II. THE UNDYING ONES.

The myth of the Wandering Jew belongs, essentially, to a class which has great antiquity, and is found in every part of the world.

At a period before Animism had been embodied in clear conceptions of a life beyond the grave, the human heart and mind had to adapt themselves as well as they could to the King of Terrors, which destroyed the greatest as well as the humblest. The first that were ideally wrested from Death were saints and heroes; and it was necessary to find for these an earthly immortality. Many myths and legends of the undying ones are no doubt variants of each other; but they are found among races so separate in origin and history, that we may be content to find their common root in human nature. Men cannot bear to think that their leaders, heroes, saviours are really dead. They resolutely repel the unwelcome fact as long as they can. They easily credit any rumour that the reported death is some fiction of the enemy, or possibly a stratagem of their own party-leaders. It is said that after the death of General Jackson, a President of the United States, many democrats still voted for him at the following election, denouncing the report of his death as “another Whig lie.” The story if not true is ben trovato; and there are facts enough like it even in modern history. Sceptics were found in France who but slowly credited the tidings of the death of Napoleon III.: their transient suspicions were echoes of Beranger’s cry when he heard of the first Napoleon’s death: “God, I can scarce believe Thee without him!”⁠[1]

It is recorded in the Heimskringla that, after the death of King Odin, “the Swedes believed that he often showed himself to them before any great battle. To some he gave victory, others he invited to himself; and they reckoned both of these to be well off in their fate.” Thus, the Wild Huntsman began his career. This tendency in the popular mind was utilised by courtiers of the next popular monarch. This was Freyr, second monarch after Odin, who probably lived in the first century of our era, and built the great temple at Upsal. It is recorded: “Then began, in his days, the Frode-peace; and then there were good seasons in all the land, which the Swedes ascribed to Freyr, so that he was more worshipped than the other gods, as the people became much richer in his days by reason of the peace and good seasons.... Freyr fell into a sickness; and as his illness took the upper hand, his men took the plan of letting few approach him. In the meantime they raised a great mound, in which they placed a door with three holes in it. Now when Freyr died they bore him secretly into the mound, but told the Swedes he was alive; and they kept watch over him for three years. They brought all the taxes into the mound; and through the one hole they put in the gold, through the other the silver, and through the third the copper money that was paid. Peace and good seasons prevailed.... When it became known to the Swedes that Freyr was dead, and yet peace and good seasons continued, they believed that it must be so as long as Freyr remained in Sweden; and therefore they would not burn his remains, but called him the god of this world, and afterwards offered continually blood sacrifices to him, principally for peace and good seasons.”⁠[2] Here we have one chapter in the genesis of these immortals. Men have been executed in Portugal for professing to be Sebastian returned. In the time of James II., country-people in England believed that Monmouth had not really died on the scaffold, but “would suddenly appear, would lead them on to victory, and would tread down the King and the Jesuits under his feet.”⁠[3] Some believed him to be the Man in the Iron Mask.

On the death of King Arthur all hope of finding the Holy Graal seemed to vanish. On the “Morte d’Arthur” it is written: “This of King Arthur, I find no more written in my copy of the certainty of his death; but thus he was led away in a barge, wherein were three Queens; and one was King Arthur’s sister, Queen Morgan le Fay, and there was Nimue, the chief Lady of the Lake. More of the death of King Arthur, could I never find. But that ladies brought such a one unto burials, that he was buried here, that the hermit bare witness that sometime was Bishop of Canterbury and dwelled that time in a chapel beside Glastonbury. But yet the hermit knew not, of a certain, that it was verily the body of King Arthur. Some men yet say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had, by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, into another place. And men say that he will come again, and he shall win the Holy Cross.”⁠[4] That King Arthur is in the Vale of Avalon (of Apples) attended by fairies; that in some regions he has been found by shepherds slumbering, like Barbarossa, with his knights in a subterranean castle (at Sewingshields especially); that in others he has been seen, like Wodan, at the head of a ghostly hunt by night: these are legends found far and wide in British and Breton folklore. Tennyson makes Arthur repose in—

Germany has many corresponding myths, chief of which is that of Frederick I., or Barbarossa, believed to be sleeping under Raven’s Hill at Kaiserlautern, ready to come forth in the last emergency (or glory and unity) of his country. There, in his palace (or grotto) underground, a shepherd once found him surrounded by his sleeping knights, all in armour; the horses near by in harness. The red beard, which gave the hero his name, had grown through the stone table before him, and taken root in the floor. As the shepherd entered, Barbarossa awoke and asked:

“Are the ravens still flying round the hill?”

