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genuine ’Sprachgefühl’, in such a matter, as a faet with which it
is utterly beyond his competency to dispute.
Apropos of my treatment of Hávamál 138 D. observes: — "die
shetländische Strophe erwähnt M. mit keiner Silbe, weil sie eben
gegen die Annahme dieser Interpolation spricht." How a
Shefc-land snatch of a song on Christ, not on record till 1878, and not
of an earlier date than the 14th Century, if at all so old, shonld
speak against the assuraption that out in Iceland an interpolation
had crept into a strophe of Hávamál in the thirteenth Century or
even earlier, I for one fail to see, my reviewer having discreetly
left the point unexplained.
D. finds my attempt at explaining the physical nature of
Sleipner "Eine recht unsinnliche Vorstellung". But is the explanation
not determined by the myth itself? Now, to begin with, air is
just as much of a material body as, for instance, water is, or, for
that matter, as stone or steel is. The currents of air are just as
genuinely material manifestations as are torrents, rapids or falls
of water or, for that matter, as are earthslips on a mountain side.
What is wanted is to look the thing in the face, and not to be
in any hurry to run away from what one sees. Grasp the myth
in its essence, and an explanation on the lines I have adopted is
bound to follow. Surely the sire of Sleipner was a storm-steed
from Jötunheim; obviously, then, the offspring inherited by birth
the nature and properties of its parentage. That the horse of the
god of the air should be imagined as a wind-steed is, surely, just
as correct a notion as is our common belief, that, like ourselves,
our riding horses are creatures of flesh and bone. The size of
Odin’s steed would naturally be determined by the size of the rider
— a Lord, who filled the toorld with his presence. Now I doubt
not my reviewer has long ago made the observation that the feet
of man bear him in the direction he wants to go; his feet, in fact,
are the executors of his locomotion. Well then, in the case of
the wind horse Sleipner, stampeding through the foliage of the
mighty Ask — the Clouds — is it really any more "unsinnlich"
or unrealistic to say that his eight feet indicate the eight
direc-tions into which the ancients supposed that wind could blow, than
to say that the feet of man indicate the direction of his movements?
D. thinks it more probable that to Odin’s horse was attributed
a supply of legs, double that of an ordinary horse, in order that
thereby should be indicated his magic speed, concerning which,
by the way, I am not aware that anything at all is lefl on record.
Well, D. scouts the idea of this speed being that of the wind; it
is but that of an ordinary horse with a set of four enchanted legs
aside. Four legs aside! In the inevitable entanglement of this
superfluity of lateral locomotors the creature would be doomed to
a speedless floundering for ever if it attempted any other mode
of Walking save that of lifting all the four legs aside together
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