02

Chapter II

  1. FUF 3 (1903), pp. 61-97, 188-255; 7 (1907), pp. 188-224; 10 (191), pp. 44-127.

  2. Kalevalastudien 6. Kullervo (1928).

  3. Translated by W. F. Kirby (Everyman’s Library). The original rough meter has been made to sound like a poor man’s Hiawatha, but it was the original metric model for Longfellow.

  4. “Kullervo-Hamlet,” FUF 7, p. 192.

  5. There is a strange Dindsencha (this word applies to the explanations of place-names which occur repeatedly in Irish tradition; see W. Stokes, “The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindsenchas,” RC 16, pp. 278f.) about the felling of five giant trees — three ash trees, one oak, one yew. “The oak fell to the south, over Mag n-Ailte, as far as the Pillar of the Living Tree. 900 bushels was its crop of acorns, and three crops it bore every year . . . apples, nuts, and acorns. The ash of Tortu fell to the South-east, that from Usnach to the North. The yew north-east, as far as Druinn Bairr it fell. The ash of Belach Dahli fell upwards as far as Carn Uachtair Bile.”

  6. The Esthonian Kalevipoeg (= son of Kaleva, the same as Finnish Kalevanpoika) makes the soil barren wherever he has plowed with his wooden plow (Setala, FUF 7, p. 215), but he, too, fells trees with noise — as far as the stroke of his axe is heard, the trees fall down (p. 103). As for Celtic tradition, one of the Rennes Dindsenchas tells that arable land is changed into woodland because brother had killed brother, “so that a wood and stunted bushes overspread Guaire’s country, because of the parricide which he committed” (Stokes, RC 16, p. 35). Whereas J. Loth (Les Mabinogion du Livre Rouge de Hergest, vol.1, p. 171, n. 6) gives the names of three heroes who make a country sterile: Morgan Mwynvawr, Run, son of Beli, and Llew Llaw Gyffes, who turn the ground red. Nothing grew for a year, herb or plant, where they passed: Arthur was more ‘rudvawe’ than they. Where Arthur had passed, for seven years nothing would grow." ;Rudvawe means “red ravager,” as we learn from Rachel Bromwich (Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads [1961], p. 35). Seven years was the cycle of the German Wild Hunter; Arthur was a Wild Hunter, too. The “Waste Land” is, moreover, a standard motif of the legends spun around the Grail and the Fisher King. All this will make sense eventually.

  7. This might originally have been the same story as the one about Romulus drawing a furrow around the new city and killing Remus for jumping over it. In the Roman tradition, the murder makes no sense. Without following up this key phenomenon here, we would like to say that in Finland the stone labyrinth (the English “Troy town”) is called Giant’s Fence, and also St. Peter’s Game, Ruins of Jerusalem, Giant’s Street, and Stone Fence (see W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths, p. 150). Whereas Al Biruni (India 1, p. 306) when dealing with Lanka (Ceylon) — i.e., Ravana’s labyrinth that was conquered by Rama and Hanuman — remarks that in Muslim countries this “labyrinthic fortress is called Yavana-Koti, which has been frequently explained as Rome.”

  8. K. Kerenyi, “Zum Urkind-Mythologen,” Paideuma 1 (1940), p. 255