TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

gods themselves j
HEROES. 341
1 the Judeo-christian angel is a daemon. Eather
may the hero be compared to the Christian saint, who through
spiritual strife and sorrow earns a place in heaven (see SuppL).
This human nature of heroes is implied in nearly all the titles
given to them. For the definite notion of a divine glorified hero,
the Latin language has borrowed heros from the Greek, though its
own vir (=Goth. vair ON. ver, 2 AS. OHG. wer, Lett, wihrs, Lith.
wyras) in the sense of vir fortis (Tac. Germ. 3) so nearly comes up
to the Sanskr. vim heros. Heros, r/pa>?, which originally means a
mere fighter, has been identified with rather too many things: hems,
Hpij,
(
HpaK\r)s, even "ApTjs and aperr) = virtus, so that the Goth,
aims, ON. ar, a~ri=nuntius, minister, might come in too, or the
supposed digamma make a connexion with the aforesaid vira look
plausible. More undeniably, our held is a prolongation 3 of the
simple ON. hair, AS. hsele vir : the name Halidegastes (like
Leudogastes) is found so early as in Vopiscus ; and a Goth, halips,
OHG. halid, helid may be safely inferred from the proper names
Helidperaht, Helidcrim, Helidgund, Helidniu, Helidberga, 4
though
it is only from the 12th century that our memorials furnish an
actual Jielit pi. helide ; the MHG. helet, helt, pi. helde, occurs often
enough. Of the AS. heeled I remark that it makes its pi. both
hseleSas and hseleS (e.g., Beow. 103), the latter archaic like the
Goth. meno]?s, whence we may infer that the Gothic also had a pi.
hali]?s, and OHG. a pi. helid as well as helida, and this is confirmed
by a MHG. pi. held, Wh. 44, 20. In OS. I find only the pi.
helidos, helithos ; in the Heliand, helithcunni, helithocunni mean
simply genus humanum. M.Dut. has helet pi.
helde. The ON.
holdr pi. holdar (Ssem. 114 b 115 a . Sn. 171) implies an older
holuftr (like manuSr = Goth. meno]?s) ;
it appears to mean nothing
but miles, vir, and holdborit (hold-born) in the first passage to be
something lower than hersborit, the holdar being free peasants,
buendr. The Dan. helt, Swed. hjelte (OSwed. halad) show an
anomalous t instead of d, and are perhaps to be traced to the
1 At most, we might feel some doubt about Skirnirt Frey s messenger and
servant but he ; seems more a bright angel than a hero.
2 With this we should have to identify even the veorr used of Thorr (p.
187) in so far as it stood for viorr.
3
Fortbildung : thus staff, stack, stall, stem, stare, &c. may be called
prolongations of the root sta. TRANS.
4 In early docs, the town of Heldburg in Thuringia is already called
Selidiberga, MB. 28 a 33.