Karl Meuli
1921
translated by Jason Colavito
2025
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NOTE |
Karl Meuli (1891-1968) was a Swiss ethnologist whose primary interests revolved around folklore and death rituals. It is therefore no surprise that when he turned his attention as a young man to the question of the Argonautica’s relationship to the Odyssey, he focused on the connections these Greek works had to folklore and a supernatural voyage to the realm of the dead, the underworld. His 1921 study Odyssee und Argonautika (Odyssey and Argonautica) contains the foundation of an argument later developed by M. L. West that the myth of the Argonauts’ voyage eastward predated Homer by centuries and from a lost oral epic about Jason and his ship Homer took many incidents and adventures to attach to his own poem of Odysseus’ wanderings. This is self-evident from Homer’s allusions to the Jason myth, as well as from the geographic confusion of the Odyssey where Argonautic adventures in the East are awkwardly grafted into Odysseus’s westward voyage. Meuli’s first chapter spent twenty-five pages arguing that the original Argonautica was a fairy tale by comparing it at length to a laundry-list of fairy tales and folklore. The second chapter, comprising fully half the book, attempted to evaluate the poetical composition of the Odyssey and to identify incidents and stories that were not original to Homer but which must have been grafted on to the presumed original myth of Odysseus. This he again attempted to discern through tedious fairy tale parallels. From these chapters, much of which is now outdated, I have selected a few brief passages to translate. Meuli’s argument that the Odyssey is dependent on an earlier Argonautica is primarily concentrated in the third and final chapter of his book, which I have translated below in full, along with his conclusion.
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ODYSSEY AND ARGONAUTICA
I. The Argonaut Epic and Helper Folk Tales.
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Now every illiterate and uneducated man is, in a sense, a child, and, like a child, he is fond of stories; and for that matter, so is the half-educated man, for his reasoning faculty has not been fully developed, and, besides, the mental habits of his childhood persist in him. (Strabo 1.2.8)
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Who were the oldest participants in the Argonauts' voyage? Which of the nearly 100 heroes mentioned are most closely linked to the events?
By the time the first reports of the voyage came down to us, the myth had already undergone a long development. Colonizing heroes had penetrated the circle of the Argonauts; the ambition of individual cities and families had forced the admission of their tribal heroes into the illustrious association; heroes with independent cycles of legend could not be left out of this oldest and most glorious undertaking; indeed, the striving for systematic completeness, that is, to know the specific hero for each of the 50 oar positions, is already clearly recognizable. The strikingly numerous pairs of brothers mentioned were probably so popular because they could easily occupy a double rowing-bench. On the middle bench, the two strongest, Heracles and Ancaeus, sit together.
From this consideration it follows that not much would be gained for our problem by investigating and questioning the oldest witnesses, even if their information had been preserved to us in its entirety and not only in fragments. The oldest completely preserved list is given by Pindar in his Fourth Pythian Ode. However, he does not list all the heroes; his song honors only 10 select sons of the gods by mentioning them, apart from Jason (v. 191, also the seer Mopsus). Apollodorus (9.16.7) has preserved a few unique pieces of information, all from good sources, as Heyne and Clavier have already correctly observed. The richest, of course, is the learned Apollonius (I. 23f.). Hyginus (Fabula 14), Valerius Flaccus (I 350f.), and Pseudo-Orpheus (Argonaut., 119f.) are essentially dependent. Diodorus (4.41), who also selects only a few particularly glorious heroes, partly again based on new sources, offers nothing special.
Thus, we are referred to internal evidence if we wish to identify the earliest Argonaut heroes. Since Karl Otfried Müller (Orchonienus and the Minyans, 253 f.) and almost simultaneously Ph. Buttmann (Abh. d. K. Akademic der Wissensch. Berlin 1820 = Mythologus II 194, esp. p. 207) have demonstrated the local origin and development of the legend in Orchomenus and Iolcus, the inner Minyan tribe is usually considered the core of the heroic group. But what if it were possible to descend even deeper into the foundation of the myth, which "here, as everywhere, is not a historical fact, but an ideal"?—What if this "ideal," which was first reinterpreted as a historical fact, to which historical memories were first attached, could be grasped? Let the attempt be daring.
If we examine the lists of names, we notice the mention of miraculous qualities in several heroes. Lynceus has the sharpest eye of all mortals, Perikynienus can transform himself into any desired form, Euphemus hurries across the sea waves with bare feet, the Boreaeds run with the speed of the wind. But one expects in vain to see these reputed powers in action. True, the Boreaeds chase the Harpies and thus free King Phineus from daily renewed torment; but of all the others—besides those already mentioned, even more heroes with supernatural powers will be found later—the narrator is unable to report any achievements commensurate with their special abilities. For when Lynceus in Libya spies the wandering Heracles in the far distance, this passage, even if it were ancient, has no significance for the progression of the action. Undoubtedly, at an earlier stage of the narrative's development, these heroes must have been given their special traits, and the mere mention of the miraculous quality must have been followed by the report of a corresponding deed. And if we imagine this deed being returned to each one, as it should be, the story takes on a face we know quite well from elsewhere. A perilous journey, the purpose of which is the acquisition of a great treasure, brings together, under the leadership of a chosen one, a troop of heroes with supernatural powers; the dangers that stand in the way, the tasks that are set before the acquisition of that precious prize, are overcome and solved by the companions thanks to their miraculous powers. This is nothing other than the fairy tale of the skillful servants!
A hero aims to win a prize whose glory has already lured many, but always to their ruin, be it the "the most beautiful main in the world" or a rich hoard. The guardians of the treasure, often the magical and hostile parents, set him supernaturally difficult tasks; contrary to expectations, the hero solves them all, or perhaps his companions solve them for him by virtue of their miraculous qualities. This is the typical course of the fairy tale, told infinitely often and everywhere. It is familiar to us above all from that magnificent book, which in richness of form, in delicacy, power, and poetic splendor of the narrative still stands high above all similar ones, and which always cheers and refreshes the fairy tale enthusiast, when he returns, tired and dejected, from his wandering through the vast and often ugly jungle of modern fairy tale collections: the Children's and Household Tales, collected by the Brothers Grimm. Who doesn't know the Six Artful Servants? Who doesn't know the delightful company of the six who travel the world? Or the Four Artful Brothers?
But how did it happen that the miraculous deeds of the heroes have been reduced to such scant traces? It is not difficult to discover the cause. Our fairy tale, for example, contains the element that the hero loves the heroine, and from the story of Theseus and Ariadne, as well as from many fairy tales, we know of the king's daughter who, secretly (at least in front of her parents), supports the suitor in solving his tasks. This more novelistic love motif, whether borrowed from another story or developed from the circumstances of our own, has become dominant in the Argonaut legend and has already made the deeds of the other heroes superfluous early on. All that remains is the characterization of the miraculous qualities, but even that has often become unclear and has often only been retained when naming the heroes outside the Argonaut catalog. We will examine the Argonauts in more detail later, but first, a few remarks about our story. It would be very tempting to treat this story in great detail; neither Benfey nor Cosquin nor Panzer nor anyone else who has come to my attention can be considered conclusive, and yet the investigation promises many interesting results. However, it lies neither in our plan nor in our ability, and so what follows makes no claim to exhaust the question.
The fairy tale has been active with rich and willful imagination in devising difficult tasks and illustrating wonderful qualities. For example, a sharp-eyed person on the top of the Strasbourg Minster tower spies a yawning flea and, in its mouth, a hollow tooth; and in a Swabian fairy tale, one can even "fill an entire kingdom as soon as he pulls the bung out of his backside." Such and similar yarns are the comical creatures of a witty imagination; in these fairy tales, the Strong One, the Sharp-eyed One, the Speed Runner, the Blower, the Frosty One, and the Eater reappear most frequently. Surely they were all originally the helpers of a Chosen One, for whose benefit they used their miraculous powers, the servants of the only "true prince." There is indeed a very considerable number of fairy tales where the skillful ones win the prize for themselves, and Benfey considered this form to be the original one. But it is not; and regardless of the fact that the oldest tale, the one about the Argonauts, already features this darling of fate in Jason, it can be demonstrated that Benfey's type is a derived, secondary one.
[…] The Argonaut legend, in particular, preserved the ancient idea that the voyage led to Helios: "Jason sailed to the city of Aeëtes, where the rays of swift Helios lie in a golden chamber," Mimnermus reports (fr. 11). But myth also preserved other ideas of the voyage to the afterlife with the most desirable clarity: it goes across the sea, beyond which Helios lives. The Alexandrian poet, who followed Ovid in Metam. II 6 (Knaack Quaestt. Phaethont. 28), decorated his palace with images of sea life, and in the fairy tale this has become a long and dangerous sea voyage or at least the crossing of a mighty river. But the hero must also pass through that mythical gate, the πύλαι Ηελίοιο (Gates of the Sun), whose dangers are depicted in ever-changing images from the oldest myths to the most distorted modern fairy tales.
