Popular Tales from the Norse | Page 8

the Swiss patriot, as firmly as they believe in anything; but,
unfortunately, this story of the bold archer who saves his life by
shooting an apple from the head of his child at the command of a tyrant,
is common to the whole Aryan race. It appears in Saxo Grammaticus,
who flourished in the twelfth century, where it is told of Palnatoki,
King Harold Gormson's thane and assassin. In the thirteenth century the
Wilkina Saga relates it of Egill, Völundr's--our Wayland
Smith's--younger brother. So also in the Norse Saga of Saint Olof, king
and martyr; the king, who died in 1030, eager for the conversion of one
of his heathen chiefs Eindridi, competes with him in various athletic
exercises, first in swimming and then in archery. After several famous
shots on either side, the king challenges Eindridi to shoot a tablet off
his son's head without hurting the child. Eindridi is ready, but declares
he will revenge himself if the child is hurt. The king has the first shot,
and his arrow strikes close to the tablet. Then Eindridi is to shoot, but at
the prayers of his mother and sister, refuses the shot, and has to yield
and be converted [Fornm. Sog., 2, 272]. So, also, King Harold
Sigurdarson, who died 1066, backed himself against a famous
marksman, Hemingr, and ordered him to shoot a hazel nut off the head
of his brother Björn, and Hemingr performed the feat [Müller's Saga
Bibl., 3, 359]. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Malleus
Maleficarum refers it to Puncher, a magician of the Upper Rhine. Here
in England, we have it in the old English ballad of Adam Bell, Clym of
the Clough, and William of Cloudesly, where William performs the feat
[see the ballad in Percy's Reliques]. It is not at all of Tell in Switzerland

before the year 1499, and the earlier Swiss chronicles omit it altogether.
It is common to the Turks and Mongolians; and a legend of the wild
Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives, relates
it, chapter and verse, of one of their famous marksmen. What shall we
say then, but that the story of this bold master-shot was primaeval
amongst many tribes and races, and that it only crystallized itself round
the great name of Tell by that process of attraction which invariably
leads a grateful people to throw such mythic wreaths, such garlands of
bold deeds of precious memory, round the brow of its darling champion
[5].
Nor let any pious Welshman be shocked if we venture to assert that
Gellert, that famous hound upon whose last resting-place the traveller
comes as he passes down the lovely vale of Gwynant, is a mythical dog,
and never snuffed the fresh breeze in the forest of Snowdon, nor saved
his master's child from ravening wolf. This, too, is a primaeval story,
told with many variations. Sometimes the foe is a wolf, sometimes a
bear, sometimes a snake. Sometimes the faithful guardian of the child
is an otter, a weasel, or a dog. It, too, came from the East. It is found in
the Pantcha-Tantra, in the Hitopadesa, in Bidpai's Fables, in the
Arabic original of The Seven Wise Masters, that famous collection of
stories which illustrate a stepdame's calumny and hate, and in many
mediaeval versions of those originals [6]. Thence it passed into the
Latin Gesta Romanorum, where, as well as in the Old English version
published by Sir Frederick Madden, it may be read as a service
rendered by a faithful hound against a snake. This, too, like Tell's
master-shot, is as the lightning which shineth over the whole heaven at
once, and can be claimed by no one tribe of the Aryan race, to the
exclusion of the rest. 'The Dog of Montargis' is in like manner mythic,
though perhaps not so widely spread. It first occurs in France, as told of
Sybilla, a fabulous wife of Charlemagne; but it is at any rate as old as
the time of Plutarch, who relates it as an anecdote of brute sagacity in
the days of Pyrrhus.
There can be no doubt, with regard to the question of the origin of these
tales, that they were common in germ at least to the Aryan tribes before
their migration. We find those germs developed in the popular

traditions of the Eastern Aryans, and we find them developed in a
hundred forms and shapes in every one of the nations into which the
Western Aryans have shaped themselves in the course of ages. We are
led, therefore, irresistibly to the conclusion, that these traditions are as
much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors, as their
language unquestionably is; and that they form, along with that
language, a double