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130 Hagen: K vasir,
legend. Possibly this is more important in a consideration
of the name than the death-feature, which may, after all,
he quite secondary. The unsavory spittle-episode, which in
Snorri is so closely associated with the birth of Kvasir, is
almost altogether ruled out of order by Schiick. The peace
compact between æsir and vanir could never, he says, have
been celebrated by a common sacrifice so disgusting as this.
Kvasir, as his name shows, must originally have been this
common sacrifice. He could not originally have had any-
thing to do with the divine mead, and his presence in the
mead-episode must be due to a later combination based on
the confusion caused by several older and similar stories.
He displaces in this episode an older god Fjolnir, who in
the Ynglingatal is said to have been drowned by accident
in a large mead-vessel. A trace of him is found in Fjalar,
one of the dwarf slayers of Kvasir.
I think it is highly probable that Schlick is right, when
he rules Kvasir out of order in the episode dealing with the
origin of the divine mead. But my reason for doing so is
altogether different from that assigned by him. It is, in-
deed, this very disgusting spittle-episode which has guided
me to this conclusion. Schiick says in effect that Kvasir
could not have been born, but that he must have died, in
the peace-celebration between æsir and vanir. Snorri says
that he was created out of the mingled spittle of the æsir
and vanir.
The method I have followed in trying to discover why
a birth-story of such a peculiar character is told of a being
bearing the peculiar name Kvasir, is an obvious one. If it
be granted for a moment that the Kvasir story sufficiently
resembles the Orion story to have been borrowed from it
(cf. excreta, excrementum, with excrementum oris, ’spittle’,
Tacitus, H. 4, 81), we have only to examine the Orion ma-
terial for anything which might have given rise to the name
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