[…] Let us try to summarize our findings. The oldest core of the Argonaut legend is a story very closely related to the fairy tale of the artful helpers. It tells how a hero, with the help of animals, perhaps also natural forces such as wind and frost, won a maiden from the sun or a riches, perhaps even both, as his helpers used their miraculous powers to solve assigned tasks or overcome hindering dangers. We can no longer call this narrative, which stands so peculiarly between nature myth, animal fable, and fairy tale, a "fairy tale." We must recognize in it a kind of common source for heroic legend and fairy tale, which could be called something like an "original fable," fable in the sense of the old fabula. A. Heusler suggests "original fairy tale" or "original myth" (Sitzungsberichte der Preuß. Akademie 1919, XV/XVI p. 163). When Panzer, carried away by the abundance of fairytale parallels, which very often reveal the original more clearly, claims that the heroic legend also developed from fairy tales, this claim requires modification in the sense indicated to be correct. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: several of the Argonauts still bear the characteristics of the skilled helpers or even resemble animals, and these must surely be considered the most original participants in the voyage. These would be Idas, Lynceus, Autolycus, possibly also Palaemon, Erginus, Periclymenus, and perhaps Echion, Ancaeus, Coronus, and Argos. For Orpheus and Euphemus, whose miraculous qualities suggest the same assumption, no definite clue emerges from the fairy tale. Our list agrees with K. O. Müller's quite differently derived list in the names of the Argonauts: Erginus, Koronus, and Periklymenus, who are initially joined by, among others, the Thessalian Echion and Euphemus (Orchomenus 2 254 f.); ours is enriched by the Apharides, Ancaeus, and Autolycus. The helpers, through the development of the motif of the king's daughter who loves the bold suitor and secretly helps him, quickly became less important and were ultimately repressed to only minimal traces, recognizable only in name and character. Only the precipitation of historical memory begins to build on this "ideal core"; the mythical event becomes a historical event, the heroes become people of historical existence and continuing progeny, the fairytale land of the sun comes to rest on the well-founded, visible earth, and legends of foundation, tribes, and lineages entwine themselves richly and richly into the ancient growth.
By the time the first reports of the voyage came down to us, the myth had already undergone a long development. Colonizing heroes had penetrated the circle of the Argonauts; the ambition of individual cities and families had forced the admission of their tribal heroes into the illustrious association; heroes with independent cycles of legend could not be left out of this oldest and most glorious undertaking; indeed, the striving for systematic completeness, that is, to know the specific hero for each of the 50 oar positions, is already clearly recognizable. The strikingly numerous pairs of brothers mentioned were probably so popular because they could easily occupy a double rowing-bench. On the middle bench, the two strongest, Heracles and Ancaeus, sit together.
From this consideration it follows that not much would be gained for our problem by investigating and questioning the oldest witnesses, even if their information had been preserved to us in its entirety and not only in fragments. The oldest completely preserved list is given by Pindar in his Fourth Pythian Ode. However, he does not list all the heroes; his song honors only 10 select sons of the gods by mentioning them, apart from Jason (v. 191, also the seer Mopsus). Apollodorus (9.16.7) has preserved a few unique pieces of information, all from good sources, as Heyne and Clavier have already correctly observed. The richest, of course, is the learned Apollonius (I. 23f.). Hyginus (Fabula 14), Valerius Flaccus (I 350f.), and Pseudo-Orpheus (Argonaut., 119f.) are essentially dependent. Diodorus (4.41), who also selects only a few particularly glorious heroes, partly again based on new sources, offers nothing special.
Thus, we are referred to internal evidence if we wish to identify the earliest Argonaut heroes. Since Karl Otfried Müller (Orchonienus and the Minyans, 253 f.) and almost simultaneously Ph. Buttmann (Abh. d. K. Akademic der Wissensch. Berlin 1820 = Mythologus II 194, esp. p. 207) have demonstrated the local origin and development of the legend in Orchomenus and Iolcus, the inner Minyan tribe is usually considered the core of the heroic group. But what if it were possible to descend even deeper into the foundation of the myth, which "here, as everywhere, is not a historical fact, but an ideal"?—What if this "ideal," which was first reinterpreted as a historical fact, to which historical memories were first attached, could be grasped? Let the attempt be daring.
If we examine the lists of names, we notice the mention of miraculous qualities in several heroes. Lynceus has the sharpest eye of all mortals, Perikynienus can transform himself into any desired form, Euphemus hurries across the sea waves with bare feet, the Boreaeds run with the speed of the wind. But one expects in vain to see these reputed powers in action. True, the Boreaeds chase the Harpies and thus free King Phineus from daily renewed torment; but of all the others—besides those already mentioned, even more heroes with supernatural powers will be found later—the narrator is unable to report any achievements commensurate with their special abilities. For when Lynceus in Libya spies the wandering Heracles in the far distance, this passage, even if it were ancient, has no significance for the progression of the action. Undoubtedly, at an earlier stage of the narrative's development, these heroes must have been given their special traits, and the mere mention of the miraculous quality must have been followed by the report of a corresponding deed. And if we imagine this deed being returned to each one, as it should be, the story takes on a face we know quite well from elsewhere. A perilous journey, the purpose of which is the acquisition of a great treasure, brings together, under the leadership of a chosen one, a troop of heroes with supernatural powers; the dangers that stand in the way, the tasks that are set before the acquisition of that precious prize, are overcome and solved by the companions thanks to their miraculous powers. This is nothing other than the fairy tale of the skillful servants!
A hero aims to win a prize whose glory has already lured many, but always to their ruin, be it the "the most beautiful main in the world" or a rich hoard. The guardians of the treasure, often the magical and hostile parents, set him supernaturally difficult tasks; contrary to expectations, the hero solves them all, or perhaps his companions solve them for him by virtue of their miraculous qualities. This is the typical course of the fairy tale, told infinitely often and everywhere. It is familiar to us above all from that magnificent book, which in richness of form, in delicacy, power, and poetic splendor of the narrative still stands high above all similar ones, and which always cheers and refreshes the fairy tale enthusiast, when he returns, tired and dejected, from his wandering through the vast and often ugly jungle of modern fairy tale collections: the Children's and Household Tales, collected by the Brothers Grimm. Who doesn't know the Six Artful Servants? Who doesn't know the delightful company of the six who travel the world? Or the Four Artful Brothers?
But how did it happen that the miraculous deeds of the heroes have been reduced to such scant traces? It is not difficult to discover the cause. Our fairy tale, for example, contains the element that the hero loves the heroine, and from the story of Theseus and Ariadne, as well as from many fairy tales, we know of the king's daughter who, secretly (at least in front of her parents), supports the suitor in solving his tasks. This more novelistic love motif, whether borrowed from another story or developed from the circumstances of our own, has become dominant in the Argonaut legend and has already made the deeds of the other heroes superfluous early on. All that remains is the characterization of the miraculous qualities, but even that has often become unclear and has often only been retained when naming the heroes outside the Argonaut catalog. We will examine the Argonauts in more detail later, but first, a few remarks about our story. It would be very tempting to treat this story in great detail; neither Benfey nor Cosquin nor Panzer nor anyone else who has come to my attention can be considered conclusive, and yet the investigation promises many interesting results. However, it lies neither in our plan nor in our ability, and so what follows makes no claim to exhaust the question.
The fairy tale has been active with rich and willful imagination in devising difficult tasks and illustrating wonderful qualities. For example, a sharp-eyed person on the top of the Strasbourg Minster tower spies a yawning flea and, in its mouth, a hollow tooth; and in a Swabian fairy tale, one can even "fill an entire kingdom as soon as he pulls the bung out of his backside." Such and similar yarns are the comical creatures of a witty imagination; in these fairy tales, the Strong One, the Sharp-eyed One, the Speed Runner, the Blower, the Frosty One, and the Eater reappear most frequently. Surely they were all originally the helpers of a Chosen One, for whose benefit they used their miraculous powers, the servants of the only "true prince." There is indeed a very considerable number of fairy tales where the skillful ones win the prize for themselves, and Benfey considered this form to be the original one. But it is not; and regardless of the fact that the oldest tale, the one about the Argonauts, already features this darling of fate in Jason, it can be demonstrated that Benfey's type is a derived, secondary one.
[…] The Argonaut legend, in particular, preserved the ancient idea that the voyage led to Helios: "Jason sailed to the city of Aeëtes, where the rays of swift Helios lie in a golden chamber," Mimnermus reports (fr. 11). But myth also preserved other ideas of the voyage to the afterlife with the most desirable clarity: it goes across the sea, beyond which Helios lives. The Alexandrian poet, who followed Ovid in Metam. II 6 (Knaack Quaestt. Phaethont. 28), decorated his palace with images of sea life, and in the fairy tale this has become a long and dangerous sea voyage or at least the crossing of a mighty river. But the hero must also pass through that mythical gate, the πύλαι Ηελίοιο (Gates of the Sun), whose dangers are depicted in ever-changing images from the oldest myths to the most distorted modern fairy tales.
