throwing hag. The Balder story, regarding which much has been written, is not, therefore, the only one that underwent radical changes in the process of Mythologymaking. According to Professor Frazer in the Golden Bough, Balder was originally a tree-god whose soul was in the mistletoe. The theory is as weighty as is the reputation of that Darwin of folklore.

But perhaps the most interesting class of elves are the sons of Ivalde-Volund and his brothers. They display the attributes now of dwarfs, now of giants, and anon of star deities. It would appear that they absorbed more than one ancient personality in an older Mythology than that in which the Odin cult predominates. Rydberg shows that Volund (Wieland) and the giant Thjasse are indistinguishable. A close study of northern folklore supports that view, and an intimate acquaintance with the mental habits of fairy-and-giant-believing people assists one to appreciate it fully. Thjasse is the only giant who is winged like Volund, as Loke and Freyja are the only members of the Asa-clan who can assume bird guise. Thjasse and Volund are also symbolized as mountain wolves; they are both star deities; they are more like one another than the two Balders, and appear to be products of the same ancient welded lore of an earlier mythological system.

In the Northern "Story of Creation" these elves, or black dwarfs, are, it is evident, intentionally belittled. They have their origin, like maggots, in Ymer's flesh. Yet they provide the gods with indispensable giftsOdin with his spear, Thor with his hammer, and Frey with his boar and wondrous ship. In Thjasse's flight to Asgard we may have a story invented purposely to account for his fall, because, like Odin, he is a spirit-god. His other names, Byrr and Gustr, signify wind and gale.

It is not possible now to reconstruct what appears to be a pre-Odin-cult Mythology, in which Ivalde and his sons predominate. The "Milky Way" is "Irmin's Way", and Irmin, invoked by old Hildebrand in the Dietrich story, is "the ruling god". It is also Bil's way (Bil is Ivalde's daughter), and as "Bil-rost", according to Rydberg, is the original of Bif-rost. The AngloSaxons called the "Milky Way" "Watling Street ".1

Volund's brother Egil, the archer, is associated with the clouds and the sea. Sleet and rain are his arrows; his arrows are also "herrings that leap from the hands of Egil", and herrings are arrows of the sea".2 Egil's son, the Iceland Hamlet, is the guardian of the World-Mill; his son Svipdag, with shining sword, resembles a light-hero.

In the older moon-myth Gevar, the Gewar of the Hother-Balder story, is the ward of the moon-ship, and it is attacked and burned by Ivalde. The myth is obscure but suggestive; it survives in fragments only. The swan-maids are wooed by Ivalde's three sons, and Ivalde and Gevar have quarrelled violently as rival lovers.

This group are hunters, skee-runners, and musicians. They are also connected with an early form of the Balder story. Svipdag, as Hotherus, is the wooer of Gevar's daughter Nanna, and Balder, his rival, falls a victim to his "magic sword" in the heroic story in Saxo. If Balder, as a tree-god, was associated with the tree-well, he may have wooed Nanna of the moon by reflecting her image. In this connection it may be noted. that wells sprang up in the hoof marks of Balder's horse,

1In Ireland the "Milky Way" is "Lugh's chain". Lugh is the dawn-god, and grandson of the night-god.

2 Saga Library, Morris and Magnusson, Vol. I, 339

and in Saxo's story he provides wells for his thirsting soldiers. His rival would thus be the light-hero Svipdag, with his shining summer sword, which was concealed for a season in the Underworld cave where lie the Seasonal "Seven Sleepers". In Northern Teutonic Mythology the popular Balder becomes the Summer Sun-god instead of Svipdag, and the only husband of Nanna. If the original story was thus transformed by displacing or changing a hero, the process is a familiar one. The shadowy Hoder may be the original rival lover altered to fit into the new mythological system.

