‘They a father know not, Whether any of them was Born before Of the dark ghosts.’
They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves’ retreat, and in ‘windy ways--
Where the mountain stream Under the ness’s mist Downward flows.’
Of the myths which spring from the wind, and which may therefore be reckoned the children of Odin, by far the most interesting are those which attach to him in his part of Psycopomp, or soul-leader, and which form a part, therefore, of an immense series of tales connected with the Teutonic ideas of death as they were detailed in the last chapter. There were many reasons why these occupied a leading place in middle-age legend. The German race is naturally a gloomy or at least a thoughtful one: and upon this natural gloom and thoughtfulness the influence of their new faith acted with redoubled force, awaking men to thoughts not only of a new life but of a new death. Popular religion took as strong a hold of the darker as of the brighter aspects of Catholicism, and was busy grafting the older notions of the soul’s future state upon the fresh stock of revealed religion. Thus many of the popular notions both of heaven and hell may be discovered in the beliefs of heathen Germany. Let us, therefore, abandoning the series of myths which belong properly to the Aryan religious beliefs as given in Chapter IX. (though upon these, so numerous are they, we seem scarcely to have begun), turn to others which illustrate our last chapter. Upon one we have already touched; Odin, as chooser of the dead, hurrying through the air towards a battle-field with his troop of shield-maidens, the Valkyriur;[126] or if we like to present the simpler nature-myth, the wind bearing away the departing breath of dying men, and the clouds which he carries on with him in his course. For there is no doubt that these Valkyriur, these shield-or swan-maidens, who have the power of transforming themselves at pleasure into birds, were originally none other than the clouds; perhaps like the cattle of Indra, they were at first the clouds of sunrise. We meet with such beings elsewhere than in northern mythology. The Urva_s_i, whose story we have been relating just now, after the separation from her mortal husband changes herself into a bird and is found by Pururavas in this disguise, sitting with her friends the Gandhavas upon the water of a lake. This means the clouds of evening resting upon the wide blue sky. The Valkyriur themselves, when they have been married to men, often leave them, as the Indian fairy left her husband; and lest they should do so it is not safe to restore them the swan’s plumage which they wore as Valkyriur; should they again obtain their old equipment they will be almost sure to don it and desert their home to return to their old life. The Valkyriur, then, are clouds; and in so far as they appear in the legends of other nations they have no intimate connection with Odin. But when they are the clouds of sunset, and when Odin in his character of soul-bearer becomes before all things the wind of the _setting_ sun (that breeze which so often rises just as the sun goes down, and which itself might stand for the escaping soul of the dying day), then the Valkyriur make part of an ancient myth of death. And almost all the stories of swan-maidens, or transformations into swans, which are so familiar to the ears of childhood, are related to Odin’s warrior maidens. If we notice the plot of these stories, we shall see that in them too the transformation usually takes place at sun-setting or sunrising. For instance, in the tale of the six swans in Grimm’s _Household Stories_,[127] the enchanted brothers of the princess can only reappear in their true shapes just one hour before sunset.