History is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of man. As the first chapter of this volume shows, we moderns know what was hidden from the ancients themselves about the still more ancient ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and language, while masses of very early writings are now newly opened to the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when history begins.

The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little of what happened beyond one’s great-grandfather’s time, unless it has been written down. But writing has not yet quite overspread the globe, and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down recollections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep a historical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree, under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had been buried; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for centuries. In the Ellice group, the natives declared that their ancestors came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the right to speak; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east; they give the names of the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they landed; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon about eighteen generations, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected, the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they are admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark (Arawa) and God’s-Eye (Mata-atua), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies, constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the wildest wonder-tales; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin. These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even the names of kings.

Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the importance of the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du Guesclin’s hair being like a lion’s mane, and in another, Jeanne de Montfort (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her suit of armour, which history elsewhere records that she really wore. But though the poet or minstrel preserves many picturesque incidents like these, he has not the historian’s conscience about facts. Eager to rouse and delight his audience, to flatter the national pride of his people and the family pride of the chieftain in whose halls he sang, the singer brought in real names and events, but he shifted them as would best suit his dramatic scenery, or he even made his own history outright. The great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, begins in Burgundy, where the three kings hold court at Worms on the Rhine, their sister is the lovely Kriemhilt, whose husband Sîfrit is treacherously slain at the well by Hagen’s spear; afterwards she marries Attila the Hun-king, and the tale of blood, ending with her vengeance and death, leaves Attila and Theodoric of Verona (Etzel and Dietrich von Bern) weeping together over the slaughter of their men. Here are places and personages historical enough to make a poem history, if history could be made by such means; but the reader of Gibbon knows that Attila really died two years before Theodoric was born. In fact the poem is a late version of a story preserved in an earlier shape in Scandinavia as the saga of the Volsungs; the court at Worms, and the tournament, and the rest of the historic names and local circumstances, are worked in to give poetic substance and colour. If poets ventured thus to falsify history in the middle ages, when the chronicles were there to convict them, how are we to tell fact from fiction in the poems of ages where the check of history is wanting? The Iliad and the Odyssey may contain many memories of real men and their deeds, an Agamemnon may have reigned in Mykēnai, there may have been a real siege of Troy, perhaps round the very mound where Schliemann has dug out the golden cups and necklace. But it is too hard a task to sift out historic truth in Homer, where natural events are as hopelessly mixed up with miracles as in the Maori legends. It is too hard to judge how far chronicles of old nations are impartially preserved by a bard whose rule it is (as Mr. Gladstone points out in his Primer of Homer) that no considerable Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan. Were nothing to be had out of ancient poetry except distorted memories of historical events, the anthropologist might be wise to set it aside altogether. Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is one of his most perfect and exact sources of knowledge.