[…] Let us try to summarize our findings. The oldest core of the Argonaut legend is a story very closely related to the fairy tale of the artful helpers. It tells how a hero, with the help of animals, perhaps also natural forces such as wind and frost, won a maiden from the sun or a riches, perhaps even both, as his helpers used their miraculous powers to solve assigned tasks or overcome hindering dangers. We can no longer call this narrative, which stands so peculiarly between nature myth, animal fable, and fairy tale, a "fairy tale." We must recognize in it a kind of common source for heroic legend and fairy tale, which could be called something like an "original fable," fable in the sense of the old fabula. A. Heusler suggests "original fairy tale" or "original myth" (Sitzungsberichte der Preuß. Akademie 1919, XV/XVI p. 163). When Panzer, carried away by the abundance of fairytale parallels, which very often reveal the original more clearly, claims that the heroic legend also developed from fairy tales, this claim requires modification in the sense indicated to be correct. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: several of the Argonauts still bear the characteristics of the skilled helpers or even resemble animals, and these must surely be considered the most original participants in the voyage. These would be Idas, Lynceus, Autolycus, possibly also Palaemon, Erginus, Periclymenus, and perhaps Echion, Ancaeus, Coronus, and Argos. For Orpheus and Euphemus, whose miraculous qualities suggest the same assumption, no definite clue emerges from the fairy tale. Our list agrees with K. O. Müller's quite differently derived list in the names of the Argonauts: Erginus, Koronus, and Periklymenus, who are initially joined by, among others, the Thessalian Echion and Euphemus (Orchomenus 2 254 f.); ours is enriched by the Apharides, Ancaeus, and Autolycus. The helpers, through the development of the motif of the king's daughter who loves the bold suitor and secretly helps him, quickly became less important and were ultimately repressed to only minimal traces, recognizable only in name and character. Only the precipitation of historical memory begins to build on this "ideal core"; the mythical event becomes a historical event, the heroes become people of historical existence and continuing progeny, the fairytale land of the sun comes to rest on the well-founded, visible earth, and legends of foundation, tribes, and lineages entwine themselves richly and richly into the ancient growth.
II. The Wanderings of Odysseus.
That the Argonaut legend is, at its core, ancient is clear from what has been said so far. Many of the adventures recounted in it, especially the one at the Planctae, have a close, inner connection with the myth from the very beginning.
Now, in a much-cited passage in the Odyssey (μ 69 f.), the highly renowned Argo is mentioned. She alone, on her return voyage from Aeëtes, passed the Planctae unscathed, where all other ships were wrecked and which even stole one of Father Zeus's flock of doves each time. But Hera guided her past them, since Jason was dear to her. Certainly, the Argo is called universally famous, πᾶσι μέλουσα, because she had already been glorified in poetry. No one will believe, with Niese, that the entire Argonaut legend was spun out of this passage, nor will anyone, with Christ, want to remove these verses as a later insertion; the Odyssey actually refers here to an old and famous poem about the Argonauts' voyage.
Now, both poems, in the versions we have them, share some adventures, for example, the one with the Sirens and the one with the Planctae. It is tempting to ask whether this one wasn't originally only a part of the mythical cycle, which he embellished with philosophical phrases in the magnificent Baroque painting of the Planctae, and indeed adheres entirely to the Odyssey; after all, he simply accepted the peculiar idea that the strait with Scylla and Charybdis stands close to the clashing rocks. But this dependence on a learned and pedantically contaminating epigone in no way resolves the question of the ancient poems' mutual relationship, and the possibility that this or that adventure migrated from the Argonauts' saga to that of the Odyssey remains unchanged. Since we don't have an ancient Argonaut poem, the answer can only be hoped for through an analysis of the Odyssey. Are there adventures in the Odyssey that aren't firmly established in the narrative structure and that do not fit the character of Odysseus but might better fit with the Argonauts?
[…]
Now, in a much-cited passage in the Odyssey (μ 69 f.), the highly renowned Argo is mentioned. She alone, on her return voyage from Aeëtes, passed the Planctae unscathed, where all other ships were wrecked and which even stole one of Father Zeus's flock of doves each time. But Hera guided her past them, since Jason was dear to her. Certainly, the Argo is called universally famous, πᾶσι μέλουσα, because she had already been glorified in poetry. No one will believe, with Niese, that the entire Argonaut legend was spun out of this passage, nor will anyone, with Christ, want to remove these verses as a later insertion; the Odyssey actually refers here to an old and famous poem about the Argonauts' voyage.
Now, both poems, in the versions we have them, share some adventures, for example, the one with the Sirens and the one with the Planctae. It is tempting to ask whether this one wasn't originally only a part of the mythical cycle, which he embellished with philosophical phrases in the magnificent Baroque painting of the Planctae, and indeed adheres entirely to the Odyssey; after all, he simply accepted the peculiar idea that the strait with Scylla and Charybdis stands close to the clashing rocks. But this dependence on a learned and pedantically contaminating epigone in no way resolves the question of the ancient poems' mutual relationship, and the possibility that this or that adventure migrated from the Argonauts' saga to that of the Odyssey remains unchanged. Since we don't have an ancient Argonaut poem, the answer can only be hoped for through an analysis of the Odyssey. Are there adventures in the Odyssey that aren't firmly established in the narrative structure and that do not fit the character of Odysseus but might better fit with the Argonauts?
[…]
III. Odyssey and Argonautica
Here we pause and look back. We have traveled a long, not always entirely straight path, often leading over shaky ground, and have had to leave quite a bit in the dark of uncertainty. But what can we now consider truly certain?
It has become clear that the narrative of Odysseus' wanderings did not arise from independent, smaller epics or poems through a mechanical process of editing, but rather presupposes at least a very profound and systematic poetic activity. No less certain, however, must be that the narrative falls into two quite distinct parts, less due to certain contradictions than due to profound differences. On the one hand, there are the events essentially conceived in the East such as the Laestrygones, Circe, Sirens, Planctae, and Thrinakia. The form of these stories appears to be unoriginal, whether the influence of other parts of the Odyssey has been proven or an abridgement of a more detailed model, as in the Laestrygonian adventure, is likely. In the West, on the other hand, the poet imagines the land of the Cyclopes and the island of Ogygia, and in the West perhaps also the ancient ferries of souls, the Phaeacians, and with these the smaller stories of Cicones, Lotus-Eaters, and Aeolus are firmly connected. One never has the impression of formal unoriginality in these adventures, if one disregards certain parts of the Phaeacian books, which, like the Nekyia, may have seemed particularly tempting and well-suited to later poets for expansion and imitation; what distinguishes them even more fundamentally from those of the other series is the fact that their fairy-tale and legendary content is extraordinarily small. Of course, the poet largely adheres to the general ideas of his time: his Calypso is one of the many nymphs, the Ionian sailor also imagines his happy Phaeacians in something like this, and the Homeric listeners will have known at least very close relatives of the Cyclopes; but it is clear that a very individual creative force plays a predominant role in all these portrayals. This poet does not enrich his images with fairy-tale features: rather, he draws from reality he has seen for himself, whether he is speaking as a knowledgeable colonist about the nature of Ogygia, the fertile soil of the Goat Island, painting us the colorful hustle and bustle of a wealthy Ionian seaport, or finally describing to us from the profound wealth of his insight into the soul the loving nymph, the powerful grace of the royal maiden, the clumsy cunning and childlike disposition of the hideous Cyclops. And whatever the legend of the former residences of the Phaeacian people in Hypereia originally meant, through the delightful description of their emigration and resettlement on Scheria, the poet also draws this mythically distant and happy people into the bright realms of the changeable and fateful world of reality. Certainly, the same spirit, averse to the truly miraculous and inclined towards the rational, prevails in the series of Eastern adventures; but the genuinely fairytale-like features, as in the poems of Laestrygon and Circe, the fabulousness of such fantastic things as beating rocks, Scylla, and Sirens, were too deeply rooted in them for him to have been able to become a complete master of them.
By and large, with minor exceptions, this fact had been established since Kirchhoff's fundamental remarks, at least as far as the formal unoriginality of these passages was concerned; opinions differed only regarding his interpretation. It is known that Kirchhoff, in the famous third excursus of his Homeric Odyssey (pp. 292-314), substantiated the view that books χ and μ represent "a substantially modified adaptation of an older poem which recounted the adventures of Odysseus in the third person and, in any case, originally bore no closer relationship to the organism of our Odyssey than that it dealt with the same legendary material" (loc. cit. 310). Similarly, according to Wilamowitz, the poet of the "older Odyssey" (ε—ξ resp. ρστ) had a poem before him that reported in the third person the experiences of Odysseus with Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Circe, the Sirens and Scylla, on Thrinakia and Scheria. The boundaries of this poem must shift somewhat after what has been said about the close connection of Aeolus' adventure to the Cyclopia and after the connection between Thrinakia and Scheria deduced from Odysseus's false narrative has been resolved: it can only have included the adventures of Telepylus and Aeaea, from the Sirens to Thrinakia. Regarding the eastern location of these adventures, it is usually said that the poet made this connection in light of the Argonaut legend. These are essentially the views still prevailing today; There is disagreement as to whether the western or eastern localization is the older one, but there is agreement that books χ and μ contain a revised poem about the wanderings of Odysseus.