It is to this group of ancient tales of rival lovers and swan-maids and moon-maids that we owe the treasures of Middle Age popular romance. The Volsunga-saga and the Nibelungenlied and the Balder heroic story were developed from what Rydberg calls the "Ivalde myth". Svipdag, too, is the original of Siegfried and Sigurd. In his character as a wronged son he suggests Hamlet and Finn-mac-Coul. The latter has a hammer (Ord na Feinne) which links him with Thor, as Thor links with the other giant-killers-Sigurd, Siegfried, and Dietrich. A tribal hero invariably absorbs the attributes of his predecessors, and develops and changes to suit the tastes of audiences and minstrels in various ages and in various countries. In Scandinavia, when the Asa-gods were threatened by the advance of Christianity, Svipdag, as Eric, was exalted as a rival to Christ, and suffered the fate of being associated with the Devil, who was afterwards called "old Erik". Odin was similarly treated; as Nik he became "the old Nick" of Perdition. Finn-mac-Coul was also pictured by early Christian missionaries as an inhabitant of "the lower regions".

The Beowulf story is an interesting link between the

heroic lore of the northern Continental peoples and that of the early Britons. Beowulf, like Dietrich, may have been a historical personage, but in the poem he is a hero of the Svipdag order, yet not necessarily a "light-hero”. He slays the warrior-devouring Grendel. Dietrich, in one of the poems of his cycle, also rids the neighbourhood of Attila's court of a man-eating monster. In the next part of Beowulf, which is evidently an addition, whether by the same author or another it matters not here, the hero slays Grendel's mother. Although the poet suggests that she is less formidable than her son, she proves to be a more ferocious opponent. Only by the familiar "magic sword" can she be slain. In this respect she resembles Hilde, the wife of Grim, in the Dietrich story; but she bears a closer resemblance to the British Hag, the mother of the giants. Finn-macCoul, when in "The Kingdom of Big Men," had similarly, after slaying sea-giants, to contend against the terrible Sea-Hag-mother. There are several similar stories in Highland giant-lore, and no doubt they were prevalent at one time throughout Britain, especially among members or descendants of the Matriarchal tribes referred to by Cæsar.

Stopford Brooke, in his History of Early English Literature, "wonders if the Grendel tale may not be a Celtic story which in very ancient times became Teutonic," and quotes the close Icelandic parallel, the Glam story. "It is a curious question," he says, "how it came to pass that the story of Beowulf and Grendel did not, like the other Sagas of the north, become a part of the north German cycle of romance. . . . I have sometimes thought that the Angles alone threw the myths and tales. of it into lays, and that when the whole body of them emigrated to our island, they left the Continent naked

of the tale.. . . . I conjecture that something broke the literary connection on the Continent, or that the story was developed only when the Angles got into Britain." The latter supposition, considered in the light of existing Scottish giant-lore, which was evidently at one time general in ancient Britain, is the more convincing of the two. The theory of a complete and wholesale Anglian migration is as improbable as the theory of a complete and wholesale extermination of the early Britons, which, although still surviving, has really no reliable basis. Dr. Clark Hall, the scholarly translator and editor of Beowulf, accepts the hero as "a thoroughly historical character". So was Dietrich as the Emperor Theodoric. But while, like Stopford Brooke and other rationalistic critics, he dismisses the solar-myth theory, he errs, we think, in the opposite direction. He says: "Is it not possible that besides performing many heroic deeds in war against ordinary mortals, our hero (Beowulf) had two or three mysterious encounters with wild beasts, which grew into our Grendel and dragon stories by the process of exaggeration. . . . I have myself heard, in the nineteenth century, from the lips of an ancient mariner, a passably truthful and not very imaginative man, an amazing yarn about a sea serpent which I have no doubt had some foundation in fact."1

To the audiences who heard the Beowulf poem sung, Grendel was as real as the hero; and no doubt there were, in those ancient days, many similar tales which perished because no great poet enshrined them in enduring verse.

It is believed by scholars that Beowulf was composed in the early part of the eighth century. Whether it was the work of one man or of several is a disputed point, 1 Beowulf, Clark Hall, Introduction, lix-lx,