Although what the poet relates may be fiction, what he mentions is apt to be history. In the names of nations and countries and cities, he is unconsciously pourtraying for us the world and its inhabitants as they were in his time. The catalogue of ships and men in the second book of the Iliad is a chart and census of the Mediterranean. Homer knows of the Ægyptians, their irrigated fields and their skill in medicine, and of the ship-famed Phœnicians and their purple stuffs. The name of Kadmos belongs to the Phœnician tongue, and signifies the “Eastern,” while the “seven-gated” Thebes built by his people shows that they had that reverence for the mystic number seven, which has its origin in the worship of the seven planets in Babylon. The poet can hardly have thought, when he told his wonder-tales with the circumstances of the actual world around him, how future ages would prize for itself that record of real life. Odysseus, clinging under the belly of the great ram, or sailing to the land of Hades to the weak shades of the dead, is mere myth. Yet the description of Polyphēmos is one of the few ancient pictures of the manners of low barbarians, and the visit to Hades is a chapter of old Greek religion, recording what men thought of the dull ghost-life beyond the tomb. So it is with the descriptions of life and manners. Nausikaa, the king’s daughter, drives the wain with the pair of mules down to the river’s mouth to carry the clothes to be washed. Odysseus walks through the streets of the seafaring Phaiakians, wondering at the haven and the mighty walls and bastions, till he crosses the bronze threshold of the palace of Alkinoos, and entering, clasps the knees of Queen Arētē; then he crouches on the hearthstone in the ashes, till the king, mindful of Zeus the Thunderer standing near to care for the suppliant, takes the guest by the hand, and makes him sit by him on his own son’s glittering seat. Thus following the romantic fortunes of the many-wiled Odysseus, we see as in the scenes of a dissolving-view how the heroes of old days went spear in hand with their swift dogs at their heel, how at the house-door they threw aside their garments to go into the bath-chamber, and came forth anointed with oil to the feast where with no such refinements as plates or knives they ate their fill of roast meat and cakes of bread; how they diverted themselves with throwing quoits on the smooth turf, or lounged on outspread hides in the sunshine playing merells; how in solemn rites they poured the libations of dark wine and burned the meat in sacrifice, with prayers for what their hearts desired, yet knowing all the while that the gods would, as they listed, this grant and that deny. All this is not only history, but history of the finest kind. Looked at by the student of culture, even the wild mixture of the natural and supernatural, so bewildering to the modern mind, is the record of an early stage of religious thought. The gods meet in council in the halls of cloud-gathering Zeus, to settle what shall be done with their contending armies of worshippers on the plains below. In the very fray of mortal warriors divine beings take part; Poseidōn plucks out the bronze-tipped spear from the shield of Aineias, lifts up the Trojan hero and bears him away unharmed over the heads of the warriors; even the goddesses set on one another like mortal shrews, when Hērē tears away the bow and quiver of Artemis, and with scornful laughter boxes her ears with them till the virgin huntress goes off in tears, leaving her bow behind. It would be wrong to think that all this seemed mere make-believe and poetic ornament to the men who first listened to the wondrous rhapsodies. They were in the changing state of religion described in the last chapter (see p. 362) when the spiritual beings, which to their ruder forefathers had served as personal causes of nature and events, were passing away from their first clearness, yet were still regarded as divinities presiding over nature and interfering with men’s lives. Contrasting such a state of thought with that of the present day will help us to realize one of the greatest events in all history, the change of men’s minds from the mythological temper to the historical temper. This change did not happen all at once, but has for many ages been gradually coming about. There is hardly a more instructive chapter in Grote’s History of Greece, than that in which he describes the philosophic age, when the Greeks were beginning to notice with perplexity and pain that the Homeric poems, become to them a sacred book, agreed but ill with their own experience of life, so that they asked themselves, can the world have really so changed since the days when men sat at table with the gods?

Much of what is called ancient history has to be looked at in this way. Historical criticism, that is, judgment, is practised not for the purpose of disbelieving but of believing. Its object is not to find fault with the author, but to ascertain how much of what he says may be reasonably taken as true. Thus a modern reader may have a sounder opinion about early Roman history than the Romans themselves had in the time of Livy and Cicero. We see more plainly than they, that the name of Rome is less likely to have been given from a man called Romulus, than that the name of Romulus was invented to account for the city being called Rome. To modern minds, the whole famous story of the wolf-fostermother of Romulus and Remus collapses when it is known to be only a version of the same old wonder-tale told by Herodotus as the story of the birth of Cyrus. Yet here again may be seen the indirect value of history even where its events are most questionable. Though there may never have been any such person as Romulus, the legend of the tracing of the city walls by his bronze ploughshare is a true record of the ceremony with which cities were anciently founded. Even later history, where the historian had written records to go upon, must often be sifted in this way. Suppose a class reading the 35th book of Livy. Such matters as Hannibal’s oath, and the preparations for war with Antiochus, are taken without question as good history. But when it comes to the story that about this time an ox belonging to one of the consuls uttered the awful words “Roma, cave tibi!” there is a laugh. Here it is not enough for the form-master simply to pass the story by as Livy’s nonsense. He has to admit that the historian probably took it from the official record of prodigies, so that at any rate it is good historical evidence that in ancient Rome men not only believed that an ox might speak, but that its so doing would be a divine portent, and notions of this kind had so become part of the national religion and government, that the augurs took care a regular supply of such omens should be forthcoming to guide the rulers of the state, or at least to enable them to impose upon the multitude. Thus the passages of history which seem at first sight most silly and false, may be solid facts in the history of civilisation.

