Asbrû, or Bifröst, was the bridge whereby the Northern gods descended to the world. One end of it reached to the famous Urdar fount, where sat the weird sisters threethe Nornir, or fates. Near the fountain which is under the ash stands a very fair house, out of which come three maidens named Urör, Verðandi, and Skuld (Past, Present, Future). These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and are called Norns. To their stream the gods ride every day along Bifröst to take council.'1 It was right that these awful embodiments of time and fate-Past, Present, Future should have their dwelling at the end of the Bridge of Death.

Odhinn is the natural conductor of the dead to the other world, for he is the god of the wind, and therefore corresponds, in a certain degree, to the two Indian dogs, the Sârameyas. 'Odhinn and Freyja' (Air and Earth) 'divide the slain,' says one legend-meaning that the bodies go to earth, the breaths or souls to heaven. In the Middle Ages, when Odhinn worship had been overthrown, and the gods of Asgard descended to Hel-home-that is to say, when from being divinities they became fiends-Odhinn still pursued his office as conductor or leader of souls. But now he hounded them to the under world. Odhinn the god was changed into the demon Odhinn, and one of the commonest appearances of this fiend was as the Wild Huntsman. To this day the Wild Huntsman Hackelberg is well known in Germany. The peasants hear his awful chase going on above their heads. He is accompanied by two dogs, and he hunts, 'tis said, along the Milky Way.3

A gentler legend concerning the Milky Way is that which we find preserved in a charming poem of the Swede Torpelius, called the Winter Street'-another of the

1 Edda Snorra, D. 15.

This name, Hackelberg, shows the Huntsman to be really Odhinn. The name is transformed from Hackel-bärend, which means 'cloak-bearing.' Now the cloak of Odhinn is one of his peculiar possessions.

Of this Wild Huntsman I shall speak more fully in future chapters (Chaps. VII. X.)

names for this heavenly road. And with this in the form in which it has been rendered into English we may close

1

our list of legends connected with the River of Death and Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers :

Her name Salami was, his Zulamyth;

And both so loved, each other loved. Thus runs the tender myth:

That once on earth they lived, and, loving there,

Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow, and despair;
And when death came at last, with white wings given,
Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven.

Yet loving still upon the azure height,

Across unmeasured ways of splendour, gleaming bright
With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned,
Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned.

Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed

Out of his strength, one night, a bridge of light to build
Across the waste--and lo! from her far sun,

A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun.

A thousand years they built, still on, with faith,

Immeasurable, quenchless-thus the legend saith—

Until the winter street of light-a bridge

Above heaven's highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from ridge.

Fear seized the Cherubim; to God they spake

'See what amongst Thy works, Almighty, these can make!'

God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy

'What in My world love builds,' He said, 'shall I-shall Lovedestroy?'

The bridge stood finished, and the lovers flew

Into each other's arms: when lo! shot up and grew,

Brightest in heavens serene, a star that shone

As the heart shines serene after a thousand troubles gone.

1

By E. Keary, Exening Hours, vol. iii. The name of the bridge, the Winter Street, has a genuine Teutonic character. The story, however, cannot be purely Teutonic; not at least in the form in which Torpelius tells it. The names of the lovers are Hebrew.

THE SEA OF DEATH.

295

§ 2. The Sea of Death.

Of all the European races the Greeks were the first who took in a friendly fashion to the sea; a fact pretty evident from what we can trace of the routes taken by their brother nations, and indeed indicated by the peculiarity of the Greek names for the sea, names not, like mare and Meer, connected with death, but áλaooa, salt water, or πÓντоs, a path.' The advantages of situation which Greece enjoyed are to be credited with this circumstance. As Curtius points out so well, where Europe and Asia meet in the Ægæan, Nature has made no separation between the two worlds. 'Sea and air unite the coasts of the Archipelago into a connected whole; the same periodical winds blow from the Hellespont as far as Crete, and regulate navigation by the same conditions, and the climate by the same changes. Scarcely one point is to be found between Asia and Europe where in clear weather the mariner would feel himself left in solitude between sky and water; the eye reaches from island to island, and easy voyages of a day lead from bay to bay.' It was in this nearness of shore to shore, from the invitation of the islands spread out like steppingstones across the calm Egæan, that the Greek people, when their wanderings brought them to the limits of Asia Minor, did not hesitate long before they crossed over to European Greece and joined the two shores under the dominion of one race.

