ST. OLAF AND THE GIANT.

27

which should nowhere be found, but he saw that he could not complete the building without greatly burthening his kingdom. In his perplexity, he was met by a man of strange appearance, who asked him why he was so thoughtful. Olaf told him what he was meditating, and the giant, or troll, offered to complete the building singlehanded, by a certain time, stipulating that he should have for payment the sun and moon, or St. Olaf himself. The bargain was struck, but Olaf laid down such a plan for the church, as he thought could not possibly be fulfilled; the church was to be so big that seven priests could preach in it at once, without disturbing each other; the pillars, and the architectural ornaments, without and within, were to be carved out of hard flint, &c. All this was soon done, and nothing remained wanting, but the roof and the spire. Again disturbed in mind at the bargain he had made, Olaf wandered over hill and dale. All at once he heard a child crying within a hill, and a giantess soothing it with these words: "Hush! Hush! To-morrow WIND AND WEATHER, your father, will come home, and bring with him the sun and the moon or St. Olaf himself." Delighted with this discovery (for with the name of the evil spirit one can destroy his power), Olaf turned and went home. The work was finished,

28

RAKSHASAS. OGRES.

even to the point of the spire. Then said Olaf, "Wind and Weather! you have set the spire awry." At the word, down fell the giant with a horrible crash from the roof-ridge of the church, and broke into a great many pieces, and every piece a flint stone.*

In the middle ages, the devil, who is proverbially busy in a gale of wind, was in very extensive practice as an architect, but his buildings were always left unfinished, or were ruined, as those of the Aryan demon were by the thunderbolts of Indra.

To come back to the southern Aryans, their Rakshasas, a very numerous tribe of demons, are also called Atrin, or devourers, and are palpably the earliest originals of the giants and ogres of our nursery tales. They can take any form at will, but their natural one is that of a huge mis-shapen giant, "like a cloud," with hair and beard of the colour of the red lightning. They go about open-mouthed, gnashing their monstrous teeth and snuffing after human flesh. Their strength waxes most terrible in twilight, and they know how to increase its effect by all sorts of magic. They carry off their human prey through the air, tear open the living bodies, and with their faces plunged among the entrails they suck up

* D.M. p. 514.

COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN GODS.

29

the warm blood as it gushes from the heart. After they have gorged themselves they dance merrily. Sometimes it happens that a giantess, smitten with love for the imperilled man, rescues him from the Rakshasa, and changes her shape for his sake into that of a beautiful maiden. Besides the demon giants there are demon dwarfs also, called Panis.

The collective appellation of the Vedic gods is Dêvas, and this name has passed into most of the Indo-European languages; for corresponding to the Sanscrit dêva is the Latin deus, Greek theós, Lithuanian déwas, Lettish dews, Old Prussian deiws, Irish dia, Welch duw, Cornish duy. Among the German

races the word dêva survives

only in the Norse

plural tìvar, gods; and among those of the Slave stock, the Servians alone preserve a trace of it in the word diw, giant. The daêvas of the Medes and Persians were in early times degraded from the rank of gods to that of demons by a religious revolution, just as the heathen gods of the Germans were declared by the Christian missionaries to be devils; and the modern Persian div, and Armenian dev, mean an evil spirit. Dêvá is derived from div, heaven (properly "the shining"), and means the heavenly being.

Hence it appears that certain gods were common

30

COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN GODS.

to all the Indo-Europeans before their dispersion, and the greatest of those "heavenly" beings must have been he who was heaven itself-Div (nom. Dyâus, gen. Divás). He is addressed in the Vedic hymns as Dyaush pitâ, i. e., Heaven Father, and his wife is Mâtâ Prithivi, Mother Earth. He is the Zeus Pater of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans,* the German Tius, Norse Tyr. Dyaush pitâ was the god of the blue firmament, but even in the Vedic times his grandeur was already on the wane. Indra, the new lord of the firmament, had left him little more than a titular sovereignty in his own domain, whilst Varuna, another heavenly monarch, who was still in the plenitude of his power, commanded more respect than the roi fainéant, his neighbour. The all-covering Varuna,* the Uranos of the Greeks, was lord of the celestial sea and of the realm of light above it, that highest heaven in which the Fathers dwelt with their king Yama. After the southern branch of the Aryans had entered India, Varuna was brought down from the upper regions, to be thenceforth the god of the earthly sea, which had

Deús,

=

Dyâus; Jupiter (Diupiter) = Div

* Zeús (gen. Diòs) pater; or Diespiter = Dyaus-pater.

+ Varuna and the demon Vritri both derive their names from var,

vri, to cover, enfold.

THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN.

31

then for the first time become known to his

votaries.

Whilst the sun was still a wheel, a store of gold, swan or a flamingo, an eagle, falcon, horse, and many other things, it was also the eye of Varuna; just as among the Anglo-Saxons and other Germans it was held to be the eye of Woden. Varuna and Mithra (the friend), the god of daylight, used to sit together at morning on a golden throne, and journey at evening in a brazen car. At the same time there was a special god of the sun, Savitar or Surya, who also had his beaming chariot, drawn by two, seven, or ten red or golden coloured mares, called Haritas, a name in which Professor Max Müller has recognised the original of the Greek Charites.* The ideas of the horse-sun and the wheel-sun had naturally coalesced to form the chariot, and then the divine charioteer followed as a matter of course. The utter inconsistency of all these various representations of the same visible object did not give the Vedic hymnists the least concern. They took their materials as they found them in the floating speech and unmethodised conceptions of their people, and used them with the freedom of an imagination which had never been taught to run in critical

*"Oxford Essays," 1856, p. 81.