It is plain that the compositions which serve as records of old-world life need not have been intended as history. If only the genuine words and thoughts of the ancients about anything have been handed down, it is for the moderns to extract history from them. Thus the Sanskrit hymns collected in the Veda serve as a record of the daily life of the early Aryans who chanted them. For when a hymn to the wind gods brings them in as driving in chariots with strong felloes and well-fashioned reins and cracking whips, then it is plain to the modern reader that the Aryan people among whom the hymn was made drove themselves in such chariots. Where the bright gods have gold chains on their breasts for beauty, carry spears on their shoulders and daggers at their sides, this mythical fancy gives a real picture of the accoutrement of the Aryan warrior. Thus, piece by piece, this præhistoric hymn-book shows the old patriarchal Aryan life, with the herds of cattle roaming over wide pastures or shut in the winter cow-stall, the ploughing of the fields and the reaping of the corn, the family ties and legal rights, the worship of the great nature-gods of sky and earth, sun and dawn, fire and water and winds, the intense belief in the shining regions of the immortal dead, the honour to the almsgiver and praise to the just man. In the sacred books of the old Persians, collected in the Avesta, have come down the long-remembered traditions of another branch of the Aryan race, who, dividing off from their Brahman kinsfolk, followed the faith of Zarathustra. The deep schism between the two religions is seen in the Zarathustrians having degraded the bright gods (deva) of the Brahmans into evil demons (daeva). Their horror of defiling the sacred fire by burning corpses as the Brahmans do had already led them to expose the dead to be devoured by wild beasts and carrion birds, as the Parsis still do in their “towers of silence.” In the beginning of the Avesta, there is mentioned as first and best of the good regions created by the good deity, the country called Airyana vaejo, the “Aryan seed,” which afterwards the evil deity cursed with ten months’ winter; this description of the climate looks as though the old Persians believed their early Aryan home was on the bleak slopes of Central Asia toward the sources of the Oxus and Yaxartes. Here and there among the sacred verses comes a touch of the life of these proud fierce herdsmen and tillers of the soil, little like the corrupt Persian and the thrifty Parsi of modern times. Their enthusiasm for the rough work of making the earth fit for man’s abode is quaintly shown where they sing of the delight the earth feels when the husbandman drains the wet soil and waters the dry, how she brings wealth to him who tills her with the right arm and the left, with the left arm and the right:

So necessary were the fierce dogs which kept the wolf from the fold and the thief from the village, that there are solemn ordinances about them, how the dog who does not bark and is not right in his mind is to be muzzled and tied up, and what punishment is to be inflicted on the man who gives a dog bad food; it is as sinful (they say) as if he had done it to a well-to-do householder. One forms a lifelike picture of the sturdy farmers who made these laws to be repeated to their children’s children and carried on to future ages.

While these rough Aryans were handing on memories of the past by word of mouth in their sacred verses, more cultured nations had long since begun to write down memorials of their own times. The best way to bring to our minds what this earliest contemporary history was like, is to look at the translations of Egyptian and Assyrian documents in Records of the Past, published under the directions of the Society of Biblical Archæology. Here is to be found, for instance, Dr. Birch’s translation of the inscription recording the expeditions of Una, crown-bearer to king Teta, before 2,000 B.C. (see page 3), and of the account on the sanctuary walls of Karnak, of the battle of Megiddo, where Thothmes III., about 1,500 B.C., overcame the armies of Syria and Mesopotamia and opened the way into the interior of Asia. It is related how the king, marching from Gaza, reached the south of Megiddo on the shore of the waters of Kaner, where he pitched his tent and made a speech before his whole army: “Hasten ye, put on your helmets, for I shall rush to fight with the vile enemy in the morning!” The watchword was passed, “Firm, firm, watch, watch, watch actively at the king’s pavilion!” It was on the morning of the festival of the new moon that the king went forth in his golden decorated chariot in the midst of his army, the god Amun being the protection in his active limbs, and he prevailed over his enemies; they fell prostrate before him, left their horses and chariots, and fled to the fort, where the garrison shut up inside pulled off their clothes to haul them up over the walls. The Egyptians slaughtered their enemies till they lay in rows like fish, and conquering entered the fort of Megiddo, where the chiefs of the land came bearing tribute, silver and gold, lapis lazuli and alabaster, vessels of wine and flocks. The lists of spoil, made with curious minuteness, include living captives 240, hands (cut off the dead) 83, mares 2,041, fillies 191, an ark of gold of the enemy, 892 chariots of the vile army, and so on. A later part of the inscription commemorates the liberal endowments bestowed by the victorious king on the god Amen Ra, the fields and gardens to supply his temple, the pairs of geese to fill his lakes, to supply him with the two trussed geese daily at sunset, a charge to remain for ever, and so on with the loaves of bread and pots of beer for daily rations. As the king says in his inscription, he does not boast of what he has done, saying that he has done more when he has not, and so causing men to contradict him. Here we see the check of public opinion beginning to act in history. It does not really compel exact truth, it allows national victories to be exaggerated and defeats kept out of sight, but even the vainglorious scribes of Egypt would hardly venture to record events without a foundation of fact. Turning now to the inscriptions of the Babylonian-Assyrian district, we may take as an example a temple-brick of the famous city Ur of the Chaldees, now called Mugheir, which bears these words in cuneiform writing:

Sumir and Akkad, here mentioned, were the seats of the old Chaldæan civilisation. As early as the 16th century B.C., Hammurabi overcame these nations, a great event in the change that absorbed their ancient culture and religion into the conquering Assyrian empire. In an inscription of this king of Babylon, he says, “the favour of Bel gave into my government the people of Sumir and Akkad, for them I dug out afresh the canal called by my name, the joy of men, a stream of abundant waters for the people, all its banks I restored to newness, new supporting walls I heaped up, perennial waters I provided for the people of Sumir and Akkad.”

