaven' are high ones, reaching into the clouds, often used as proper names: himinfiöll, Sæm. 148a. Yngl. saga cap. 39; Himinbiörg, Sæm. 41, 92b is an abode of gods; spirits haunt the Himilinberg (mons coelius, Pertz 2, 10); Himilesberg in Hesse (Kuchenbecker's Anal. 11, 137. Arnsb. urk. 118); a Himmelsberg in Vestgötland, and one in Halland (said to be Heimdall's); Himelberc, Frauendienst 199, 10. |