TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

THUNAK. 185
something of the devil in her, she was made by him, and her feet
especially smack of their origin, and are not eaten, Tobler 214 a .
Did the German thundergod in particular have he-goats and she-
goats sacrificed to him (supra, p. 52) ? The Old Roman or Etruscan
tridental (from bidens, lamb) signifies the place where lightning had
struck and killed a man : there a lamb had to be sacrificed to
Jupiter, and the man s body was not burned, but buried (Plin. 2,
54). If the Ossetes and Circassians in exactly the same way offer
a goat over the body killed by lightning, and elevate the hide on a
pole (supra, p. 174), it becomes the more likely by a great deal that
the goat-offering of the Langobards was intended for no other than
Donar. For hanging up hides was a Langobardish rite, and was
practised on other occasions also, as will presently be shown. In
Carinthia, cattle struck by lightning are considered sacred to God ;
no one, not even the poorest, dares to eat of them (Sartoris reise 2,
158).
Other names of places compounded with that of the thundergod,
besides the numerous Donnersbergs already cited, are forthcoming
in Germany. Near Oldenburg lies a village named Donnerschwee,
cration, and of the boar Ssehrimnir (Sn. 42) being boiled and eaten every day
and coming whole again every evening, seems to re-appear in more than one
shape. In Wolfs Wodana, p. xxviii, the following passage on witches in
Ferrara is quoted from Barthol. de Spina (f 1546), quaestio de strigibus :
Dicunt etiam, quod postquam comederunt aliquem pinguem bovem vel aliquam
vegetem, vino vel arcam sen cophinum panibus evacuarunt et consumpserunt
ea vorantes, domina ilia percutit aurea virga quam maim gestat ea vasa vel loca,
et statim ut prius plena sunt vini vel panis ac si nihil inde fuisset assumptum.
Similiter congerijubet ossa mortui bovis super cor turn ejus extensum, ipsumque per
quatuor partes super ossa revolvens virgaque percutiens, vivum bovem reddit ut
prius, ac reducendum jubet ad locum suum. The diabolical witches meal
very well matches that of the thundergod. But we are also told in legends,
that the saint, after eating up a cock, reanimated it out of the bones ; and so
early as parson Amis, we find the belief made use of in playing-off a deception
(1. 969 seq.). Folk-tales relate how a magician, after a fish had been eaten, threw
the bones into water, and the fish came alive a^ain. As with these eatable
creatures, so in other tales there occurs the reanimation of persons who have
been cut to pieces : in the marchen vom Machandelbom (juniper-tree) ; in the
myth of Zeus and Tantalus, where the shoulder of Pelops being devoured by
Demeter (Ovid 6, 406) reminds us of the he-goat s leg-bone being split for the
in the myth of Osiris
marrow, and remaining lame after he came to life again ;
and St Adalbert (Temine p. 33) conf. ; DS. no. 62, and Ezekiel 37. Then in
the eighth Finnish rune, Lemminkaimen s mother gathers all the limbs of his
dismembered body, and makes them live again. The fastening of heads that
have been chopped off to their trunks, in Waltharius 1157 (conf. p. 93) seems
to imply a belief in their reanimation, and agrees with a circumstance in
ftorske eventyr pp. 199, 201.