By the aid of such contemporary writings, historians are now able to check the recorded lists of ancient kings, and to piece together something like a continuous line of dynasties in Egypt and Babylonia since the foundation of the great cities Memphis and Ur. We may notice where the records and traditions of the Israelites, written down in later ages in the historical books of the Old Testament, come in contact with ancient history from the monuments. Israelite tradition records (Gen. xi., xii.) that their ancestors had been in the Chaldæan district of Ur, and in Egypt, which is evidence of their intercourse with the two great nations of the ancient world. The mention in Exodus (i. 11) of the Israelites being set to build for Pharaoh a city called Rameses, points to their oppression in Egypt having been under the Great Rameses II. of the XIX. dynasty, apparently about 1400 B.C., which makes a point of contact between Egyptian and Hebrew chronology. In the books of Kings there come into view later persons and events, well known in the contemporary records of other countries, as in the mention of Shishak, king of Egypt, who fought against Rehoboam and plundered the temple (1 K. xiv. 25). It seems likely, when Herodotus (ii. 141) describes the army of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, being put to flight from the mice gnawing the soldiers’ bows, that this is a version of the great disaster of Sennacherib, of which the Bible gives a different account (2 K. xix.).

With Herodotus the student comes in view of the Old World as it was known to a Greek traveller and geographer of the 5th century B.C. The Father of History, as he has been called, wrote not as a chronicler of his own nation, but with the larger view of an anthropologist to whom all knowledge of mankind was interesting. The way in which modern discoveries have come in to confirm his statements, justifies us in relying on ancient historians when, like him, they are careful to distinguish mere legend or hearsay from what they have themselves enquired into. Thus Herodotus tells the strange story of the impostor who passed himself off as Smerdis, and sat on the throne of Persia till he was detected by his cropped ears, and Darius slew him. When, a few years ago, the cuneiform characters of the inscription sculptured in a high wall of rock near Behistan in Persia were deciphered, it proved to be the very record set up by Darius the king in the three languages of the land, and it matches the account given by Herodotus closely enough to show what a real grasp he had of the course of events in Persia a century before his time. Yet more remarkable is the test which can be put to what Herodotus says he learnt from the priests in Egypt about their kings who reigned 2000 years before. From their dictation he wrote down the names of the pyramid-kings Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos. In later ages critics had sometimes come to doubt whether these kings belonged to fact or fable, but when the lost meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was anew interpreted by modern scholars, there stood the names recognisable as the Greek historian heard them. The best ancient history is apt to receive such confirmation from long-lost monuments. Thucydides relates (vi. 54) that Peisistratos (the younger) dedicated two altars, from one of which the Athenians erased the inscription, but the other (the historian says) may still be read, though in faint letters: “this monument of his archonship Peisistratos son of Hippias set up in the enclosure of Pythian Apollo.” Professor Newton reports that this very stone with its inscription is declared to have been found in 1878 in a courtyard near the Ilissos. How lively a sense of reality such monuments give to history may be understood by the student who, fresh from his books, goes to the British Museum and sees among the ancient coins the grand head of Alexander the Great with the ram’s horns, commemorating that curious episode of his life when he was declared to be son of Zeus Ammon; or who notices with surprise the gold coins that prove Cymbeline, now best known in Shakspere, to have been a real British king who coined money with his name.

Having thus looked at the sources of early history as belonging to the study of mankind, we need not go over the well-trodden ground of later history. It remains to notice myth, the stumbling-block which historians have so often fallen over. Myth is not to be looked on as mere error and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind. It is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never happened. Historians, especially in writing of early ages, have copied down the traditions of real events so mixed up with myths, that it is one of the hardest tasks of the student to judge what to believe and what to reject. He is fortunate when he can apply the test of possibility, and declare an event did not happen because he knows enough of the course of nature to be sure it could not. For instance, cultured nations have learnt from science that what appears to be a blue dome or firmament above our heads, the sky or heaven, is not really the solid vault the ancients thought it was, but only thin air and watery vapour. The consequence of knowing this is that people have had to strike out of their history the old myths of gods dwelling in palaces and holding courts in the skies, of men climbing or flying up from earth into heaven, of giants heaping mountain Ossa on Pelion, to scale the cloudy heights and wage battle with the gods above. Besides this way of detecting myth by its relating what could not have taken place, there are other means of judging it. It is often possible to satisfy oneself that some story is not really history, by knowing the causes which led to its being invented.