And yet this very assumption is subject to the most serious doubts. What is the hero of Ithaca doing in the East, in Pontus? How did he end up there on his voyage from Troy to the West? And if ancient legend really did place his wanderings in the Eastern Sea, why have no traces of this survived? I don't think it was simply a matter of Wilamowitz's inadequate reading, as he only had one piece of evidence from Pherecydes to cite (Hom. Unt. 167), in which one of Odysseus's companions was called Σίνωπος (Schol. μ 257). And further, was there really an Odyssey, and would that surely have been an epic that dealt with such a completely different subject matter? For this poem had no connection with the stories of Scheria, which undoubtedly only referred to Odysseus. And finally, it is very strange that precisely those parts that are most deeply rooted in ancient and authentic fairy tales exist in a new, revised form. No, an ancient poem about Odysseus' wanderings can never be assumed to be the model for these books.
But what then? The correct answer, it seems to me, is not far off, and recent research has often come so close to it (consider, for example, B. Lamer's Urodyssee, Pauly-Wiss. X 1794) that only a small step is required. "Following the Argonaut legend," the Odyssey was localized in Pontus; Circe was "influenced by the Argonaut legend"; the Planctae were "taken from the Argonaut legend." One reads this and similar things wherever someone mentions these topics, and indeed, the solution is to be sought in the consistent pursuit of those allusive clues. All these suggestions transform into just as many appropriate explanations, so that we can use Kirchhoff's favorite phrase here when we assert that the poet used not a Pontic Odyssey, but an Argonaut poem. The Argonauts have always sailed to the East, for it was from the sun, from Helios, that the most beautiful maiden or the shimmering treasure could be won; their voyage had to be transferred, with the most natural consistency, from the epic of the heroic age to the Pontus, when the Ionian sailors opened its gates. In the Argonaut legend, which is so much older than the legend of the return of Odysseus, a motif such as that of the Planctae is meaningfully connected with myth; in the Argonaut legend, whose direct relationship to fairy tales we have noted, the depth and richness of the fairy tale tone need not surprise us. For the Odyssey poet, this does not result in a dull, mechanical activity of "translating an older poem"; he did, albeit less refined and with more naive power, essentially the same thing as Virgil, who leads his Aeneas to Scylla and Polyphemus and shows him Circe's dwelling from afar (Aen. III 554f., VII 10f.). Why should it not be possible that the Prince of Ithaca, like Jason before him, passed the Sirens' island unpunished, stayed with Circe, and saved himself through the horrors of the gates of Hell? Why should he not have surmounted the giant Laestrygonians and set foot on the island of Helios? For the figure of the bold Ionian adventurer may be a recent creation of legend; Odysseus, the hero of Ilios, through whose cunning the citadel was finally conquered, or Odysseus, the hero who freed his wife from her suitors on Apollo's Day, may be much older; the legends of his wanderings already presuppose the developed legend of the Trojan War or of the murder of the suitors. When he was then seen as the man who, after a long wandering, finally returned to a house beset by impudent suitors, the poets enriched his fortunes at sea by having him experience famous adventures elsewhere. The most momentous act of this kind was accomplished by the poet of ε—τ when he gave Odysseus a whole series of the Argonauts' adventures—in literary terms, when he based his poem, to a large extent, on an Argonaut epic. He always strove carefully and successfully to establish a connection between the individual adventures and Odysseus, but to anchor them as firmly in the narrative as they are in the Argonaut legend, or as he could do with his own creations Calypso, Polyphemus, and Nausicaa, was, of course, not possible. We will now examine in detail how each adventure belongs to the Argonaut legend and how it had to be adapted to Odysseus's particular circumstances.
The Planctae, as one of the countless forms of the mythical gate which poses a danger to those returning from the afterlife, belongs entirely to those tales that, like the Argonaut legend, tell of the acquisition of a precious possession in the otherworldly realm; quite correctly, our Odyssey begins with it on the return journey from Aëetes. In their description (μ 59-72), despite all the artificial interpretations that began very early on, we are surely to understand the two gate-rocks that once opened and closed, but now stand still after the ship Argo has successfully completed its daring passage. For at one point the poet specifically mentions the Argo; that was her most famous adventure, but we can neither infer a kind of magnetic mountain nor a dangerous surf in the ancient legend nor demonstrate it in any later tale. The designation of the rocks as Πλαγκταί is also clear to the unbiased: they are the πέτραι αἳ πλάζονται (clashing rocks). But they are also called plurally Πλαγκταί: so it is more than one rock. Finally, the story of the flock of doves bringing ambrosia, each of which the rock clips, can surely only be understood as meaning that the rock gate, which closes too soon, crushes the last dove. It is the familiar fairy tale motif, no different from the Argo just missing being smashed and losing the last piece of the rudder, or the eagle stealing soma losing a feather, or the German fairy tale where the prince, who has fetched the water of life, has a piece of himself torn off in the castle gate, which closes too soon (Grimm No. 97). The doves also bring the food of immortality, surely from the realms beyond Ocean. It is obvious that the idea of two narrow passages lying side by side cannot be original. That famous voyage of the demigods brought the movement of the beating rocks to an end (Pind. Pyth. IV 210), and so the famous, but now safe, adventure for Odysseus had to be replaced by another. We may assume that the narrow passage of Scylla and Charybdis was also invented in imitation of one of those conceptions of the gate of the afterlife, expressed in countless forms by legend, which the author of the Odyssey may have taken from a sailor's tale.
One would like to offer a better explanation; I must confess, unfortunately, that I am not capable of doing so. It must be readily admitted that the depiction of these fairy-tale-like, fantastical monsters would fit the Argonaut story; but for the peculiar juxtaposition of the two equally important mythical gates, no reason could be conceived in the Argonaut poetry, and so, for now, the proposed attempt at an explanation must be sufficient.
From this strange relationship, we can draw a not insignificant conclusion. The assertion that the rocks of the mythical gate stood still certainly only became apparent when people believed they had identified the narrow passage in a specific location of the navigable sea. In general, all of Antiquity (Herod. IV 85 and others, frequently) saw the ancient cliffs as the rocky islets of Cyaneai, located east of the Bosporus. The Argonaut legend was therefore already localized in the Black Sea before our Odyssey.
This conclusion is confirmed by another fact: the Laestrygonian adventure mentions the spring of Artakia, which, according to all evidence, was located in the city area of later Cyzicus, on the west coast of Arctonnesus, and whose name still clings to the same place today (χ 108). Apollonius (I 936f.) reports the following about the Argonauts' experiences there: The youthful King Cyzicus welcomed the Argonauts warmly. Jason entered Dindymon with most of the heroes to explore the route for their onward journey. Meanwhile, six-armed, earth-born giants attacked the ship, in which only Heracles and the younger ones remained, hurling mighty rocks and attempting to block the harbor. With the help of the heroes returning from Dindymon, they successfully fought and defeated the giants. The Argonauts continued their journey, but were driven back that same night by adverse winds. They do not recognize the shore; the Cyzicenians mistake them for enemies, and in the ensuing night-time battle, the young king is slain. When the disaster is recognized with dawn, the Argonauts honor the noble dead with ceremonial games, which the Cyzicenians still repeat annually. That two legends overlap in this account is as obvious as the fact that the legend of the Cyzicenian local hero, a deity similar to Adonis, whose death from the prime of his youth is mourned in annually recurring celebrations, must only be secondarily connected with the Argonauts. Originally, the Argonauts here only fought the six-armed giants; Heracles, to whom Herodorus's compromise (fr. 45, FHG II 38, according to Apollonius) seeks to give special glory for this, and whom the Argonauts subsequently have to assist, is not original here, as in the entire Argonaut legend. The earth-born giants, who are also significantly called Thessalian Pelasgians, had almost closed the harbor with their enormous stones; the walls now leave only a narrow entrance. The purpose of the harbor, famous for its "Pelasgian" walls, seems clear to me. The poet of the Odyssey has reshaped the adventure for his own purposes; he was forced to make somewhat violent changes. Odysseus's entire fleet sailed into the harbor, which is praised for its safe waters and calm winds (χ 91 f.): only Odysseus stops his ship outside. What prompts him to exercise this extraordinary caution? The poet gives us no answer. The giants smash the entire fleet with their stones, and only Odysseus escapes: the etiological narrative is lost, but the connection to the story of the Argonauts is now much easier to establish, as Odysseus, like Jason, only has one ship. Thus, the beginning of this adventure—the description of the land and its inhabitants with their many names—and the experiences of the scouts were taken by the poet from the Argonaut poem; he remodeled the conclusion, whose peculiarities are clearly determined by the economy of the whole.
