Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/123

CHAP, note of almost all ; and this keynote runs practically through the great body of tales gathered from Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, and Scotland. It is found again everywhere in the mythology of the Greeks, whether in the legends which have furnished the materials for their magnificent epics, or have been immortalised in the dramas of their great tragedians, or have remained buried in the pages of mythographers like Pausanias or Diodoros. If then all these tales have some historical foundation, they must relate to events which took i^lace before the dispersion of the Aryan tribes from their original home. If the war at Troy took place at all, as the Homeric poets have narrated it, it is, to say the least, strange that precisely the same struggle, for precisely the same reasons, and with the same results, should have been waged in Norway and Germany, in Wales and Persia. Unless we are to adopt the hypothesis of conscious borrowing in its most exaggerated form, the dream of a historical Ilion and a historical Carduel must fade away before the astonishing multitude of legends which comparative mythologists have traced to phrases descriptive of physical phenomena. At the least it must be admitted that the evidence seems to point in this direction. To take these stories after any system, and arrange their materials methodically, is almost an impossible task. The expressions or incidents worked into these legends are like the few notes of the scale from which great musicians have created each his own world, or like the few roots of language which denoted at first only the most prominent objects and processes of nature and the merest bodily wants, but out of which has grown the wealth of words which feed the countless streams of human thought. In one story we may find a series of incidents briefly touched, which elsewhere have been expanded into a hundred tales, while the incidents themselves are presented in the countless combi- nations suggested by an exuberant fancy. The outlines of the tales, when these have been carefully analysed, are simple enough; but they are certainly not outlines which could have been suggested by incidents in the common life of mankind. Maidens do not fall for months or years into death-like trances, from which the touch of one brave man alone can arouse them. Dragons are not coiled round golden treasures or beautiful women on glistening heaths. Princes do not everywhere abandon their wives as soon as they have married them, to return at length in squalid disguise and smite their foes with invincible weapons. Steeds which speak and which cannot die do not draw the chariots of mortal chiefs, nor do the lives of human kings exhibit everywhere the same incidents in the same sequence. Yet every fresh addition made to our stores of popular tradition does