Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning | Page 8

wolf, the dog, the ox; and into giant birds, and into monsters which were both bird and beast.
The Winds, again, in their fancy, were the companions or the ministers of Indra, the sky-god. The Maruts, or spirits of the winds, gathered into their host the souls of the dead--thus giving birth to the Scandinavian and Teutonic legend of the Wild Horseman, who rides at midnight through the stormy sky, with his long train of dead behind him, and his weird hounds before. The Ribhus, or Arbhus, again, were the sunbeams or the lightning, who forged the armour of the Gods, and made their thunderbolts, and turned old people young, and restored out of the hide alone the slaughtered cow on which the Gods had feasted. Out of these heavenly artificers, the workers of the clouds, there came, in later times, two of the most striking stories of ancient legend--that of Thor, the Scandinavian thunder-god, who feasted at night on the goats which drew his chariot, and in the morning, by a touch of his hammer, brought them back to life; and that of Orpheus in the beautiful Greek legend, the master of divine song, who moved the streams, and rocks, and trees, by the beauty of his music, and brought back his wife Eurydike from the shades of death. In our Western fairy tales we still have these Ribhus, or Arbhus, transformed, through various changes of language, into Albs, and Elfen, and last into our English Elves. It is not needful to go further into the fanciful way in which the old Aryans slowly made ever-increasing deities and superhuman beings for themselves out of all the forms and aspects of Nature; or how their Hindu and Persian and Greek and Teuton descendants peopled all earth, and air, and sky, and water, with good and bad spirits and imaginary powers. But, as we shall see later, all these creatures grew out of one thing only--the Sun, and his influence upon the earth. Aryan myths were no more than poetic fancies about light and darkness, cloud and rain, night and day, storm and wind; and when they moved westward and southward, the Aryan races brought these legends with them; and they were shaped by degrees into the innumerable gods and demons of the Hindus, the divs and jinns of the Persians, the great gods, the minor deities, and nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs of Greek mythology and poetry; the stormy divinities, the giants, and trolls of the cold and rugged North; the dwarfs of the German forests; the elves who dance merrily in the moonlight of an English summer; and the "good people" who play mischievous tricks upon stray peasants amongst the Irish hills. Almost all, indeed, that we have of a legendary kind comes to us from our Aryan forefathers; sometimes scarcely changed, sometimes so altered that we have to puzzle out the links between the old and the new; but all these myths and traditions, and Old-world stories, when we come to know the meaning of them, take us back to the time when the Aryan races dwelt together in the high lands of Central Asia, and they all mean the same things--that is, the relation between the sun and the earth, the succession of night and day, of winter and summer, of storm and calm, of cloud and tempest, and golden sunshine and bright blue sky. And this is the source from which we get our Fairy Stories; for underneath all of them there are the same fanciful meanings, only changed and altered in the way of putting them, by the lapse of ages of time, by the circumstances of different countries, and by the fancy of those who kept the wonderful tales alive without knowing what they meant.
When the change happened that brought about all this, we do not know. It was thousands of years ago that the Aryan people began their march out of their old country in mid-Asia. But from the remains of their language and the likeness of their legends to those amongst other nations, we do know that ages and ages ago their country grew too small for them, so they were obliged to move away from it. They could not go eastward, for the great mountains shut them in; they could not go northward, for the great desert was too barren for their flocks and herds. So they turned, some of them southward into India and Persia, and some of them westward into Europe--at the time, perhaps, when the land of Europe stretched from the borders of Asia to our own islands, and when there was no sea between us and what is now the mainland. How they made their long and toilsome march we know not. But, as Kingsley writes of such