We know how strong our own desire is to account for everything. This desire is as strong among barbarians, and accordingly they devise such explanations as satisfy their minds. But they are apt to go a stage further, and their explanations turn into the form of stories with names of places and persons, thus becoming full-made myths. Educated men do not now consider it honest to make fictitious history in this way, but people of untrained mind, in what is called the myth-making stage, which has lasted on from the savage period and has not quite disappeared among ourselves, have no such scruples about converting their guesses at what may have happened, into the most lifelike stories of what they say did happen. Thus, when comparative anatomy was hardly known, the finding of huge fossil bones in the ground led people to think they were the remains of huge beasts, and enormous men, or giants, who formerly lived on the earth. Modern science decides that they were right as to the beasts, which were ancient species of elephant, rhinoceros, &c., but wrong as to the giants, none of the great bones really belonging to any creature like man. But while the belief lasted that they were bones of giants, men’s imagination worked in making stories about these giants and their terrific doings, stories which are told still in all quarters of the globe as though they were traditions of real events. Thus the Sioux of the western prairies of North America say their land was once inhabited by great animals, bits of whose bones they still keep for magic, and also, they tell of the giant Ha-o-kah, who could stride over the largest rivers and the tallest pines, and to whom they sing and dance at their festivals. It appears that fossil bones, very likely of the mastodon, had to do with this native belief in old monstrous beasts, nor need we be surprised at the giants coming into the story, considering that so lately as the last century Dr. Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, sent to our Royal Society an account of the discovery of such bones in New England, which he argued were remains of antediluvian giants.

Another thing which in all parts of the world has set the imagination of myth-makers to work, is the fact that people live in tribes or nations, each known by a particular name, such as Ojibwa, Afghan, Frank. The easiest and favourite way of accounting for this is to suppose each tribe or nation to have had an ancestor or chief of the like name, so that his descendants or followers inherited their tribe-name from him. It really happens so sometimes, but in most cases a pretended tradition of such an eponymic or name-ancestor arises from the makers of genealogies first inventing him out of the name of the tribe, and then treating him as a historical personage. They may now and then be caught in the act of doing this. Thus among the native race of Brazil and Paraguay, some tribes are called Tupi and others Guarani, so to account for this division, a tradition is related that two brothers named Tupi and Guarani came over the sea to Brazil, and with their children peopled the country, but a talking parrot made strife between the wives of the two brothers, and this grew into a quarrel and separation, Tupi staying in the land, and Guarani going off with his family into the region of La Plata. Now there happens to be a means of checking this story, for Martius says that the name guarani (meaning warrior) was first given by the Jesuits to the southern Indians whom they collected in their missions, so that the tale of the two ancestor-brothers must be a myth of modern manufacture. Such eponymic myths of national ancestors were not only made in ancient times, but are mixed up in the chronicles of Old World nations as though they were real history. The classical student knows the legends of the twin brothers Danaos and Aigyptos, ancestors of the Danaoi (Greeks) and Ægyptians; and of Hellēn, father of the Hellēnes, whose three sons Aiōlos, Dōros, Xouthos, were fathers of the Æolians, Dorians, &c.

Having looked at these two frequent kinds of myths derived from fossil bones and national names, it is worth while to notice how both come together in our own country. The History of the Britons, compiled in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, relates that our island was in old time called Albion, and was only inhabited by a few giants; but Brutus, a banished Trojan prince, landed with his followers and called the land Britain, after his own name, and his companions Britons. With him came a leader called Gorineus, and he called the part of the country which fell to him Corinea and his people Corineans, that is, Cornish. In that part the giants were most numerous, and one especially, named Goemagot (elsewhere called Gogmagog) was twelve cubits high, and could pull up an oak like a hazel wand. On a certain day, when there had been a battle and the Britons had overcome a party of giants and slain all except this hugest monster, he and Corineus had a wrestling-match, when Corineus caught the giant up in his arms, and running with him to the top of the cliff now called the Hoe at Plymouth, cast him over, wherefore (says the chronicler) the place is called “Goemagot’s leap” to this day. Quaint as this legend is, it is not hard to find the sense of it. It was the fashion to trace the origin of nations from Troy; Brutus and Corineus were invented to account for the names of Britain and Cornwall; Goemagot or Gogmagog is the Biblical Gog and Magog rolled into one, these personages being recognised in tradition as giants. But why the story of his having been thrown over the Hoe at Plymouth? The answer seems to be that this is a place where the bones of fossil animals are actually dug up, such as were looked upon as remains of giants. Even in modern times, when excavations were being made on the Hoe for the fortifications, huge jaws and teeth were found, which were at once settled by public opinion to be the remains of Gogmagog.