Very early in prehistoric days, long before the age of Homer, they had become familiar with their own Greek sea, with all its islands and all its harbours; but it was long after this that their mariners had rounded Cape Matapan; longer still before the first Greek had sailed as far as Sicily. Some tidings of the distant lands of the Mediterranean were brought by Phoenician navigators, and afterwards by their own more adventurous sailors;

Connected with the Skr. panthas, patha and our path.

and with this slender stock of real knowledge, imagination was busy in mingling the stories of a mythic world. Whatsoever had in former times been dreamt of concerning the Caspian Sea, was now transferred to the Mediterranean. And in this way among the most poetic and imaginative of all the Aryan peoples was formed the great epic of the Sea of Death. This is the Odyssey.'

The Odyssey is generally admitted to be of a more recent date than the Iliad. The morality of it is observably higher in character; the gods have grown better, more worthy of reverence. The conception of Zeus, for example, is far nobler in the Odyssey; here he appears constantly as the protector of the poor, and of wanderers and strangers. All these are notable points of difference between the two epics. But the essential distinction between the two lies in the difference of the subjects with which they deal, the diversity of interests which they represent. The Iliad is a tale of land battle, and the theatre of its action is limited to the known world of the Greek, the two shores of the Egæan; the Odyssey

1 The expedition of the Argonauts was always held in Greek tradition to have preceded the expedition of Odysseus. It belongs to the 'antiquity' of Homer. No circumstantial account of it, however, is to be found until a much later date than that of the Odyssey; therefore it is right to consider the latter poem as the first great epic of the Sea of Death. That the voyage of the Argonauts was originally of the same kind as the voyage of Odysseus, and undertaken in the same direction, seems highly probable. In after years the former was transmuted into an expedition to Cholchis and to the river Phasis. But there is no trace of that form of the legend in Homer. All that is there said is that Jason's voyage was made to the house of Eetes (Od. xii. 70). Nowhere is it said that the land lay to the eastward; nothing in the earliest tradition points to that voyage in the Euxine and up the Phasis, which we meet first in Pindar and afterwards in a more elaborate shape in Apollonius Rhodius. The golden fleece might seem (to a lover of dawn myths) to suggest the dawn; but it does not so any more than do the apples of the Hesperides. The myth of these latter is a myth of sunset. Eetes is the brother of Circê, and son of Helios and Persê. He is, like Circê, connected with the setting sun, and so with death. He is a kind of god of death, and for that reason is called 'deathdesigning' (Xoóppwv).— Od. x. 137.

2 Cf. especially Od. vii. 165, 316; ix. 270; xiv. 57, 283-4; xvi. 422.

is a song in praise not of war, but of seafaring adventure, and the hero of it is not a type of the warrior, but of the navigator. For Greece, in prehistoric days, had her gallant band of Columbuses and De Gamas, of Drakes and Hudsons, and it was these discoverers who paved the way for Greek supremacy over seas. Such men had different views of life and a different worship from those of the settled nobility of Greece, the Ionian princes, for instance, for whom the Iliad was composed; and this divergency in views of life and worship appears very strikingly on a comparison of the two great poems.

The original sea god of the Greek race had been Poseidôn; but in the Odyssey Poseidôn is superseded by Athênê,' who, when we put aside Zeus, stands by far the first among the remaining divinities. The Odyssey seems to be written expressly to glorify Athênê, and to display her power; for she is the active divinity throughout. She wields all those forces of nature which in the Iliad are made the peculiar possession of Zeus himself, controlling the storm and sending the lightning. No other deity appears actively upon the scene, saving the rival of Athênê, the older sea god, Poseidôn, and he is defeated in his endeavours to bring destruction on Odysseus. With Athênê the Odyssey glorifies the sailor and a sailor's life. It celebrates all the luxuries which the voyager brings home from foreign lands; and chiefly among them those treasures of art which, first introduced by the Phoenicians, were beginning at the time in which the Odyssey was composed to stir the spirit of young Greece. Of the sailor, as goddess of the sea (Tritogeneia), of the merchantman, to whom she gives prudence and the power to deceive, of

In the Odyssey we see a transfer to Athênê of some of the powers over the sea, which in the Iliad belong exclusively to Poseidôn. In the Odyssey, moreover, we find that Zeus has to a great extent delegated to lesser gods the control over the phenomena of nature which were once specially his, and that the powers of wind and storm are swayed alternately by Poseidon and Athênê. See particularly bk. v.