Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 5. The Underworld 113
“brig o’ dread, na brader than a thread” 3 or the rainbow bridge Bifröst. The Land
of Oz has both bright and dark aspects as well as good and evil. In Oz, the good is
exemplified by Glenda the Witch of the North, and evil by the Witches of the East
and West. In the eddaic literature, however, all these are combined in the two-sided
Goddess, Hel, whose face is half beautiful and half in decay. It is not known whether
Baum was drawing directly from Germanic mythology or not, but it can be surmised
that he drew from his imagination and memory of childhood stories which often
are but the surface structure of the collective/ cultural eduacation through oral
tradition.
On the one hand, these descriptions can be merely written off as a storyteller’s
fanciful imagination; on the other, however, the tale weaver may have been recanting
the living oral tradition of his ancestry. With a little investigation into the folk
memories of cultures bordering the Germanic peoples such as the Finns, the Saamí,
the Celts, and the Balts, one finds that the storyteller’s memory might even run a
little deeper than simply Old Norse, perhaps a Northern European–subarctic culture.
For some, comparative mythology is truly a source of contention, and, in many
cases, contention may be justified. Comparing North American mythology with
Germanic (as is often done among New Age folk) is truly mixing apples and oranges
except at a very broad and general level, but comparisons should not be completely
disregarded. While it is true that linguistically Finnish is non Indo-European, Celtic
is Indo-European having branched off the proto-Germanic line approximately 1000
years earlier, Baltic appears to stem from a completely different line of Indo-European
and the Saamí language (Lappish) is a mixture of the languages of the indigenous
people of Northern Europe, Finnish, and Swedish, and that all these languages differ
from one another greatly, the speakers of these different tongues demonstrate many
cultural commonalities. True, each culture considers itself to be an autonomous
ethnic entity, but each is in a great part defined by geographic location, and geography,
weather patterns, availability of and types of food, occupations determined
by the land, and cultural intercourse helped to create large border areas around the
Northern Germanic peoples where the distinguishing characteristics of one culture
blurred into the next often making it difficult for even the inhabitants of the region
itself to form any true alliance with either one culture or the other.
These border zones become important, then, for the purposes of comparison.
To ignore the similarities between these cultures, especially within the border-zone
regions themselves, would either have to be an act of prejudice based on some
silly notion of racial, religious, or cultural purity, or simple ignorance. The ancient
3 MacCulloch, J. A. Eddic Mythology published as vol 3. of Mythology of All Races edited by
J. A. MacCulloch (Boston, Mass.) 1928, p. 305.