'Here, there is no gold as on Grani's path; Far is this land from the hills of the Rhine. When hale we sat at home.' 'Grani's path' is a paraphrase for the roads which the horse of Sigurd, or Siegfried, was accustomed to canter upon. These roads were in the Rhinelands, in Germany. It is well known how much gold was once washed out of the sands of the Rhine; large amounts of money being coined from it every year. Sigurd himself, whose name is but one of the frequent Northern contractions from the German name Siegfried, is, in the Edda also, not a Scandinavian, but a Teutonic hero. On the Lower Rhine-even as in the Nibelungen Lied-Sigurd's home is placed by the Icelandic poet. Sigurd is called there a 'Southern,' a 'Hunic,' that is, a German chieftain or prince. Both expressions-southern and Hunic-were synonym for Germans.* The Northmen called us southern folk,' even as the Scots, to this day, call an Englishman a Southron.' The Hunes of the Edda have nothing to do with the Mongolic Hunns. Those Hunes over whom Siegfried, or Sigurd, ruled, were dwellers in north-western Germany. There the Hunsrück range and many place-names still bear witness to their former existence as a tribe. In our heroic sagas, names like Hunolt, Hunbrecht, Hunferd, are frequent enough. Humboldt's name means bold as a Hune.' In consequence of the Great Migrations, which produced a chaotic state of intermixture, the Hunns of Attila, by an easily comprehensible misunderstanding, took the place, in poetic sagas, of the German Hunes, and of Atli, the ruler on the Lower Rhine. This Atli name also was a frequent Teutonic one. It still survives in English place-names like Attleborough and Attlebridge. For to England, too, German Hunes came, together with Frisian, Anglo-Saxon, and other German warrior clansas testified to by the English monk, Baeda, the Venerable Bede, in his Church History. There are Anglo-Saxon names composed * See the Eddic Saga of Atli. with Hun. A mass of place-names, from southern England up to Shetland, still reminds us of those Teutonic Hunes, who took a part in the making of England. Certainly, no Mongolic Hunns from Attila's army ever came to this country. In the Rhine, the Hunic Sigurd of the Edda, the son of a king in Frank-land, proves the sword which the dwarf Regin had forged for him by letting a piece of wool down the stream, when the sword clove the fleece asunder as if it were water. Rhine-upwards Sigurd fares to the Gnita Heath to slay the Dragon. The Gnita Heath, according to Scandinavian testimony, lay between Mainz and Paderborn. In the many Eddic songs referring to Sigurd we hear of Burgundians and other Teutonic tribes, of the Rhenish hills and the Holy Mountains ;' these latter being manifestly the Sieben-Gebirge, which has its name from the sacred number seven. Further southwards, Sigurd rides to Frank-land, where he awakens Brynhild. Murdered by Högni (our Hagen), he sinks down in the south, near the Rhine. In the Eddic poem in question ('Fragment of a Brynhild Song') there is a note at the end, saying that German men (thydverskir menn) had said that Sigurd was killed in the forest. I have mentioned all this because it is calculated to shed light on the transplantation of the German tale about Wieland the Smith to Scandinavia and Iceland, as well as by the AngloSaxons to Britain, which they made into an England. Northmen had heard the Wieland, the Siegfried, and other tales in Germany, and carried them to the North. There, those tales were cast into a new poetic form, but their Teutonic origin was not disowned. On the contrary, it was fully acknowledged. German men of Soest, Bremen, and Münster, and dwellers in castles of Lower Saxony, were expressly quoted as sources of such sagas in ancient Scandinavian writings. Twice, in this way, came the Wieland tale to the North. No wonder the famed magic armourer and goldsmith himself mentions the Rhinelands as his home. In the Wilkina Saga, the German sources are clearly given. II. Now I come to a subject of a somewhat painful character. Comprehensive erudition, or extensive reading, is unhappily sometimes far from being allied to a proper recognition of the simplest facts or truths. Professor Sophus Bugge, of Christiania, known for his strange views about Northern mythology— in which he thinks he detects merely classic traditions mixed with Christian notions-wrote a paper a short time ago, by which he tries to make out Wieland to have been, not a German, but a Finn! As to the Swan-Maidens or Valkyrs, who, according to the Eddic poem (Völundar Kvidha'), came from the South to the famed captive armourer and goldsmith in the North, Professor Bugge endeavours to deny, at least partially, their Germanic character. One of them he makes out to have been an Irish girl! At the same time he wants to show that the Wieland tale did not come to England from Germany, but by way of the North. In doing so, he distinguishes, rather unnaturally and unnecessarily, between Anglo-Saxons and Germans. That is as if somebody were to say that the early English settlers in America were not English. The Finns are undoubtedly a little nation meriting much respect-more particularly so now, since they have been the object of that