TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

384 HEROES.
religions the full-blooded animalism of heroliood developed itself
the more richly for that very reason. While the Indian heroes are
in the end reabsorbed into the god, e.g., Krishna becomes Vishnu,
there remains in Greek and German heroes an irreducible dross of
humanism, which brings them more into harmony with the
historical ingredients of their story. Our hero-legend has this long
while had no consciousness remaining of such a thing as incarna
tion, but has very largely that of an apotheosis of human though
god-descended virtue.
Herakles can never become one with Zeus, yet his deeds remind
us of those of his divine sire. Some traits in Theseus allow of his
being compared to Herakles, others to Apollo. Hermes was the
son of Zeus by Maia, Amphion by Antiope, and the two brothers,,
the full and the half-bred, have something in common.
In Teutonic hero-legend, I think, echoes of the divine nature
can be distinguished still more frequently ; the Greek gods stood
unshaken to the last, and heroes could be developed by the side of
them. But when once the Teutonic deities encountered Christianity,
there remained only one of two ways open to the fading figures
of the heathen faith, either to pass into evil diabolic beings, or
dwindle into good ones conceived as human. The Greek heroes
all belong to the flowering time of paganism; of the Teutonic a
part at least might well seem a poverty-stricken
attenuation and
fainter reproduction of the former gods, such as could still dare to
shew its face after the downfall of the heathen system. Christian
opinion in the Mid. Ages guided matters into this channel ;
unable
to credit the gods any longer with godhood, where it did not
transform them into devils, it did into demigods. In the Edda the
aesir are still veritable gods ; Jornandes too, when he says, cap. 6 :
mortuum (Taunasem regem) Gothi inter numina populi sui
coluerunt be this Taunasis Gothic or Getic assumes that there
were Gothic gods, but the anses he regards as only victorious
heroes exalted into demigods ; and in Saxo, following the same line
of thought, we find that Balder (who exhibits some Heraklean
features, v. supra p. 22G-7), and Hother, and Othin himself, have
sunk into mere heroes. 1 This capitis deminutio of the gods brought
1 In the AS. Ethel wcrd p. 833 we read : Hengest et Horsa, hi nepotes
fuere Woddan regis barbarorum, quern post infanda dignitate ut deum honorantes,
sacrificium obtulerunt pagani victoriae causa sive virtutis, ut humanitas sarpc
credit hoc quod videt . Win. of Malmesbury s similar words were quoted