The exposure of
the child in infancy represents the long rays of the
morning-sun resting on the hillside. Then Paris forsakes
Oinone ("the wine-coloured one"), but meets her again at the
gloaming when she lays herself by his side amid the crimson
flames of the funeral pyre. Sarpedon also, a solar hero, is
made to fight on the side of the Niblungs or Trojans, attended
by his friend Glaukos ("the brilliant one"). They command the
Lykians, or "children of light"; and with them comes also
Memnon, son of the Dawn, from the fiery land of the Aithiopes,
the favourite haunt of Zeus and the gods of Olympos.
The Iliad-myth must therefore have been current many ages
before the Greeks inhabited Greece, long before there was any
Ilion to be conquered. Nevertheless, this does not forbid the
supposition that the legend, as we have it, may have been
formed by the crystallization of mythical conceptions about a
nucleus of genuine tradition. In this view I am upheld by a
most sagacious and accurate scholar, Mr. E. A. Freeman, who
finds in Carlovingian romance an excellent illustration of the
problem before us.
The Charlemagne of romance is a mythical personage. He is
supposed to have been a Frenchman, at a time when neither the
French nation nor the French language can properly be said to
have existed; and he is represented as a doughty crusader,
although crusading was not thought of until long after the
Karolingian era.
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