These are examples of the myths easiest for modern civilised minds to enter into, for they are little more than inferences or guesses as to what may have actually happened, worked up with picturesque details which give them an air of reality. But to understand another kind of myths we must get our minds into a mood which is not that of scientific reasoning in the class-room, but of telling nursery tales in the twilight, or reading poetry in the woods on a summer afternoon. Former chapters have shown how, in old times and among uncultured people, notions of the kind which still remain among us as poetic fancy were seriously believed. When to the rude philosopher the action of the world around him was best explained by supposing in it nature-life like human life, and divine nature-souls like human souls, then the sun seemed a personal lord climbing proudly up the sky, and descending dim and weary into the under-world at night; the stormy sea was a fearful god ready to swallow up the rash sailor; the beasts of the forest were half-human in thought and speech; even the forest-trees were the bodily habitations of spirits, and the woodman, to whom the rustling of their leaves seemed voices, and their waving branches beckoning arms, hewed at their trunks with a half-guilty sense of doing murder. The world then seemed to be “such stuff as dreams are made on;” transformation of body and transmigration of spirit were ever going on; a man or god might turn into a beast, a river, or a tree; rocks might be people transformed into stones, and sticks transformed snakes. Such a state of thought is fast disappearing, but there are still tribes living in it, and they show what the men’s minds are like who make nature-myths. When a story-teller lives in this dreamland, any poetic fancy becomes a hint for a wonder-tale, and though (one would think) he must be aware that he is romancing, and that the adventures he relates are not quite history, yet when he is dead, and his story has been repeated by bards and priests for a few generations, then it would be disrespectful, or even sacrilegious, to question its truth. This has happened all over the world, and the Greek myths of the great nature-gods which Xenophanes and Anaxagoras ventured to disbelieve with such ill consequences to themselves, were of much the same fabric as those of modern barbarians like the South Sea Islanders. Let us look at a few nature-myths, choosing such as most transparently show how they came to be made.

The Tahitians tell tales of their sea-god Hiro, whose followers were sailing on the ocean while he was lulled to sleep in a cavern in the depths below; then the wind-god raised a furious storm to destroy the canoe, but the sailors cried to Hiro, till, rising to the surface, he quelled the storm, and his votaries came safe to port. So in Homer, Poseidōn the sea-god, dweller in caves of ocean, sets on the winds to toss the frail bark of Odysseus among the thundering waves, till Ino comes to his rescue and bids him strip and swim for the Phaiakian shore. Both tales are word-pictures of the stormy sea told in the language of nature-myth, only with different turns. The New Zealanders have a story of Maui imprisoning the winds, all but the wild west-wind, whom he cannot catch to shut into its cavern by a great stone rolled against its mouth; all he can do is to chase it home sometimes, and then it hides in the cavern, and for a while dies away. All this is a mythic description of the weather, meaning that other winds are occasional, but the west wind prevalent and strong. These New Zealanders had never heard of the classic myth of Æolus and the cave of the winds, yet how nearly they had come to the same mythic fancy, that it is from such blow-holes in the hill-sides that the winds come forth. The negroes of the West Indies tell a tale of the great quarrel between Fire and Water, how the Fire came on slowly, stopped by the stream, till he called the Wind to his aid, who carried him across everything, and the great fight came off, the Bon Dieu looking on from behind a curtain of clouds. It is not likely that these negro slaves had ever heard of the twenty-first Iliad, to know how the same world-old contest of the elements is told in the great battle between the Fire-god and the Rivers, when the Winds were sent to help, and carried the fierce flames onward, and the eels and fish scuttled hither and thither as the hot breath of the blast came upon them.

