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SUN. MOON. 703
Like the giant, the god (Wuotan, the sky) has but one eye,
which is awheel and a shield. In Beow. 113.5 bedcen Godes
is the sun, the great celestial sign. 1 With this eye the divinity
surveys the world, and nothing can escape its peering all-piercing
glance 3
;, all the stars look down upon men. 3 But the ON. poets,
not content with treating sun, moon and stara as eyes of heaven,
invert the macrocosm, and call the human eye the sun, mooiv or
star of the skull, forehead, brows -
and eyelashes y they even call
the eye th shield of the forehead : a confirmation of the similar
name for the sun. Another title they bestow on the sun is
gimsteinn himins .(getnma coeli) j so in AS. heofones gim/
Beow.. 4142. and wuldres .gim, Andr. 1289 (see SuppL).
And not only is the sun represented as the god s eye looking
down, but as his full face and countenance; and that is how we
draw his picture still. Otfried says of the sun being darkened
at the Saviour s death, iv. 33, 5 i
In ni liaz si nuzzi thaz. sconaz annuzzi,.
n?i liaz in scinan thuruh thaz ira gisiuni blidaz.
The Edda speaks of the sun and moon as brother and sister,
children of a mythic Mundilfori. Several nations beside the
Lithuanians and Arabs (Gramm. 3, 351) agree with us in ima
gining
the moon -masculine and the sun feminine. The Mexican
Meztli (luna) is a man ; the Greenlanders think of Anningtat, the
moon, as pursuing his sister Ma/llina, the sun. An Ital. story
(Pentam, 5, 5) makes Sole and Luna children of Talia (in
Perrault they are named Jour and . Aurore) The Slavs make the
moon masc., a star fern., the sun neut. ; thus in a Servian, lay
(Vuk 1, 134), God calls the sun .(suntse,, Euss. solntse, -tse dim.
suff.) his child (chedo), the moon (mesets) being its brother, and
the star (zvezda) its sister. To think of the stars as children or
young suns is nothing out of the way. Wolfram says- in Wh, 254,
5 :: jungiu sunneUn mohten wahsen."7
1 The Servians call the deepest part of a lake oko (eye), Yak s Montenegro 62.
2 When the Iliad 14, 344 says :
it resembles the lay of Wolfram 8, 28 :.
ov8 &v vCii SiadpaKCi HeXttSs. 7re/>,
oSre /ecu 6 ^iJTa.TOv TreXerat 0dos, etVo/)aacr$cu,
Obe der sunnen dri mit blicke waeren (if there were 3 suns- looking),
sin mohten zwischen si geliuhten (they could not shine in between).
n/3e <r/3tcrroj frarpuv VVKTOS (50^aX/i6s, Aesch. Sept. c. Th. 390.