Even the undertaking of the Sirens' adventure was not without violent remodeling. The Argonauts could easily and quickly protect themselves from the spell of the Sirens' song: they had a famous singer on board who recognized the danger at the first sound of the destructive song and could drown it out with the power of his stringed instrument (Apollon. IV 891 f. etc.). No complete account leaves Jason's band without a singer, and usually several are mentioned; even after the most recent statements by O. Kern, who seeks to reaffirm Lobeck's judgment, it seems likely to me that ὀνομακλυτὸς ̓Ορφής (the renowned Orpheus) (Ibyc. fr. 10) was the Argonauts' first singer. Not because I agreed with Welcker in his opinion that the Argonauts "could hardly have done without a priestly and prophetic singer" (Götterlehre II 544); it was precisely the fact that the later conception of the prophet and founder of the mysteries was not far removed from the older conception of the simple heroic singer that caused the resistance to a too early placement of Orpheus. And yet, there can be no doubt how ancient and famous Orpheus as an Argonaut is. He would be quite conceivable even in the old legendary form, although strict proof of this cannot be provided; but in any case, not only the overwhelming majority of all later sources, but especially the oldest ones, mention him. The metope from the Sicyonian treasury at Delphi, which certainly dates back to the 6th century, identifies the beardless singer as Ὀρφάς and Ibycus (loc. cit.) may well have named him among the Argonauts; at least he spoke of them, as the mention of Jason (fr. 39), the Boreads, and the Harpies (fr. 49) makes probable. Pindar (Pyth. IV 177) also certainly follows an older, recognized tradition. The existence of a mythical singer, Orpheus, was never disputed in antiquity; Herodotus (II 53) only objects to the alleged great antiquity of the Orphic poems if, as is likely, his allusion is directed toward it, and similarly, Aristotle's statement (fr. 10 Rose in Cicero de nat. deor. 1, 38, 107) is directed only against the alleged poet Orpheus. (Gruppe RML III 1060.) Indeed, Orpheus' participation in the Argonaut expedition was so generally established that most historians' chronologies for Orpheus and the associated Homeric texts are based on this fixed fact. And if, finally, later times add so much that is recent and distinctive to this name, this surely testifies to the great antiquity of the figure; it is precisely recent inventions that are often given the appearance of greater venerability by tracing them to anciently attested names. Something similar probably happened with Euphemus. He, too, is probably one of the oldest Argonauts (Müller Orchomenus 2 258), and it is precisely to him that Cyrene, founded relatively late (630), attributes its founding legend. Whether it was Orpheus or another singer who, drowning out the Sirens with his song, saved the Argonauts, Odysseus had to find another way. "Listen to what I tell you; but a god will also warn you," promises Circe to the inventive man as she prepares to describe the route and its dangers (μ 38); and indeed, it is said that as the ship rapidly approaches the island of the Sirens, the wind suddenly died down and the sea became calm, "for a god was calming the waves" (μ 169). Ancient and modern commentators have labored diligently to name this god; although I am also at a loss for a name, I have no doubt that it is precisely the god whose warning Circe promised Odysseus. The cessation of the wind is not meant to prolong Odysseus's torment, nor to make the Sirens' song more clearly audible, nor, as Crusius (Philol. 50, 1891, 93)1) so much more appealingly explained, to mark, together with the heat (μ 175), the hour of midday, the proper time for southern gusts: rather, it is meant to warn the hero of the nearness of danger. Odysseus, in any case, understands the warning: He takes a large disc of wax and plasters his companions' ears with it. (The pedant, so often instructed with a superior smile, who asked where Odysseus suddenly got such a disc of wax, may have been rightly offended; it may well be doubted whether ancient legend could really tell such a story.) But he has himself tied upright to the mast, so that he alone of all mortals can defy the magic song. With this, the poet has achieved such an exceedingly bold and magnificent image that it is easy to understand why, from then on, the Sirens remain primarily associated with Odysseus, and why the more original narrative of the Argonauts' legend fades into the background; an image that allows any receptive observer to readily forget the brutalities performed upon the previous account.
The close connection between Thrinakia's adventure and the others, now proven to be Argonautic, alone compelled us to claim it as part of the Argonaut poem; but the account of the Odyssey provides us with even stronger evidence. It should be recalled again that Odysseus possesses knowledge of the events on Olympus that otherwise belongs only to the poet himself. Before the decisive catastrophe, the poet could not have missed an Olympian scene, which his source provided him with precisely this one, and with the invention that Odysseus learned this from Calypso and the other from Hermes (μ 389 f.), he calmed his own misgivings and those of critical listeners. Above all, our assumption now explains a stumbling block that the poet himself was just as eager to eliminate, but which nevertheless has never completely put the critics to rest: The wrath of Helios stands as a striking duplication of motif alongside the wrath of Poseidon, which otherwise dominates the narrative. Undoubtedly, the original and unified legend could have also reported an independent transgression by Odysseus's companions against the sea god; a completely freely creative poet could have invented such a thing, indeed he would have had to: for Poseidon also promises his blinded son the fulfillment of this request (ι 534). How could he have come on his own to make Helios an enemy of Odysseus and later to drop the motif entirely? But it is immediately clear how much reason Helios had to pursue the Argonauts with his wrath. From the earliest form of the legend to its latest versions, it is Helios, the sun, or at least his royal son Aeëtes, from whom the heroes wrest their precious booty, and in all probability, the wrath of the sun god played the main role in our Argonaut epic. Difficulties that remain with this assumption must not be ignored. Helios's wrath must surely have been effectively portrayed earlier, starting with the abduction of the Sun Virgin or the death of Apsyrtus, for example, and not only when the Argonauts angered the god with another outrage. But what the Odyssey poet had before him was no longer a simple fairy tale; the mention of Hera, who was well disposed towards Jason (μ 72), the appearance of the helpful messenger of the gods, Hermes (χ 277), the echo of the Olympian scene (μ 374 f.) clearly show that this epic had a developed apparatus of gods, and thus the myth certainly also displayed many other further developments and interweaving of the original motifs. But the basic feature, the hostility of Helios, remained. That the calculation would work out perfectly everywhere is not to be expected, given the nature of the original and the manner in which our poet used it, as we have sought to recognize it so far.
But doesn't the name of the island of the sun, Thrinakia, point to the Peloponnese, the "forked island" (Wilamowitz H. U. 168) or the no less forked Chersonnese (Kranz ibid. 101), and thus, since both certainly lie on Odysseus's natural route, to their original affiliation with the Odysseus legend? I would not be surprised at all if Kranz's attempts to identify the forked island differently were followed by other such islands. For herds of Helios cattle still existed in some places (Jessen in Pauly-Wissowa VIII 71), as good as locations, and not just on the map, but they clearly looked like a winnowing shovel or a trident. For example, the urban terrain of Illyrian Apollonia is described "as a group of hills that protrude into the plain like a trident." I certainly do not intend to declare Apollonia as the original Homeric Thrinakia; I simply want to point out that this name does not necessarily indicate a definite location. We also have places named after farming instruments, for example, in the names Drepane and Zankle (Thuc. VI 4). Incidentally, it is precisely in Apollonia that sacred animals of Helios graze; the conservative Corinthian colony may have preserved a cult custom there that had been abandoned by the mother city. The conclusion of the adventure is also here rewritten by the Odyssey poet: the ship Argo could not be destroyed in the storm.
There remains the account of the events at Aeaea. The fact that Circe is called a sister of the wicked-minded Aeëtes (χ 137) has always prompted critics to draw connections to the Argonaut legend here as well; the fairy-tale character of the entire episode, its formal unoriginality, the violation of Jörgen's law, by which the appearance of Hermes must be judged, are decidedly favorable to our hypothesis. But it is precisely here that a more rigorous proof is most desirable; the Circe adventure holds all the others together, and if we succeed in proving its original connection to the Argonaut legend, we can well hope to have placed the keystone in the entire body of evidence. The proof will be attempted; however, this requires a further digression, which will lead us back to the questions posed in the first part of this book, to the study of legends.
Circe shows Odysseus the way. The famous guide of the Argonauts is Phineus. We must first briefly examine the Phineus story.
The Phineus legend was certainly treated several times in ancient epic poetry, but none of these versions seems to have been particularly successful—at least none became authoritative for later tradition. Thus, here, as with the entire Argonaut legend, there were no strict limits placed on the free-form imagination of the tragedians, and we can still infer from the few surviving verses of these tragedies the bold innovations of the poets. Antimachus again seems to have adhered closely to the account in the Hesiodic Catalogue, as did Apollonius. But this late, learned author, who was to succeed only in giving the legend its final form, is by no means lacking in his own modest inventions, and that he does not fail to make defensive or other references to differing accounts goes without saying for an Alexandrian poet. Given the abundance of variants that such a state of affairs gives rise to, one is almost tempted to join in the sighing of the mythographers, on whose diligence in collecting and balancing skill the wealth of forms in the accounts placed such great demands. It is clear that in the effort to bring together as many versions as possible into a coherent narrative, many a contradiction remained unreconciled. Every attentive reader will be puzzled when he comes across schol. V. to Od. μ 69 (ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ ̓Ασκληπιάδῃ—“the story according to Asclepiades”) or Hyginus (fab. 19), which claim that the Boread twins freed Phineus from his tormentors, the Harpies, who had his sons, the children of their sister, blinded.