The beams of light darting down from the sun through openings in the clouds seem to have struck people’s fancy in Europe as being like the rope over the pulley of an old-fashioned draw-well, for this appearance is called in popular phrase, “the sun drawing water.” The Polynesians also see the resemblance of the rays to cords, which they say are the ropes the sun is fastened by, and they tell a myth how the sun once used to go faster, till a god set a noose at the horizon and caught him as he rose, so that he now travels bound and slowly along his daily appointed path. In English such an expression as that the sun is “swallowed up by night” is now a mere metaphor, but the idea is one which in ancient and barbaric times people took more seriously. The Maoris have made out of it the story of the death of their divine hero Maui. You may see, they say, Maui’s ancestress, Great-Woman-Night, flashing and as it were opening and shutting out on the horizon where sea and sky come together; Maui crept into her body and would have got through unharmed, but just at that moment the little flycatcher, the tiwakawaka, broke out with its merry note and awoke the Night, and she crushed Maui. That this is really a nature-myth of the setting sun dying as he plunges into the darkness, is proved by the mention of the bird, which has the peculiarity of singing at sunset. Of all the nature-myths of the world, few are so widely spread as those on this theme of night and day, where with mythic truth the devoured victims were afterwards disgorged or set free. The Zulu story-tellers describe the maw of the monster as a country where there are hills and houses and cattle and people living, and when the monster is cut open, all the creatures come out from the darkness; with a neat touch of nature which shows that the story-teller is thinking of the dawn, the cock comes out first, crying, “kukuluku! I see the world!” Our English version of the old myth is the nursery tale of Little Red Ridinghood, but it is spoilt by leaving out the proper end (which German nurses have kept up with better memory), that when the hunter ripped up the sleeping wolf, out came the little damsel in her red satin cloak, safe and sound.

Such stories are fanciful, but the fancy of the myth-maker can take yet further flights. The mythic persons as yet described have been visible objects like the sun, or at least what can be perceived by the senses and made real objects of, such as wind, or day. But when the poet is in the vein of myth-making, whatever he can express by a noun and put a verb to, becomes capable of being treated as a person. If he can say, summer comes, sleep falls on men, hope rises, justice demands, then he can set up summer and sleep, hope and justice, in human figures, dress them, and make them walk and talk. Thus the formation of myth is helped by what Professor Max Müller has called a “disease of language.” This, however, is not the whole matter. We saw in the last chapter how the notion of soul or spirit helped men on to the notion of cause. When the cause of anything presents itself to the ancient mind as a kind of soul or spirit, then the cause or spirit of summer, sleep, hope, justice, comes easily to look like a person. No one can really understand old poetry without knowing this. Homer could fancy on the field of battle the awful Kēr, whose figure was shown on the shield of Achilles with blood-stained garment flung over her shoulders, as she seized some warrior wounded to the death, or dragged a corpse by the feet out of the fighting throng. This being is not merely a word turned into a reality, she is a personal cause, a spirit-reason, why one warrior is slain and not another. So far is the idea of her spread in Aryan mythology, that it appears again among the Northmen, when Odin sends to every battle the maidens who in Walhalla serve the feast and fill the bowls with ale for the spirits of the heroes; these maidens are the Valkyriur, who guide the event of victory, and choose the warriors who shall fall. Another well-known mythic group shows again how what to us moderns are but ideas expressed in words, took personal form in the minds of the ancients. In the classic books of Greece and Rome we read of the three fate-spinners, the Moirai or Parcæ, and their Scandinavian counterparts appear in the Edda as the three wise women whose dwelling is near the spring under the world-ash Ygdrasill, the Norns who fix the lives of men. The explanation of these three mythic beings is that they are in personal shape the Past, Present, and Future, as is shown by the names they bear, Was, Is, Shall (Urdhr, Verdhandi, Skuld).

Stories are always changing and losing their meanings, and from age to age new bards and tale-tellers shape the old myths into new forms to suit new hearers. Considering how stories thus grow and change, one must expect their origins to be as often as not lost beyond recovery. While, as we have seen, it may be often possible to make out what they came from, this must be done cautiously. Clever writers are too apt to sit down and settle the mythic origin of any tale, as if this could be done by ingenious guessing. Even if it is nonsense and never was intended for anything else, the myth-interpreter can find a serious origin for it all the same. Thus a learned but rash mythologist declares that in our English nursery rhyme, “the cow jumped over the moon,” is a remnant of an old nature-myth, describing as a cow a cloud passing over the moon. What is really wanted in interpreting myths is something beyond simple guessing; there must be reasons why one particular guess is more probable than any other. It would have been rash to judge that Promētheus the fire-bringer is a personification of the wooden fire-drill (p. 262), were it not known that the Sanskrit name of this instrument is pramantha; taken together, the correspondence of name and nature amounts to a high probability that we have got back to the real origin of the Prometheus-legend. We may choose another example from the mythology of India, in the story of Vâmana, the tiny Brahman, who, to humble the pride of King Bali, begs of him as much land as he can measure in three steps, but when the boon is granted, the little dwarf expands into the gigantic form of Vishnu, and, striding with one step across the earth, another across the air, and a third across the sky, drives Bali down into the infernal regions, where he still reigns. This most remarkable of all the Tom Thumb stories seems really a myth of the sun, rising tiny above the horizon, then swelling into majestic power and crossing the universe. For Vâmana, the “dwarf,” is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and Vishnu was originally the Sun. In the hymns of the Veda the idea of his three steps is to be found before it had become a story, when it was as yet only a poetic metaphor of the Sun crossing the airy regions in his three strides. “Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his foot; it was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made Vishnu, unharmed preserver, upholding sacred things.”

