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WEAL. S^LDE. 863
the right bank of the Elbe near Itzehoe, the river Stor having
apparently formed the aue, ea ; Welan-owa would then be
uniform with Wunschesouwa and Pholesouwa (p. 600). The
great thing is, first to establish from other sources the personality
of Welo, which the quotations from the Heliand fail to do, for
welanowa taken simply as isle of luck (Atterbom s lycksalighetens
6) is quite compatible with the old ways of thinking
(augia dives) has much the same meaning, and in the vicinity of
Welnau has arisen Gliickstadt. In the AS. welan bewunden }
(Gramm. 4, 752), wela is used, though mythically, yet
: Reichenau
not of a
person but a thing : God himself sits welan bewunden/ Adam
and Eve stand mid welan bewunden/ wrapt in splendour, in
welan bewunden
bliss, Caedm. 42, 2. 27, 19. But the gold
forms a contrast to the (
gold galdre bewunden/ a holy divine
power is imagined confronting that of sorcery; and this wela
does seem to lead up to Wela,, as the kindred notion of wunscli
to Wunscli.
The ON. distinguishes its fern, heill (felicitas) from a neut. heil
(omen), so does the AS. its hselu f. (salus) from hael n. (omen),
and the OHG. its heili f. (salus) from heil n. (omen). Both
meanings are combined in MHG. heil n. Personifications of
this I
scarcely know, unless such be intended by a passage
obscure to me, Ottoc. 683 b
, which gives out as a common pro
verb : chum hail hauenstain ! In MS. 2, 130 b : waz ob iuwer
heil eime andern kumet an sin sell/ what if your hap prove
another s hanging? And so early as 0. ii. 18, 7 : thaz heil ni
gifahit iuwih/ luck comes not your way (see Suppl.).
On the other hand, it is the commonest thing with our 13th
cent, poets to treat scelde (fortuna) as a female person, and that
apparently not in imitation of the Romance writings
OHG. sdlida occurs with the like import, and the compound
hmlsdlida (supra p. 857) was a stronger expression of the same
: even the
thing. 0. i. 26, 4 speaking of the baptism of Christ in the
water, uses a remarkable phrase, to which no church writer could
have prompted him : sid wacheta alien mannon thiu Sdlida in
then undon. Waking presupposes life. The personification
comes out still more clearly in poets four centuries after him :
unser Scelde wachet, Parz. 550, 10.
f min sorge slafet,
so din
Scelde wachel, Tit. 31, 3. z aller zit des 8. wachetj MS. 1, 16 b .