What can lead us through the convoluted, often obscure paths of tradition to the goal of establishing the original legendary form? The name Phineus? This approach seems to fail here. Heroic legend clothes the "primal fable" in the forms of its own heroic existence, places it within the geographical facts of the world known to it, and interprets its own historical experiences into it: It may very well have subsequently attached to a legendary figure whose character and function in the plot are fully developed a name taken from precisely these conceptual spheres. We have examples of such a process; for example, consider Apsyrtus from the same cycle of legend. This essentially un-Greek name was used only later to designate a fully developed mythic figure similar to Phaethon. The same is likely for Phineus. "Φινεύς is named after the place, Phineion, and not the other way around; the place will have its name from φῖναξ· δρῦς (Hesych.)" (Fick-Bechtel 433. Sittig in Pauly-Wissowa VII 2429, cf. Steph. Βyz. s. v. Φίνειον. Φινόπολις.) As soon as the land of the sun, to which the Argonauts are sailing, was imagined on the eastern edge of the Pontus, the advising seer had to be imagined somewhere on the way there. This has already happened in our oldest evidence: Hesiod in the Eoeia (fr. 53 Rz.2 = Schol. Parisin. Ap. Rhod. II 181) called the sons of Phineus Θυνός and Μαριανδυνός – ἐξ ὧν τὰ ἔθνη κέκληται (“Mariandynus – from whom the peoples are named”), adds the scholiast; we say that these are the eponymous heroes of the tribes in question, situated on the coast east of the Bosporus. And when Pherecydes (fr. 68 = Schol. Ap. Rhod. a. O.) calls him king of the Asian Thracians, and Hellanicus (fr. 38 = Schol. Ap. Rhod. II 178) king of Paphlagonia, all this leads to the same conclusion as the unanimity with which the other testimonies also make him a Thracian: The name is firmly established in the region of the Bosporus, so consequently, like the entire localization of the myth on the Pontus, it must be secondary and therefore cannot provide any information for the oldest form of the Argonaut legend.
Nevertheless, the essential features of the Phineus episode are a necessary part of the entire legend. All versions, which otherwise diverge so widely, seem to agree that the Argonauts receive instructions about their voyage from Phineus. There have, however, been attempts to exclude the episode, like the prequel of the Fleece (Friedländer Rh. Mus. 69, 1914, 299 f.): but this is unjustified, as the parallels between fairy tales and their related Greek legends demonstrate.
We draw this lesson from the same "Helper's Tale," whose close relationship to the Argonauts' Legend was demonstrated above. This tale is closely related, touching upon, and very often interpenetrating with what recent scholarship calls the "Tale of the Bear's Son." Like the hero of the Helper's Tale, the brave "Bear's Son" also enters an otherworldly or subterranean world and, in a difficult battle, snatches a maiden from a demon. It differs from the Helper's Tale primarily in the characteristics of its companions; they possess no supernatural powers; the hero's virtue accomplishes everything alone and even triumphs over a shameful betrayal by his companions. Furthermore, it often has a childhood narrative of the hero that serves as preface. This "reports his miraculous birth, in which animal origins play a major role" (Panzer p. 15, see below), his growing up in hidden solitude, and the acquisition of a miraculous weapon. I think one may safely compare here the account of Jason's secret upbringing in the wilderness of Pelion and his upbringing by the forest animal, the wise offspring of Philyra [i.e., Chiron] (probably first found in Pind. Pyth. IV 102).
A closer examination of this fairy tale is extremely beneficial and convenient for us. Indeed, it has received, through Fr. Panzer, perhaps the most comprehensive critical treatment a fairy tale has ever received. (Fr. Panzer, Studies in Germanic Legends, I. Beowulf. Munich 1910.) Panzer presents the typical course of the narrative and, in addition, continuously records the variants of the individual narrators, just as one records the variants of the writers in a critical text. Thus, we can gratefully utilize his abundant material, examined so clearly and critically.
The fairy tale thus reports the "adventure in the forest house," as Panzer (p. 74 f.) calls the episode, as the first experience of the companions who set out with the hero. They come to a lonely, deserted house in the forest, where they are invited to stay. It is filled with comfortable furnishings and especially a sumptuous kitchen. The companions settle in. But during the hero's absence, a companion who remains in the house is haunted by a demon who devours or contaminates all the food and, to top it off, mistreats the companion. However, when he later tries to play the same trick on the hero himself, things go badly for him: he is overpowered, forced to reveal the secret of the princess the hero is seeking and show the way to her. We see something similar in Beowulf: The demon is wounded in battle but escapes through the entrance to his subterranean realm; the hero pursues him, following his blood trail, and now wins the actual decisive battle in that realm. It is uncertain whether this incident is truly "original," as Panzer suggests, for who could assert that with confidence? Can we truly grasp the "original" in all its details with certainty? Nevertheless, it should be noted that as the narrative progresses, it doesn't really know what to do with the demon who has fled to his realm. Since the hero has to wage the decisive battle with the actual Lord of the Underworld, the other demon either completely retreats or, like Grendel in Beowulf, has already succumbed to his wounds.
We also have a very similar pre-adventure in Greek myths: The hero, who is assigned a difficult task, namely a journey to the afterlife, uses cunning and force to extract knowledge of the path and means from a demonic being. This is what Heracles does with Nereus in his search for the apples of the Hesperides; this is how Perseus gains knowledge of his path from the outwitted Graeae, and a similar story may have been told about Peleus's capture of Thetis. Friedländer (Heracles 36 f.), for example, has quite rightly objected to the exclusion of the Nereus adventure from the Heracles legend, citing such fairy tales and the account of the giant Kuperan in the Seyfried Song. The fairy tale from Lorraine of the filleul du roi d'Angleterre (Cosquin No. III) seems particularly worthy of comparison. It is somewhat watered down by repetition of the same motif, somewhat bloated by the striving for richer and more magnificent depiction, spiced up by soldierly narrators, and finally not free from misunderstandings. Thus, the pre-adventure with the knowing demon is repeated several times; a fight with him does not take place, although the narrator prepares for it. Nevertheless, the basic outlines are quite clear and correct. The hero, sent to seek the most beautiful maiden, learns from a giant the way and means to win her, sets out on a ship, and along the way, entrusts himself to the kingdoms of rats, fish, and other animals, with whose help he successfully solves the difficult tasks set before him. This pre-adventure, established in our myth—the victory over a demon and the questioning of the demon about the means and methods of solving the main task in the otherworldly realm—can also be found in the Phineus story.
But, one might object, the Argonauts don't fight Phineus at all. Admittedly, he is "originally one of those demons who must lend their aid to the lonely sailor in unknown. . . seas or upon entering the realm of the unknown (the afterlife would be even better) so that he can make progress.” But Phineus doesn't do this reluctantly, after being overwhelmed or outwitted, but out of gratitude to the Argonauts who free him from the Harpies. And this pursuit of the Harpies is, after all, already attested by Hesiod as well as by the oldest sculptures, such as the Olympian Cypsele, the Amyclaean throne, and the Würzburg Phineus bowl. And one might even say that the Argonauts only gain the information they need through a successfully won battle; it is a battle of the Boread twins with the Harpies and not of the first hero with Phineus. Where are the similarities for comparison when there are so many differences?
All these objections must be acknowledged. But could we expect much else from this narrative, which, as we have seen, has been modified and expanded upon by so many poets? Indeed, even the oldest evidence available to us reveals a profound transformation of the original. From the mythical land of the sun, Aea has become Colchis; the world-bordering river, beyond which Helios dwells, has become the Pontus Euxeinus, just as the Persians made it the Tigris; the gate of the clashing rocks, which in myth only becomes dangerous to the returning traveler, has been reinterpreted by bold rationalism as a narrow passage on the Bosporus and placed at the beginning of the voyage. And yet, if we possessed more than a few sparse fragments of the epic and later accounts, we would find the version we have postulated more than once. One remembers that in the tragedians the relationship between the Argonauts and Phineus is not a friendly one: they punish him because he has blinded his children, the sons of the sisters of the Boreaed twins, and in Sophocles the punishment of Phineus consisted, in a truly tragic way, in blinding. Dionysius Scytobrachion, in keeping with the whole tendency of his narrative, has Heracles carry out the punishment (Diodorus IV 43 f.), and in the Orphic Argonautica he is chased by the storms of Boreas through the forests and scrublands of Bistonia and is thus killed (v. 680 f.). That this is not a recent invention is demonstrated by the verse of Hesiod, attributed by Ephorus in Strabo 302 to a γῆς περίοδος (“circuit of the Earth”), in which Phineus is driven by the Harpies Γλακτοφάγων ἐς γαῖαν ἀπήνας οἰκί ̓ ἐχόντων (“To the land of the milk-eaters, who have their dwelling afar.”): evidently this is a related tradition. Thus, not a few and not insignificant reports speak of Phineus' enmity with the Argonauts. The fable, however, of how the Boread twins free Phineus from the Harpies, does not fit such a version; there must be a change in the original, the meaning of which remains a mystery to us. Two things are certain: the idea of wind demons stealing or contaminating food is very old and popular (Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte II 2 90 f.), and the account of the disrupted meal is a recurring feature in the fairy tale of the forest house adventure. I will pick out one from the wealth of examples collected by Panzer: An Estonian fairy tale tells that "a king in Kunglaland had already twice had his feast, which he used to celebrate every seven years, thwarted because every time the food was served, a small, gray-haired man asked the head cook for permission to taste something, but all the ingredients disappeared as soon as he dipped the spoon." A highly peculiar and interesting variant may be described in some detail, because it has not yet been recognized as such and, moreover, beautifully illustrates the view presented here: namely, that the poets of heroic legends often take a fable that is firmly established in its course of events and, with greater or lesser transformation, draw it into the spheres of heroic life. I refer to the legend of Thor and Utgardaloki.
