06

Appendix 6

It is not as easy to dispose of Mysing, as the specialists pretend, e.g., by preferring to interpret his name as “mouse-gray” instead of the equally possible “son of a mouse.” Olrik (pp. 459f.) proposes to identify straightaway “King Mysing who killed Frith-Frothi, and the cow that struck down Frothi the Peaceful . . . King Mysing is merely a rationalistic explanation of the ancient monster.” (For the death of Frodi by means of a sea cow, see also P. Herrmann’s commentary on Saxo, pp. 380-84. This “cow” — in Iceland they remain within the frame of zoology and make it a stag — was, according to Saxo, a witch, who was pierced through by Frodi’s men. Afterwards they kept Frodi’s death a secret for three years, in the same manner as told by Snorri in his Heimskringla about Frey.)

A. H. Krappe, more observant, compared Mysing with Apollon Smintheus, the old “mouse-god” (ARW 33 [1936], pp. 40-56). He had in his mind, however, only the connection — undeniable as it is — between mice and rats and the plague, and the dragging-in of Smintheus does not much further the understanding of Mysing. This state of things was changed with the publication of the work by Hénri Gregoire, R. Goossens and M. Matthieu, “Asklepios, Apollon Smintheus et Rudra: Études sur le dieu à la taupe et le dieu au rat dans la Grèce et dans l’Inde,” although they do not even mention our Mysing, and although they loudly praise (p. 157) the merit of “Meillet . . . d’avoir fait descendre la mytholgie du ciel sur la terre”; with Rudra, and with the rat of Ganesha (who, by the way, acquired his elephant’s head because the planet Saturn, not being invited to the infant’s “baptism,” had looked upon the baby with his evil eye, thus destroying his head which was successfully replaced by that of an elephant), the mouse plot has got much deeper background. Nevertheless, the identity and the role of the mouse deity is hardly going to be settled without taking into account (1) “the tailed Mûs Parîk, arrayed with wings; the Sun fettered her to his own ray, so that she could not perpetrate harm; When she becomes free, she will do much injury to the world, till she is recaptured, having come eye-to-eye with the Sun”; this enigmatical winged mouse come from the world horoscope in the Iranian Bundahishn (chapter V, Anklesaria translation, p. 63); (2) the colorful Polynesian myths dealing with the rat that gnawed through the “Nets of Makalii,” i.e., Hyades and Pleiades; she could do so unpunished being Makalii’s very own sister; (3) the warriors, in the guise of mice, of Llwyd, son of Cil Coed, “who cast enchantment over the seven cantrefs of Dyfed . . . to avenge Gwawl son of Clud,” in the third branch of the Mabinogi. There are more items, to be sure, but we have to leave it at that.