Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

680 TEEES AND ANIMALS.
have to weigh your words and questions, so as not to get en
snared (Arndt s Sweden 3, 18). To kill him without cause is
dangerous, his followers might avenge it. He has power to teaze
men, to delude them, what Swedish superstition
calls dam, and
Danish gante. A MHG. poem (Fragm. 38 b
) has : peterlin und
louch hat begucket mit der gouch. Often his is appearing of evil
omen. Paulus Diac. 6, 55 says of Hildeprand king of the Lom
bards : cui dum contum, sicut moris est, traderent, in ejus conti
summitate cuculus avis volitando veniens insedit. Tune aliquibus
prudentibus hoc portento visum est significari, ejus principatum
inutilern fore (see Suppl.) .
As that all-nourishing life-divinity of the Slavs took the shape
of the cuckoo, so does the Grecian Zeus transform himself into
the bird, when he first approaches Hera. A seated figure of the
goddess shews a cuckoo on her staff, and a bas-relief representing
the wedding procession of Zeus and Hera has a cuckoo perched on
1
Zeus s sceptre (as on that of the Lombard king) so that this
j
bird has got mixed up with the most sacred of all weddings,
and we understand why he promises marriage and the fruit of
wedlock. Then, the mountain on which Zeus and Hera came
together, previously called Opovaj; (from Opovos,
seat of the
Thunderer? supra p. 183) or opva%, received after that the
name of 0/005 KOKKVJIOV (Pausanias ii. 36, 2). Well, and we have
gowkVhills in Germany :
a Gauchsberg near Kreuznach (Widder s
Pfalz 4, 36), others near Durlach and Weinsberg (Mone s Anz. 6,
350), a Guggisberg in Switzerland (Joh. Miiller, 1, 347. 2, 82.
Tschachtlan p. 2), Goclterliberg (KM. no. 95); the name might
be accounted for very naturally by the song of the bird being
heard from the hill, but that other traditions also are mixed up
with it. In Freidank 82, 8 (and almost the same in Bonerius 65,
55):
wisiu wort unt tumbiu were
diu habent die von Gouchesberc.
Here the men of Gauchsberg are shown up as talking wisely and
acting foolishly ; Gauchsberg is equivalent to Narrenberg (fool s
1 Welcker on Schwenk 269. 270; usually an eagle sits there. The figures of
eagle and cuckoo are not always easy to distinguish ; but to this day the Bavarians
by way of jest call the Prussian eagle gukezer, Schm. 2, 27.