“Yes.”

“Then must I sleep another hundred years.”

On the evening when the present Emperor of Germany had reviewed his troops, after his late war with France, this legend was represented before him in a series of marvellous tableaux which I witnessed. In the last it was shown that the hour had arrived for Frederick the Red Beard to come forth, and it need hardly be said that he bore a striking resemblance to the Emperor William. In some regions it is said that Frau Holda stands beside the slumbering Barbarossa: this may have helped to give us our familiar variant The Sleeping Beauty.

It is said that after Pope Paschal III. had made Charlemagne a saint, Otho III. (anno 997) opened that Emperor’s tomb and found him seated on his throne, with his crown, imperial robe, and sceptre, and on his knees a copy of the Gospels. Beside him was his sword Joyeuse, and his pilgrim’s pouch. So Charlemagne was added to the list of holy sleepers.

In another work I have spoken of these Sleepers, and also of the Wanderers.⁠[5] The list of such, too long to be given here, includes Tell, in Switzerland; Boabdil of Spain; Sebastian of Portugal; Olger Dansk; Thomas of Ercildoune, and many another, down to such præternatural if not perpetual sleepers as Rip Van Winkle, and the Abbot Cormac of Killarney, who listened two hundred years to the singing of a nightingale. The Abbot had doubted if he would not find the singing of heaven tiresome; he supposed he had listened to the bird a few moments only in the wood, but returned to find all changed. The legend has inspired one of Allingham’s beautiful ballads, “The Abbot of Inisfalen.” Herodotus (iv. 94) relates the tale of Zalmoxis, the Thracian, who, disgusted with the uncivilised life around him, had a subterranean hall built and there resided. Some presently believed that Zalmoxis never died; others regarded him as a god; and ultimately it became a custom of the Getans to despatch a messenger, every fifth year, to him, by hurling some man into the air and catching him on javelins. If the victim dies Zalmoxis is propitious. Plutarch relates a story similar to this (De Defect. Orac.), as told by one Cleombrotus, concerning an Oriental personage who appeared among his fellow-men only once a year. The rest of his life was passed among friendly nymphs and demons, and as these are said to have rendered him proof against disease it may be supposed that he was one of the undying.

Similar legends are indeed found among the aboriginal races of North America. Such heroes as Booin (Nova Scotia) and Hiawatha were supposed never to have died. Booin was carried to a happy land inside a friendly whale, whom he compensated with the tobacco which the Micmacs still see smoking in the spout of that animal; and Hiawatha “sailed into the purple sunset.” To these good Indians migrate when they die. The Incas of Peru also were found believing that the founder of their kingdom never died, but would return to restore its ancient splendours. The Muyscas of Bogota relate that the first lawgiver of Bochica lived among their tribe 2000 years, then “withdrew,” and he is now known as Idacanzas.⁠[6]

It is interesting to compare such primitive forms of the myth with those assumed by it amid the advanced phases of Animism. Tithonus, for whom Eos obtained the gift of immortality but not that of perpetual youth, whom divine pity changed into a grasshopper, became the proverbial title of a decrepit old man, and represents the nearest approach to an earthly immortal in Greek mythology. The immortals exist indeed, but in changed forms, or even if the human powers be preserved it must be in Hades, as in the case of Teiresias. The Glaucus-myth, running through several variants, shows the evolution of this class of myths. Surviving all ordeals in Crete—the sea, the cask of honey, the serpent’s bite—he becomes on the Corinthian coast an evil ghost, and in Bœotia a marine deity. In classic ages every hero has his vulnerable point where he is sure to be touched at last.