philanthropic and peace-loving Czar's special care. Against Irish girls nothing shall be said here which could detract from their charms. But whoever reads the Eddic poem about Völundr with an unbiassed mind, cannot but be astounded at the attempted perversion of the plain truth that the captive himself declares the Rhinelands to be his native country. In his argumentation, I regret to say, the Norwegian scholar has laid himself open, moreover, to the charge of having rather surprisingly omitted dealing with facts which he, in his wide reading, must have fully known, but which, because they tell against his own views, he preferred to ignore or to suppress. This is not the proper manner in learned discussions. The Finnish' theory of Professor Bugge reposes on the following circumstances. The Eddic Völundr Song, which probably dates from the tenth century, has a prefacing note tacked to it by some later scribe, who, regardless of the fact of Völundr declaring himself to be a Rhinelander, designates him and his brothers, Slagfidr and Egil, as sons of a Finn King' (synir Finna konungs). We know how these things were often done and muddled in the Middle Ages, when the older and purer folk-traditions had gradually paled. By the way, taking such transmogrifying passages into unmerited account, might we not make out Völundr to have been even an Asiatic or an African? In an old French poem, in which Wieland, by a well-known law of letter-change, appears as Galans, he forges a sword at Damascus and in Persia, which is said to be part of a treasure of Pharao. Here we are both on Asiatic and African ground. Maybe that Pharao was put in the place of a Frankish Pharamund or Faramund; for no doubt the Wieland tale was, with other heroic and divine sagas, brought by the German Franks into Gaul, which by conquest they converted into a Frankish kingdom, even as the Angles gave to Britain the name of Angleland, or England. Medieval poetry is luxuriously rich in the misunderstanding of names. In his translation of the Eddic Völundr Lay, Simrock, one of the best authorities, very properly placed a point of interrogation behind the word Finn King' in the prefacing note. Jakob Grimm, a still greater authority, asks whether, perchance, Finn, son of Godwulf or Folkwald (Folcvaldansunu) may be meant, who in the Anglo-Saxon and Norse pedigrees of Royal families is mentioned as a predecessor of Wodan or Odin. This Finn, it need scarcely be said, belongs to the German race. One might have expected that Professor Bugge, who shows his full reading by numerous quotations, would have mentioned and dealt with Grimm's noteworthy hint. But there is not a word of reference to it in the treatise of the Norwegian writer. Grimm could truly have said even more. Finn is to this day a family name in Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland. It was evidently brought to Ireland by the Finnians, Fianna, or Fenians that semi-mythical, fair-haired, blue-eyed, martial North folk, which, like men of the Germanic stock in general, was also much given to the cult of the cup, and which had come to Ireland over the sea from Lochlann, that is, Norway. In Ireland, it got the mastery for a time over the Kelt-Iberian natives. These Finnians, or Fenians, represent the first wave of the historical Norwegian and Danish conquerors, who from the ninth to the twelfth century ruled over the Green Isle. An Irish tale speaks of such Finnians having come both from Scandinavia and from Germany. Frisian Teutons were unquestionably mixed with the Scandinavian sea-dogs who took hold of Ireland. I may add that the island of Fühnen in the Baltic was of yore called Fiona. On English soil, a number of place-names like Finningham, Finningley, Finney, Findern, are characteristic enough. The Anglo-Saxon saga knows a chieftain called Finn, in struggles in which a Hengist appears. But as little as Mongolic Hunns ever visited England, did Finns of Finland come to this country. The real Finns originally called themselves Suomalainenmorass-dwellers. Now, the Germanic Finnian or Fiona name-which an Irish disruptionist party has unduly adopted, as if it had reference to their own heroic forebears-may easily have given rise to a misunderstanding which led to the designation of Völundr as the son of a Finn King. Nay, it is even possible, as Grimm suggests, that the author of the note mentioned did not think of the Finns at all, but had a Germanic Finn in his mind. However that may be, even supposing that the writer of the note had wished to localise the scene of Völund's art-working in Finnmarken, in the poem itself the famed smith says he is a Rhinelander. That settles the point. The various names in the Eddic song are also mostly recognisable as Germanic ones. Finnish they are not. But how weak. the argument of Professor Bugge is, may be seen from a few further specimens. The real Finns-kindred, as Ugrians, to the Mongols are not distinguished by whiteness of skin. They are rather slightly yellowish. Yet, in the Eddic Lay, the white neck' of the Rhenish smith is specially mentioned. He is also said to be a Light Elf. Such descriptions in ancient poetry are always given for a manifest, so to say ethnographical, purpose. |