TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

380 HEHOES.
on them. Swedish folk-song has not yet forgotten Mimes a
socken in
(Arvidsson 2, 316-7), and in Konga harad and Tingas
Smaland there lies a Mimes sjo, inhabited according to the legend
by neckar (nixies), ibid. p. 319. Perhaps some of the forms quoted
have by rights a short i, as have indisputably the AS. mimor,
meomor, gemimor (memoriter notus), mimerian (memoria tenere),
our Low German mimeren (day-dreaming), Brem. wtb. 3, 161, and
the Memerolt, Memleben above ; so that we might assume a verb
meima, maim, minium. Then the analogy of the Latin memor and
Or. fjbifjieofjLai allows us to bring in the giant and centaur Mi^as,
i.e., the wood-sprite again (see Suppl.).
According to the Edda (Sxm. 133), Volundr had two brothers
SlagfiSr and Egill, all three synir Finnakonungs/ sons of a Finnish
king, whereas the saga transplanted to the North from Germany
makes its Vilkinus a king of Vilkinaland. Or can Finna be taken
as the gen. of Finni, and identified with that Finn Folcwaldansunu
on p. 219 ? SlagfiSr might seem = Slagfinnr,
but is better
explained as Slagfio Sr (flap- wing, see ch. XVI, Walachuriun). All
three brothers married valkyrs, and Egill, the one that chiefly
concerns us here, took Olrun (Alioruna). The Vilk. saga, cap. 27,
likewise calls Velint s younger brother Eigill : ok ]?enna kalla
menn OlrAnar Eigil, 1 but the bride is not otherwise alluded to ;
this form Eigill agrees with the OHG, Eigil on p. 376, not with the
ON". Egill, dat. Agli, for the dat. of Eigill would have been Eigli.
Well, this Eigill was a famous archer ; at Nidung a command he
shot an apple off the head of his own little son, and when the king
asked him what the other two arrows were for, replied that they
were intended for him, in case the first had hit the child. The tale
of this daring shot must have been extremely rife in our remotest
with features
antiquity, it turns up in so many places, and always
of its own. As the Vilkinasaga was imported into Scandinavia in
the 13th century, the story of Eigill was certainly diffused in
Lower Germany before that date. But Saxo Grammaticus in
Denmark knew it in the 12th century, as told of Toko and king
llarald Gorrnsson, with the addition, wanting in Eigill, that Toko
1
Peringskiold translates *
Egillus Sagittarius, and Eafn Egil den traffende,
but this was merely guessed from the incidents of .the story. Arrow is
not 61, but or ; Orentil on the contrary, Eigil s son, does seem to have been
named from the arrow.