Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

198 MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK
II
which he is to avenge the death of Patroklos, as Begin the
smith of Hialprek the king of Denmark fashions a new
sword for Sigurd at the intercession of his mother Hjordis.
But in spite of all his power he himself is subject to great
weakness, the result, according to one version, of his mother's
harshness, in another, of the cruelty of Zeus. The former
relates that Here was so horrified by his deformity and limping
gait that she cast him forth from Olympos, and left him
to find a refuge with the Ocean nymphs Thetis and Eurynome.
The other tells how when once he was taking his mother's
part in one of her quarrels with her husband, Zeus, in-
dignant at his interference, seized him by the leg and
hurled him out of heaven. Throughout the livelong day he
continued to fall, and as the sun went down he lay stunned
on the soil of Lemnos, where the Sintians took him up and
tended him in his weakness. 1 The myth also ran that he
had no father, as Athene has no mother, and that he was
the child of Here alone, who in like manner is called the
solitary parent of Typhon. The mystery of his birth per-
plexed Hephaistos : and the stratagem in which he dis-
covered it reappears in the Norse story of the Master Smith,
who, like Hephaistos, possesses a chair from which none can
rise against the owner's will. In the one case it is Here, in
the other it is the devil who is thus entrapped, but in both
the device is successful.
The Olympian dwelling of Hephaistos is a palace gleaming
with the splendour of a thousand stars. At his huge
anvils mighty bellows keep up a stream of air of their own
accord; and giant forms, Brontes, Steropes, Pyrakmon
(the thunders, lightnings and flames) aid him in his labours.
With him dwells his wife, who in the Iliad, as we have seen,
is Charis, in the Odyssey Aphrodite. In its reference to
Hephaistos the lay of Demodokos which relates the faith-
1 The tradition which assigns this in-
cident as the cause of his lameness refers
probably to the weakened powers of lire
when i-it her materials or draught fail it.
The Vedic hymn speaks of Agni as
clothed or hindered by smoke only at
his birth; but with a feeling not less
true to the phenomena of fire, the poets
of the Iliad represent him as always
halting, and so furnishing the gods with
a source of inextinguishable laughter,
as they see him puffing and panting in
his ministrations as the cup-bearer.
The golden supports which hold him up
as he walks are the glittering flames
which curl upward beneath the volumes
of smoke which rise above them.