It remains to see how myths spread. Whenever a good story is told, whether real or made-up does not matter, it becomes part of the story-teller’s stock, who puts to it any new name that will suit, and often succeeds in planting it not only in popular legend, but even in history. There is a fragment by Demaratus preserved in the collection of Stobæus, where there is related with Greek names, as an episode of the history of Arkadia, the grand story which we were taught as an event of Roman history, the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii. Roman history, it seems, only borrowed it from an earlier tale, much as modern Swiss history borrowed from older folklore the tale of the archer and the apple, to adorn their national hero, Tell. To show how legend is put together from many sources, historical and mythical, let us take to pieces one of the famous children’s tales of Europe. Blue Beard was a historical person. He was Gilles de Retz, Sieur de Laval, Marshal of France, nicknamed Barbe Bleue from having a beard of blue-black shade. Persuaded by an Italian alchemist that his strength could be restored by bathing in the blood of infants, he had many children entrapped for this hideous purpose into his castle of Champtocé on the Loire, the ruins of which are still to be seen. At last the horrible suspicions of the country folk as to what was going on were brought to proof, and the monster was burnt at the stake at Nantes in 1440. In all this, however, there is not a word about murdered wives. Indeed the historical Blue Beard, in his character of murderous monster, seems to have inherited an older tale belonging to the wife-murderer of Breton legend, Comor the Cursed, Count of Poher, whose name and deeds are set down to near a thousand years earlier, in the legendary chronicles which tell of him as a usurper and tyrant who married and murdered one wife after another, till at last when he had wedded and killed the beautiful Trifine, vengeance overtook him, and he was defeated and slain by the rightful prince. It is not easy to say whether this is a version of a yet older story, or whether there is a historical foundation for it; if Henry VIII. of England had lived in those times, such a legend might have gathered round his name. Other points of the modern Blue Beard appear already in the story of Trifine, her sending for aid to her kinsmen when she knows her danger, and her discovery of the murder of the former wives. This last, however, does not come to pass in the modern way; in the legend, Trifine goes down into the chapel to pray in the hour of need, and there the tombs of the four murdered wives open and their corpses stand upright, each with the knife or cord or whatever she was murdered with in her hand. Instead of this powerful and ghastly scene, the modern version brings in the hackneyed episode of the forbidden chamber, which had long been the property of story-tellers for use on suitable occasions, and is to be found in the Arabian Nights. The old Trifine legend has a characteristic ending. Her wicked husband pursues her into the forest and cuts her head off, but St. Gildas makes her body carry it back to Comor’s castle, which he overthrows by flinging a handful of dust at it, then he puts Trifine’s head on for her again, and she retires into a convent for the rest of her life. The story-tellers of later times prefer a more cheerful if more commonplace finish.

The miracle-legend just quoted brings us back to the historical use of myth, which was spoken of earlier in this chapter. The story of St. Gildas bringing the fair Trifine back to her castle with her head in her hand, and his afterwards putting it back on her shoulders, is history. It records the intellectual state of the age when it was held edifying to tell such wonders of holy men, for holy men were believed able to do them. Old tales which seem extravagant to our minds are apt thus to have historical value by pointing back to the times when, seeming possible, they were made. This is true even of Æsop’s fables. In the stage of thought when human souls are thought able to live in animals’ bodies, when a wolf may have one’s enemy’s soul in him, or one’s grandfather may be crawling on the hearth in the body of a snake, stories of rational beasts themselves seem rational. Among the Buddhists, where beast-tales early became moral apologues, they are told as incidents of the many births or transmigrations of the great founder of the religion. It was Buddha himself who, as a bird, took the bone out of the lion’s throat, and was repaid by being told that he was lucky to be so well out of it. It was Buddha who, born in the body of a peasant, listened to the ass in the lion’s skin, and said he was but an ass. That millions of people should have this as part of their sacred literature is a fact of interest in the study of civilization, warning us not to cast aside a story as worthless, because it is mythical. For understanding the thoughts of old-world nations, their myths tell us much we should hardly learn from their history.