THE PIPER OF BRANDENBURG. is a note of his music heard than there is throughout the town a sound of pattering feet. All the little boys and girls With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls The wonderful music with shouting and laughter. The musician goes before them to a hill rising above the Weser, and as they follow him into a cavern, the door in the mountain-side shuts fast, and their happy voices are heard no more. According to one version none were saved but a lame boy, who remained sad and cheerless because he could not see the beautiful land to which the piper had said that he was leading them—a land Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew, And flowers put forth a fairer hue, And everything was strange and new, And sparrows were brighter than peacocks here, And their dogs outran our fallow deer, And honey bees had lost their stings, And horses were born with eagles' wings.' The temptation to follow Mr. Gould through his series of tales is almost as powerful as the spell of the piper himself. We may yield to it only so far as we must do so to prove the wide range of these stories in the North, the East, and the West. At Brandenburg the plague from which the piper delivers the people is a host of ants, whom he charms into the water. The promised payment is not made, and when he came again, all the pigs followed him into the lake-a touch borrowed probably from the narrative of the miracle at Gadara. In this myth there is a triple series of incidents. Failing to receive his recompense the second year for sweeping away a cloud of crickets, the piper takes away all their ships. In the third year all the children vanish as from Hameln, the unpaid toil of the piper having been this time expended in driving away a legion of rats. clusively to the god near whom it was placed; accordingly he refers the myth without hesitation to Apollon as the deliverer from those plagues of mice which have been dreaded or hated as a terrible scourge, and which even now draw German peasants in crowds to the churches to fall on their knees and pray These lines are quoted from Mr. 243 CHAP. V. BOOK The Erlking. The Jew among the thorns. The idea of music as charming away souls from earth is common to all these legends, and this notion is brought out more fully not only in Göthe's ballad of the Erlking, who charms the child to death in his father's arms, but also, in Mr. Gould's opinion, in superstitions still prevalent among certain classes of people in this country, who believe that the dying hear the sound of sweet music discoursing to them of the happy land far away.' The idea of the shrubs and trees as moved by the harping of Orpheus has run out into strange forms. In some myths, the musician who compels all to dance at his will is endowed with the thievish ways of Hermes, although these again are attributed to an honest servant who at the end of three years receives three farthings as his recompense. In the German story of the Jew among the Thorns the servant gives these farthings to a dwarf who grants him three wishes in return. The first two wishes are, of course, for a weapon that shall strike down all it aims at, and a fiddle that shall make every one dance, while by the third he obtains the power of forcing every one to comply with any request that he may make. From this point the story turns more on the Homeric than on the Orphic myth. Strangely enough, Phoibos is here metamorphosed into the Jew, who is robbed not of cows but of a bird, and made to dance until his clothes are all torn to shreds. The appeal to a judge and the trial, with the shifty excuses, the dismissal of the plea, and the sentence, follow in their due order. But just as Hermes delivers himself by waking the sweet music of his lyre when Phoibos on discovering the skins of the slaughtered cattle is about to slay him, so the servant at the gallows makes his request to be allowed to play one more tune, when judge, hangman, accuser, and spectators, all join in the magic dance. Another modern turn is given to the legend when the Jew is made to confess that he had stolen the money which he gave the honest servant, and is himself hanged in the servant's stead." 1 Curious Myths, second series, 160. 2 This marvellous piper reappears in Grimm's stories of the Wonderful Musician, of Roland who makes the witch dance against her will to a bewitched tune, and of the Valiant Tailor who thus conquers the Bear as Orpheus masters Kerberos. THE HORN OF OBERON. 245 CHAP. V. ot Arîon. In a less developed form this story is the same as the legend of Arîon, who, though supposed to be a friend of the Corinthian tyrant Periandros, is still represented as a son of The story Poseidon. In this case the musician's harp fails to win his life at the hands of the men who grudge him his wealth, but his wish seems to carry with it a power which they are not able to resist, while his playing brings to the side of the ship a dolphin who bears Arîon on his back to Corinth. In the trial which follows, the tables are turned on the sailors much as they are on the Jew in the German story, and Arîon recovers his harp which was to play an important part in many another Aryan myth. horns. The German form of the myth Mr. Gould has traced into Inchanted Iceland, where Sigurd's harp in the hands of Bosi makes harps and chairs and tables, king and courtiers, leap and reel, until all fall down from sheer weariness and Bosi makes off with his