Untitled - Centrostudirpinia.it

798 TIME AND WORLD.
tails est, ut superior pars coelos petatj inferior terrae inhaereat,
fixa infernorum ima contingat, latitude autem ejus paries mundi
appetat/ I can never believe that the myth of Yggdrasil
in its
complete and richer form sprang out of this Christian conception
of the Cross ; it were a far likelier theory, that floating heathen
traditions of the world-tree, soon after the conversion in Germany,
France or England, attached themselves to an object of Christian
were converted
faith, just as heathen temples and holy places
into Christian ones. The theory would break down, if the same
exposition of the several pieces
of the cross could be found in
any early Father, African or Oriental; but this I doubt. As for
the birds with which the 13th cent, poem provides the tree, and
which correspond to the Norse eagle and squirrel, I will lay no
stress on them. But one thing is rather surprising : it is pre
cisely to the ash that Virgil ascribes as high
air as its depth of root in the ground, Georg. 2, 291 :
an elevation in the
Aesculus in primis, quae quantum vortice ad auras
aetherias, tantum radice in tartara tendit ;
upon which Pliny 16, 31 (56) remarks: si Yirgilio credimus,
esculus quantum corpore eminet tantum radice descendit/ 1 So
that the Norse fable is deeply grounded in nature ; conf. what
was said, p. C96, of the bees on this ash-tree,
Another and still more singular coincidence carries us to
Oriental traditions. In the Arabian Calila and Dimna the
human race is compared to a man who, chased by an elephant,
takes refuge in a deep well : with his hand he holds on to the
branch of a shrub over his head, and his feet he plants on a
narrow piece of turf below. In this uneasy posture he sees two
mice, a black and a white one, gnawing the root of the shrub ;
far beneath his feet a horrible dragon with its jaws wide open ;
the elephant still waiting on the brink above, and four worms
heads projecting irom the side of the well, undermining the turf
he stands on; at the same time there trickles liquid honey from a
branch of the bush, and this he eagerly catches in his mouth. 3
1
Perhaps Hrabanus Maurus s Carmen in laudem sanctae crucis, which I have
not at hand now, contains the same kind of thing.
2
Calila et Dimna, ed. Silvestre de Sacy. Mem. hist. p. 28-9, ed. Knatchbull,
p. 80-1 ; conf. the somewhat different version in the Exempeln der alten weisen,
p.m. 22.