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MAN IN THE MOON. 719
him as a lazy old man, who walks a bit and stands a bit, and
is drunk as well ; not a word about desecration of the sabbath.
Shakspeare alludes more than once to the man in the moon ;
Tempest ii. 2 : I was the man i th moon, when time was , . .
( I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee : my
mistress shewed
me thee and thy dog and thy bush Mids. K Dr. iii. 1 : One
must conie in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say he
comes to present the person of Moonshine/ In Gryphius too
the player who acts the moon ties a bush round his body (conf.
Ir. elfenm. no. 20).
Two more, and those conflicting, interpretations of the moon s
are likewise drawn from the Bible. Either it is Isaac bear
spots
ing a burthen of wood for the sacrifice of himself on Mount Moriah
(Praetor. Weltbeschr. 1, 447) ; or it is Cain carrying a bundle of
thorns on his shoulders, and offering to the Lord the cheapest gift
from his field. 1
This we find as far back as Dante, Parad. 2, 50.
che sono i segni bid
di questo corpo, che laggiuso in terra
fan di Gain favoleggiare altrui ?
And Inferno 20, 12"6 : Caino e le spine. On this passage Landino
remarks : cioe la luna, nella quale i volgare vedendo una certa
ombra, credono che sia Caino,
habbia in spalla una forcata di
}
c
And another commentator : accommodandosi alia favola
pruni?
del volgo, che sieno quelle macchie Caino, che inahi una forcata
di spine.
Nearly all these explanations agree in one thing : they suppose
the spots to be a human figure carrying something on its shoulder,
whether a hare, a pole and bucket, an axe and thorns, or the load
of thorns alone. 3 A wood-stealer or fratricide accounts for the
spots of the moon, as a chaff- stealer (p. 357) does for the streaks
in the milky way.
There must have been yet more traditions. A Netberl. poet
of the 14th century speaks of the dark stripes that stand
1 The story of the first fratricide seems to have made a peculiarly deep im
pression on the new converts from heathenism ; they fancy him. a wicked giant,
conf. Beow. 213 seq., and supra p. 525.
2
Water, an essential part of the Norse myth, is wanting in the story of the
man with the thornbush, but it re-appears in the Carniolan story (for krameiisch
read krainerisch) cited in Brentano s Libussa p. 421 : the man in the moon is called
Kotar, he makes her grow by pouring water.