Alfaleith.org - Rydberg's Teutonic Mythology

The legend came also to Germany, but here it appears with the addition that the queen of Saba was rewarded for this piety, and was freed while wading across the brook from a bad blemish. One of her feet, so says the German addition, was of human form, but the other like the foot of a water-bird up to the moment when she took it out of the brook. Church sculpture sometimes in the middle age represented the queen of Saba as a woman well formed, except that she had one foot like that of a water-bird. How the Germans came to represent her with this blemish, foreign to the Italian legend, has not heretofore been explained, although the influence of the Greek-Roman mythology on the legends of the Romance peoples, and that of the Teutonic mythology on the Teutonic legends, has been traced in numerous instances.

During the middle ages the queen of Saba was called queen Seba, on account of the Latin translation of the Bible, where she is styled Regina Seba, and Seba was thought to be her name. The name suggested her identity, on the one hand, with Sibba, Sif, whose swan-guise lived in the traditions; on the other hand, with Sibilla, and the latter particularly, since queen Seba had proved herself to be in possession of prophetic inspiration, the chief characteristic of the Sibylla. Seba, Sibba, and Sibilla were in the popular fancy blended into one. This explains how queen Seba among the Germans, but not among the Italians, got the blemish which reminds us of the swan-guise of Thor's wife Sibba. And having come to the conclusion that Thor was a Trojan, his wife Sif also ought to be a Trojan woman. And as it was known that the Sibylla was Trojan, and that queen Seba was a Sibylla, this blending was almost inevitable. The Latin scholars found further evidence of the correctness of this identity in a statement drawn originally from Greek sources to the effect that Jupiter had had a Sibylla, by name Lamia, as mistress, and had begotten a daughter with her by name Herophile, who was endowed with her mother's gift of prophecy. As we know, Mercury corresponds to Odin, and Jupiter to Thor, in the names of the days of the week. It thus follows that it was Thor who stood in this relation to the Sibylla.

The character of the anthropomorphosed Odin, who is lawgiver and king, as represented in Heimskringla and the Prose Edda, is only in part based on native northern traditions concerning the heathen god Odin, the ruler of heaven. This younger Odin, constructed by Christian authors, has received his chief features from documents found in the convent libraries. When the Prose Edda tells that the chief who proceeded from Asgard to Saxland and Scandinavia did not really bear the name Odin, but had assumed this name after the elder and deified Odin-Priam of Troy, to make people believe that he was a god, then this was no new idea. Virgil's commentator, Servius, remarks that ancient kings very frequently assumed names which by right belonged only to the gods, and he blames Virgil for making Saturnus come from the heavenly Olympus to found a golden age in Italy. This Saturnus, says Servius, was not a god from above, but a mortal king from Crete who had taken the god Saturnus' name. The manner in which Saturnus, on his arrival in Italy and the vicinity of Rome, was received by Janus, the king ruling there, reminds us of the manner in which Odin, on his arrival in Svithiod, was received by king Gylfi. Janus is unpretentious enough to leave a portion of his territory and his royal power to Saturnus, and Gylfi makes the same concessions to Odin. Saturnus thereupon introduces a higher culture among the people of Latium, and Odin brings a higher culture to the inhabitants of Scandinavia. The Church father Lactantius, like Servius, speaks of kings who tried to appropriate the name and worship of the gods, and condemns them as foes of truth and violators of the doctrines of the true God.

In regard to one of them, the Persian Mithra, who, in the middle age, was confounded with Zoroaster, Tertulianus relates that he (Mithra), who knew in advance that Christianity would come, resolved to anticipate the true faith by introducing some of its customs. Thus, for example, Mithra, according to Tertulianus, introduced the custom of blessing by laying the hands on the head or the brow of those to whom he wished to insure prosperity, and he also adopted among his mysteries a practice resembling the breaking of the bread in the Eucharist. So far as the blessing by the laying on of hands is concerned, Mithra especially used it in giving courage to the men whom he sent out as soldiers to war. With these words of Tertulianus it is interesting to compare the following passage in regard to Odin in the Heimskringla: "It was his custom when he sent his men to war, or on some errand, to lay his hands on their head and give them bjannak". Bjannak is not a Norse word, not even Teutonic, and there has been uncertainty in regard to its significance. The well-known Icelandic philologist, Vigfusson, has, as I believe, given the correct definition of the word, having referred it to the Scottish word bannock and the Gaelic bangh, which means bread. Presumably the author of Heimskringla has chosen this foreign word in order not to wound the religious feelings of readers with a native term, for if bjannak really means bread, and if the author of Heimskringla desired in this way to indicate that Odin, by the aid of sacred usages, practised in the Christian cult - that is, by the laying on of hands and the breaking of bread - had given his warriors the assurance of victory, then it lay near at hand to modify, by the aid of a foreign word for bread, the impression of the disagreeable similarity between the heathen and Christian usages. But at the same time the complete harmony between what Tertulianus tells about Mithra and Heimskringla about Odin is manifest.

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