Gangleri demands to know whether Thor, who was never defeated, had ever encountered something "so puissant and strong that it was too powerful for him"; "And despite the protests of those who know this about Thor, who point out the outrageousness and indecency of the story, because there is much evidence that Thor remains the strongest, and because we must all believe it," the story is told. Thor and Loki stop at a farmer's house; Thor slaughters his goats for a communal meal and revives them the next morning by swinging his hammer over the skin and bones. But one of them is lame: despite Thor's prohibition, Thjalfi, the farmer's son, had broken a bone to extract the marrow, and the farmer can only appease the god's terrible anger by giving him his children, Thjalfi and the girl Röskwa, as servants. They continue on, the swift-footed Thjalfi carrying the sack of food, and sail across the sea. There, they enter an endless forest and at night reach a large, empty house, where they rest. At midnight, a massive earthquake occurs; Thor flees with his companions into a smaller house next door. Early in the morning, they see that the earthquake of the previous night had been caused by the monstrous giant Skrymi, their dwelling was the giant’s gauntlet, and the house next door was his thimble. Skrymi offers to accompany them; they put their food together in a shared sack, which the giant ties up and now carries in Thjalfi's place. In the evening, he lies down without a meal and soon falls asleep. Thor, however, cannot open the tied-up sack of food; he suspects the giant's treachery, grabs the hammer in anger, and strikes the snoring man with a mighty blow. The giant awakens, asks if a leaf fell on his head, and if they have eaten. Thor answers evasively, saying they now wish to sleep. As the giant resumes snoring, the god strikes a second time, much more powerfully, and toward morning a third time with his hammer, but with no better effect than the first. Skrymi now advises Thor and his companions to go to Utgard Castle, where mighty men are to be found; and after giving them advice and showing them the way leading east, he separates from them. Thor and his men actually reach the castle, but since they cannot open the locked gate, they have to slip through its very narrow bars. With superior mockery, King Utgardaloki, enthroned among his men in the hall, greets the newcomers: "It is not easy to hear true news from afar, or is it different from what I think? Is this young fellow really Asa-Thor?" And then he asks about his and his companions' skill, "for no one is allowed among us who does not distinguish himself from other men through some skill or talent." Loki undertakes to eat faster than everyone else, Thjalfi wants to be first in a race: both are overtaken by Utgardaloki's men. Thor is supposed to drink first, but in three mighty gulps from the offered horn, he only manages to get a little of the drink down; then he is supposed to lift Utgardaloki's cat from the ground, but it arches its back, ever higher, and Thor, exerting all his strength, only manages to get the animal to lift one foot; finally, he is supposed to wrestle with the king's foster mother, the old woman Elli, who even causes him to sink to the knee with one leg. Utgardaloki then has enough of the competitions, treats them lavishly, and accompanies them out of the castle the next day. And now that Thor is outside, Utgardaloki reveals the truth to him: "You almost brought us to great distress, but I deceived you with illusions. The first time I met you in the forest, in the form of the giant Skrymi; when you wanted to open the food bag, I had magically tied it with iron wire..." And with Thor's hammer blows, the giant had raised a hill in front of him, in which three deep, square valleys can still be seen as traces of the mighty blows. Loki succumbed to Logi, that is, wildfire, in the feeding contest, and Thjalfi was overtaken in the race by Hugi, thought; Thor himself, however, drank from the sea and with his mighty strokes caused the tide to go out. The cat was the Midgard Serpent, which coils around the entire globe, and to everyone's horror, Thor stretched it up close to the sky. Finally, he wrestled with Elli, the old age that slays all those born. And from now on, Utgardaloki will protect his castle from such dangerous guests. When Thor heard this speech, he reached for his hammer to strike Utgardaloki and his castle, but everything has vanished. --
This wonderful piece of skaldic poetry does not need to be fully analyzed here; nor do I understand enough about Norse mythology for that. It is not merely a matter of comparing individual fairy-tale features or eliminating motifs taken from elsewhere; what is essential here are two other things. The structure of the narrative is quite clearly the same as in our helper tale: the hero's departure and the acquisition of companions with supernatural powers, their first adventure in the solitary dwelling in the forest—the giant's glove is a bizarre new invention—the interrupted meal, the battle with the demon who points the way to the afterlife—this by no means self-evident combination of such peculiar motifs is no coincidence. That Utgard Castle bears features of the afterlife would be clear, even if Saxo did not explicitly describe Thor's journey as a descent into hell: They first cross the sea, and entrance must be forced through a very narrow gate. Utgardaloki's words at the end clearly express the idea that a return is now impossible. Thor's simple and invincible strength was not enough for the skalds of the Eddic period: they wanted to portray their tricks and intrigues, the eternal uncertainty of existence, and so they transformed the hero's victorious battles into meaningful defeats. Where the poet derived these concepts remains an open question; Heracles, for example, also struggles with Γῆρας, the old age; that its use in this story originates from the poet cannot be doubted. However, he could not award his hero a prize for defeats, and so the actual central element of the story, the winning of the beautiful maiden, was lost. Perhaps this was intended to be replaced by the account of Röskwa, the farmer's daughter, whom Thor receives.
In this example one can, it seems to me, grasp almost tangibly how bold transformations may be attributed to a poet’s individuality. With regard to the Phineus episode, the story of Skrymir especially interests us. Here too we find the motif of the disturbed meal; here too, through the poet’s intention that Thor should suffer defeats, the original has been blurred, and it remains recognizable only in traces—how the hero had to wrest advice and counsel from the demon.
But let us now return definitively to Phineus. Legend tells of another Phineus, brother of Cepheus, who was betrothed to Andromeda and, after her rescue by Perseus, disrupted the wedding feast with the noise of weapons, asserted his claims against the stranger. This is the story told by Ovid (Met. V 8 f.) and Apollodorus (II 4, 3, 6), probably based on Euripides' Andromeda. The two figures of the same name can hardly be separated, as Hiller, op. cit., 64, emphasizes, but a connection has so far been sought in vain. Is it permissible to ask whether the fact that he appears in the Andromeda legend as a disturber of the meal might not perhaps go back to ancient tradition and still contain a trace of his original nature?
Let us briefly summarize the original form of the legend and its transformations. Jason and his companions encountered a demon who initially treated them badly—probably by disrupting their meal—but was then overpowered and forced to reveal information about the onward journey. The heroic legend transforms the material; the knowledgeable demon becomes a seer, and this, simultaneously with the subsequent localization of the voyage in Pontus, is equated with an already established legendary figure, the Thracian king Phineus. It was natural to imagine the seer blind; just as natural that people later asked about the causes of this blindness. The variety of answers clearly shows how secondary all these explanations are. Sometimes it is Zeus, sometimes Helios, sometimes Poseidon, who blinds the king; and since Hesiod also knows of a second punishment, the plague of the Harpies, one must also consider the former as secondary. The tragedy clung to the seer, but in the account of his enmity against the Argonauts, preserved an older mythic form, which in the epic had been altered by the story of the Harpies, and invented a new explanation for his blindness: family discord; the slander and intrigue of his stepmother that led him to commit a crime against his sons. Antimachus again follows the account of the Catalog; Apollonius combines several versions so that their resolution is usually a matter as simple as it is amusing, and occasionally adds his own modest invention or a flat "elaboration." He calls him (II 237) the son, not the grandson of Agenor like Hesiod, but must therefore grant him an excessively long life (Schol. II 178). He was formerly king of Thrace, but now lives in Bithynia as a simple seer, honored and cared for by the surrounding inhabitants. (238, 450 f.) Apollonius evidently liked the idea that a seer also has a duty to remain silent in some matters; this is impressed upon us ad nauseam (311, 390, 425), and the impressive, profound phrase in Phineus's rejoinder (v. 444 f.) is clearly Apollonius's own: "Perhaps a god will restore your sight once more," Jason consoles; "I would rather he give me death," replies the blind man, "καί τε θανών πάσῃσι μετέσσομαι ἀγλαίῃσι" (“And I will join you in all your deaths”). This also shows that the author is familiar with Sophocles' story of the healing of Phineus' blinded sons. And it continues in this entertaining manner.
