Myth and Religion; - Germanic Mythology

thing, better preserved in ancient Greece than anywhere else, which stirred up the wrath
of Xenophanes and Plato; so that the latter, not without reason, for as we have seen, the
civilized Greek must have been much perplexed in his moral feelings, when he brought
his children to visit the temples and look upon the sacred pictures by which from such
pieces as the Ion of Euripides etc., we learn that these myths were illustrated. In Greece
and in India we see that the myths had undergone similar transformations to those, we
observe the Teutonic myths to have undergone. They had been reduced to the epical
condition. Mr Lang, to whom we have referred several times as one of the most advanced
British students of mythology, is of opinion that Homer and Hesiod, in whom we find so
much, that is hardly presentable to dress societies of our own time, had nevertheless
found it necessary to select in their poems, and if Homer, as is probable, represents the
rhapsodists of his time, they too had found it necessary to adopt a more or less
expurgated form of the mythical materials which they found at hand as the subjects of
their poems. The same is in all probability true of the Rig-Veda; so much is agreed
upon. 13 People ridicule the Americans of our own day as being so very proper that they
wish to cover up the legs of then- pianofortes, but in the days of the Rig-Veda there
appears to have been a very different state of feeling. Macaulay, voyaging to India, notes
that on the outward voyage, an Andaman boatman boarded the steamer, and stood on the
deck before the whole company of passengers on board the outward bound Indiaman, as
naked as the hour in which he was born, but yet without the least indication of shame;
and such is but bringing the youth and maturity of the world face to face!
The myths which have been reduced to the epical condition, what does this
imply? It certainly implies that these myths are generally recognized by mythologists as
belonging to the higher or more recent and artificial class of myths. This they owe,
doubtless to the treatment they have received from that 'priesthood' who were in
possession of an “ur-alt" stock of mythological songs from the time of the beginning of
the Christian era, according to the testimony of Tacitus. 14 These priests were the
predecessors and progenitors of the skalds and minstrels of a later period; and we know
that while they preserved the ancient myths, these myths passed, while in their keeping,
through a change analogous to that through which the Grecian myths passed in the hands
of Homer and Hesiod, and similar also to that through which the myths, wrought up in
the Rig-Veda, are believed to have passed, in the importation into them of a purer and
more elevated tone, such as the process of the ages had wrought upon the minds of the
skalds and minstrels themselves.
In the transmission of these myths too, through new poetic forms, such as they
must, more or less have undergone, we know that besides the elements of change which
came from the ethical change to which we have already referred, that there was in the
working over of the mythical material into new poetic forms, a change also of an artistic
kind. This also must have had its effect, as we see that the same materials when wrought
up by Oehlenschlager in his ”Nordens Glider", differ from the form they take in the Edda.
Light is thrown upon these changes in the relation of the rude and savage myths which
are believed, we understand universally, to be the oldest mythical forms in Greece, as
compared with those which have passed through the hands of Homer or Hesiod, though
13 Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. I. p. 11 ff. and I. Chapter X. pp. 289 ff.
14 2) Rydberg's Undersokningar i Germanisk Mythologi. Andra delen s. 469 ff.