TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

256
GODDESSES.
in the black lake, 1 must have arisen, gross as the perversion may
be, out of the account in Tacitus, who makes the goddess, when
satiated with the converse of men, disappear
in the lake with her
attendants. But there are no other local features to turn the scale
2
in its favour and the Danish islands in the Baltic have at least
;
as good a claim to have been erewhile the sacred seat of the
goddess.
We have yet more names for the earth-goddess, that demand
from the
investigation : partly Old Norse, partly to be gathered
Romans. In the Skaldskaparmal, p. 178, she is named both
Fidrgyn and Hloftyn.
Of Fidrgyn I have treated already, p. 172 ; if by the side
of this goddess there could stand a god Fiorgynn and a neuter
common noun fairguni, if the idea of Thor s mother at the same
time passes into that of the thundergod, it exactly parallels and
confirms a female Nertlms (Goth. Nafrjms, gen. Nair]?aus) by the
side of the masculine Nior&r (Nerthus), just as Freyja goes with
Freyr. If it was not wrong to infer from Perkunas a mountain-
god Fairguneis, Lithuanian mythology has equally a goddess
Perkunatele.
Hloftyn is derived in the same way as Fiorgyn, so that we may
safely infer a Goth. Hlofrunja and OHG. Hluodunia. In Yoluspa
56 Thorr is called mogr HldSynjarj which is son of earth again ;
and Fornald. sog. 1, 469 says : i Hlddynjar skaut. In the OK
language hldff is a hearth, 3 the goddess s name therefore means
protectress of the fireplace; and our OHG. herd (p. 251), beside solum
or terra, also denotes precisely focus, arula, fornacula, the hearth
being to us the very basis of a human habitation, a paternal Lar, so
to speak, corresponding to the mother earth. The Eomans also
worshipped a goddess of earth and of fire under the common name
of Fornax, dea fornacalis* But what is still more important to us,
there was discovered on Low Rhenish ground a stone, first kept at
Cleve and afterwards at Xanten, with the remarkable inscription :
1 Deutsclie sagen, num. 132.
2 Of Hertha a proverb is said to be current in Pomerania : cle Hertha gift
grns, und fiillt schiin und fass (barn and vessel), Hall. allg. lit. z. 1823, p. 375).
But the un-Saxon rhyme of gras with fass (for fat) sufficiently betrays the
workmanship. It is clumsily made up after the well-known rule of the farmer :
Mai kiihl und nass fiillt scheunen und fass (see Suppl.).
s Liter, strues, n.ra, from hlaSan lilOS, struere, Gramm. 2, 10, num. 83.
* Ovid. fast. 2, 513.