TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

3 14 GODDESSES.
HelreiS Brynhildar and the VegtamsqviSa ; in the latter, Gain s
ride on Sleipnir for Baldr s sake seems to prefigure that which
HermoSr afterwards undertakes on the same steed in Sn. 65-7.
But the incidents in the poem are more thrilling, and the dialogue
between Vegtamr 1 and the vala, who says of herself :
var ek snifin sniofi (by snow), ok slegin regni,
ok drifin doggo (by dew), dauS (dead) var ek leingi,
is among the sublimest things the Edda has to shew. This vala
must stand in close relationship to Hel herself.
Saxo Gram. p. 43 very aptly uses for Hel the Latin Proserpina,
he makes her give notice of Balder s death. In the Danish popular
belief Hel is a three-legged horse, that goes round the country,
a harbinger of plague and pestilence ; of this I shall treat further
on. Griginally it was no other than the steed on which the goddess
posted over land, picking up the dead that were her due ;
there is
also a waggon ascribed to her, in which she made her journeys.
A passage in Beowulf shows h)w the Anglo-Saxons retained
perfectly the old meaning of the word. It says of the expiring
Grendel 1098 : feorh filegde, hreftene sawle (vitam deposuit,
animam gentilem), J?aer hine Hel onfeng, the old-heathen goddess
took possession of him.
In Germany too the Mid. Ages still cherished the conception of
a voracious, hungry, insatiable Hell, an Orcus esuriens, i.e., the man-
devouring ogre : diu Helle ferslindet al daz ter lebet,
si ne wirdet
niomer sat! N. Cap. 72. diu Helle und der arge wan werdent
niemer sat, Welsch. gast. It sounds still more personal, when she
lias gaping yawning jaws ascribed to her, like the wolf ; pictures in
the MS. of Csedmon represent her simply by a wide open mouth.
Der tobende wuoterich The raging tyrant
der was der Hellen gelich, he was like the Hell
diu daz abgrunde
who the chasm (steep descent)
begcnit mit ir munde be-yawneth with her mouth
unde den himel zuo der erden. from heaven down 2 to earth,
unde ir doch niht ne mac werden,And yet to her it cannot hap
1 OSinn calls himself Vegtamr (way-tame, broken-in to the road, gnams
viae), son of Valtamr (assuetus caedibus), as in other places gangtamr (itineri
assuetus) is used of the horse, Sasm. 26o b , but OSinn himself is GangraGr or
(langleri. Vegtamr reminds one of the Hunibald.
holy priest and minstrel Wechtam in
2 I have supposed that *
unde den is a slip for abe dem . TRANS.