bride who was about to be given to some one else. The horn of Oberon in the romance of Huon of Bordeaux has the same powers, while it further becomes, like the Sangreal, a test of good and evil, for only those of blameless character dance when its strains are heard. Still more marvellous are the properties of the lyre of Glenkundie: He'd harpit a fish out o' saut water, Or water out o' a stane, Or milk out o' a maiden's breast The instrument reappears in the pipe of the Irish Maurice Connor, which could waken the dead as well as stir the living; but Maurice is himself enticed by a mermaid, and vanishes with her beneath the waters. It is seen again. in the magic lyre which the ghost of Zorayhayda gives to the Rose of the Alhambra in the charming legend related by Washington Irving, and which rouses the mad Philip V. from his would-be coffin to a sudden outburst of martial vehemence. In Sclavonic stories the harp exhibits only the lulling qualities of the lyre of Hermes, and in this Mr. Gould perceives the deadening influence of the autumn winds Jamieson's Scottish Ballads, i. 98; Price, Introd. to Warton's Hist. Eng. Poetry, Ixiv. The harp of Wäinä möinen. BOOK II. Galdner the Singer. which chill all vegetation into the sleep of winter, until the sun comes back to rouse it from slumber in the spring. It comes before us again in the story of Jack the Giant-killer, in which the Giant, who in the unchristianised myth was Wuotan himself, possessed an inchanting harp, bags of gold and diamonds, and a hen which daily laid a golden egg. 'The harp,' says Mr. Gould, 'is the wind, the bags are the clouds dropping the sparkling rain, and the golden egg, laid every morning by the red hen, is the dawn-produced Sun." This magic lyre is further found where perhaps we should little look for it, in the grotesque myths of the Quiches of Guatemala. It is seen in its full might in the song of the Finnish Wäinämöinen, and in the wonderful effects produced by the chanting of the sons of Kalew on the woods, which burst instantly into flowers and fruit, before the song is ended. The close parallelism between the myth of Wäinämöinen and the legends of Hermes and Orpheus cannot be better given than in the words of Mr. Gould. 'Wäinämöinen went to a waterfall and killed a pike which swam below it. Of the bones of this fish he constructed a harp, just as Hermes made his lyre of the tortoiseshell. But he dropped this instrument into the sea, and thus it fell into the power of the sea-gods, which accounts for the music of the ocean on the beach. The hero then made another from the forest wood, and with it descended to Pohjola, the realm of darkness, in quest of the mystic Sampo, just as in the classic myth Orpheus went down to Hades to bring thence Eurydice. When in the realm of gloom perpetual, the Finn demigod struck his kantele and sent all the inhabitants of Pohjola to sleep, as Hermes when about to steal Iô made the eyes of Argus close at the sound of his lyre. Then he ran off with the Sampo, and had nearly got it to the land of light when the dwellers in Pohjola awoke, and pursued and fought him for the ravished treasure which, in the struggle, fell into the sea and was lost; again reminding us of the classic tale of Orpheus.' 92 Wuotan again in the Teutonic mythology is Galdner the 1 Curious Myths, ii. 160. 2 b. ii. 177. THE EASTERN AND WESTERN SIBYLS. 247 V. singer and in the Gudrunlied the time which it would CHAP. take one to ride a thousand miles passed in a moment while any one listened to the singing of Hjarrandi. The christianised form of this myth, as the Legend of the Monk and the Bird, is well known to the readers of Longfellow and Archbishop Trench, and is noteworthy chiefly as inverting the parts, and making the bird charm the wearied and doubting man. Still more remarkable is the connexion of this mystic The Sibyl. harp in the legend of Gunâdhya with a myth which reproduces that of the Sibylline books offered in diminished quantities, but always at the same price, to the Roman king Tarquin. In the Eastern tale the part of Tarquin is played by King Sâtavâhana to whom Gunâdhya sends a poem of seven hundred thousand slokas written in his own blood. This poem the king rejects as being written in the Pisâcha dialect. Gunâdhya then burns a portion of the poem on the top of a mountain, but while it is being consumed, his song brings together all the beasts of the forest who weep for joy at the beauty of his tale. The king falls ill, and is told that he must eat game: but none is to be had, for all the beasts are listening to Gunâdhya. On hearing this news, the king hastens to the spot and buys the poem, or rather the seventh portion which now alone remained of the whole.1 It is scarcely necessary to add that in this tale, as in that of Wäinämöinen, we have two stories which must be traced to a common source with the myths of Hermes, Orpheus, and the Sibyl,-in other words, to a story, the framework of which had been put together before the separation of the Aryan tribes.2 SECTION IV.-PAN. the The lyre of Orpheus and the harp of Hermes are but The song other forms of the reed pipe of Pan. Of the real meaning of the in of this name the Western poets were utterly unconscious. the reeds. In the Homeric Hymn he is said to be so called because all the gods were cheered by his music.3 Still through all the Katha Sant Sagara, i. 8; Gould, Curious Myths, ii. 172. 2 See vol. i. p. 121, et seq. Hymn to Pan, 47. |