But let us finally return from these late games to the Circe adventure. Just as we explored the ancient form of the legend, the close relationship and firm affiliation with this cycle is now revealed in it too. The lonely castle in the forest, in which a demonic being dwells, attracts the companions; things go badly for them, the witch enchants them, and only the hero overcomes the demon and receives instructions from him for the next phase of the journey. The accumulation of genuine fairy tale motifs is thus explained by the larger context of the entire story, and it no longer needs to be assumed that independent fairy tale motifs are sometimes less frequent, sometimes more numerous, in this or that episode. The Circe and Phineus adventures are two different epic elaborations of the same ancient legendary episode, precisely this preliminary adventure in which the hero, through a fight with a demon, gains knowledge of the path to be taken. The fairy tale itself introduces this demon sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman (Panzer, op. cit., 79); In one epic development, the male demon was fused with a legendary figure, the Thracian king Phineus, who was already somewhat developed and attached to a specific location; in the other version, the female demon became the sister of Aeëtes. This other version contained the Argonaut poem that forms the basis of the Odyssey. Undoubtedly, the appearance and helpful assistance of the messenger of the gods (χ. 277 f.) also belongs to the overall context, an episode that emerges from the strict style of the first-person narrative, but is very natural in the context of our fairy tale and probably has its precise parallels. We remain more in the dark about other questions. Did Circe give Jason her advice willingly or under duress? Did the Argonauts also stay on the hospitable island for so long? Did they, like Odysseus, also land on Aeaea a second time and only then receive instructions for the return journey? Little can be deduced from the "original fable" about such details; our Argonaut poem, as a fully developed epic, is far removed from the primitive narrative. We can at least make some probable assumptions about some points. The long stay in the opulent enchanted castle is a common fairy tale motif; by assuming that our Argonaut poem, like the Odyssey, also reported an extended period of idle luxury, the still striking circumstance would receive a not insignificant explanation: that the otherwise inactive companions must remind their leader Odysseus, who is otherwise primarily concerned with returning home, of this seems much more appropriate for the equally important heroes of the Argo. Whether and how this account is connected to the Lemnian adventure, we cannot examine here. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that the description of the camp in χ. 345 f. is also taken from the Argonaut poem. This is the starting point for the story of the four maids, whose activities have no comparable significance in Homer, and the equally singular, Hesiodic teaching in the Odyssey that such creatures originate from springs, forests, and rivers (χ. 350 f.). In a picture of the Olympian Cypsele, Pausanias (V. 19, 7) saw "a woman lying on a couch with a man in a grotto," surrounded by four maids engaged in the activity described in our passage. Perieget, since inscriptions are missing, surmises that the pair are Odysseus and Circe. But the grotto does not fit the Odyssey, and besides, this would probably be the only depiction from the Odyssey's legendary cycle on the Kypsele, while it had images from the Argonauts' cycle (Jason, Medea, and Aphrodite V 18, 3. ἆθλα ἐπὶ Πελίᾳ [Battles on Pelion], V 17, 9); were they, as presented in our Argonaut epic, Jason and Circe? We can hardly reach any certainty on all these matters and are content with having clearly answered at least one question: the adventure at the Aeaean Circe is a fixed episode in the Argonauts' fable, just as the Planctae are, and was only transferred to Odysseus later. What the poet changed in this process is uncertain. But with this evidence, the probability has increased even further that the other adventures closely connected with the Circe episode were also transferred from the Argonauts' cycle to Odysseus.
Only a brief word remains to be said about Nekyia, that central figure in the Odyssey's composition, which we have so far omitted from our consideration; not unjustly, we hope. For it should probably be generally admitted that the narrative of the journey to Hades was only subsequently and artificially inserted into our present context. On the other hand, however, one must also acknowledge that the poem fulfills a high poetic purpose with admirable certainty. Not only do all the threads converge here and intertwine inextricably: the wrath of Poseidon and Helios, proclaimed by Tiresias, the sadly confused conditions of the homeland, which the mother lamentably describes. But the hero is also presented against the backdrop of the great Trojan events, his fate contrasted with that of the other heroes. In these most inextricable parts of the poem, the exclusive reference to Odysseus is clear; in the others, the list of heroic mothers and the penitents, at least no reference to the Argonauts can be discerned. Kirchhoff, much to the dismay of later critics, assigned the Nekyia to his "old Nostos" (Hom. Odyssey 2 225 f. Wilamowitz Hom. Unt. 133): he found no trace of a developed model, but he did find the main motif of his "Nostos," the wrath of Poseidon, inextricably linked to the entire poem. We now see how right he was here as well. Admittedly, the Nekyia was only subsequently inserted into a completed context; but this context itself belonged not to the Odyssey, but to the Argonautica, and nothing prevents us from assuming that the same poet who transferred the Argonaut stories to Odysseus inserted his own invention at this point with the Nekyia. How far later authors have expanded this poem is not our concern here; only the question remains whether the poet of the Nekyia also received the inspiration for his creation from the Argonautica. At this point, Jason's adventures at Aeëtes must have been reported; but what the relationship between the otherworldly realm of the sun and the actual underworld is still an open question—a question that would be worthy of extensive investigation and is by no means settled by the brief reference given above.
It has become clear that the narrative of Odysseus' wanderings did not arise from independent, smaller epics or poems through a mechanical process of editing, but rather presupposes at least a very profound and systematic poetic activity. No less certain, however, must be that the narrative falls into two quite distinct parts, less due to certain contradictions than due to profound differences. On the one hand, there are the events essentially conceived in the East such as the Laestrygones, Circe, Sirens, Planctae, and Thrinakia. The form of these stories appears to be unoriginal, whether the influence of other parts of the Odyssey has been proven or an abridgement of a more detailed model, as in the Laestrygonian adventure, is likely. In the West, on the other hand, the poet imagines the land of the Cyclopes and the island of Ogygia, and in the West perhaps also the ancient ferries of souls, the Phaeacians, and with these the smaller stories of Cicones, Lotus-Eaters, and Aeolus are firmly connected. One never has the impression of formal unoriginality in these adventures, if one disregards certain parts of the Phaeacian books, which, like the Nekyia, may have seemed particularly tempting and well-suited to later poets for expansion and imitation; what distinguishes them even more fundamentally from those of the other series is the fact that their fairy-tale and legendary content is extraordinarily small. Of course, the poet largely adheres to the general ideas of his time: his Calypso is one of the many nymphs, the Ionian sailor also imagines his happy Phaeacians in something like this, and the Homeric listeners will have known at least very close relatives of the Cyclopes; but it is clear that a very individual creative force plays a predominant role in all these portrayals. This poet does not enrich his images with fairy-tale features: rather, he draws from reality he has seen for himself, whether he is speaking as a knowledgeable colonist about the nature of Ogygia, the fertile soil of the Goat Island, painting us the colorful hustle and bustle of a wealthy Ionian seaport, or finally describing to us from the profound wealth of his insight into the soul the loving nymph, the powerful grace of the royal maiden, the clumsy cunning and childlike disposition of the hideous Cyclops. And whatever the legend of the former residences of the Phaeacian people in Hypereia originally meant, through the delightful description of their emigration and resettlement on Scheria, the poet also draws this mythically distant and happy people into the bright realms of the changeable and fateful world of reality. Certainly, the same spirit, averse to the truly miraculous and inclined towards the rational, prevails in the series of Eastern adventures; but the genuinely fairytale-like features, as in the poems of Laestrygon and Circe, the fabulousness of such fantastic things as beating rocks, Scylla, and Sirens, were too deeply rooted in them for him to have been able to become a complete master of them.
By and large, with minor exceptions, this fact had been established since Kirchhoff's fundamental remarks, at least as far as the formal unoriginality of these passages was concerned; opinions differed only regarding his interpretation. It is known that Kirchhoff, in the famous third excursus of his Homeric Odyssey (pp. 292-314), substantiated the view that books χ and μ represent "a substantially modified adaptation of an older poem which recounted the adventures of Odysseus in the third person and, in any case, originally bore no closer relationship to the organism of our Odyssey than that it dealt with the same legendary material" (loc. cit. 310). Similarly, according to Wilamowitz, the poet of the "older Odyssey" (ε—ξ resp. ρστ) had a poem before him that reported in the third person the experiences of Odysseus with Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Circe, the Sirens and Scylla, on Thrinakia and Scheria. The boundaries of this poem must shift somewhat after what has been said about the close connection of Aeolus' adventure to the Cyclopia and after the connection between Thrinakia and Scheria deduced from Odysseus's false narrative has been resolved: it can only have included the adventures of Telepylus and Aeaea, from the Sirens to Thrinakia. Regarding the eastern location of these adventures, it is usually said that the poet made this connection in light of the Argonaut legend. These are essentially the views still prevailing today; There is disagreement as to whether the western or eastern localization is the older one, but there is agreement that books χ and μ contain a revised poem about the wanderings of Odysseus.
And yet this very assumption is subject to the most serious doubts. What is the hero of Ithaca doing in the East, in Pontus? How did he end up there on his voyage from Troy to the West? And if ancient legend really did place his wanderings in the Eastern Sea, why have no traces of this survived? I don't think it was simply a matter of Wilamowitz's inadequate reading, as he only had one piece of evidence from Pherecydes to cite (Hom. Unt. 167), in which one of Odysseus's companions was called Σίνωπος (Schol. μ 257). And further, was there really an Odyssey, and would that surely have been an epic that dealt with such a completely different subject matter? For this poem had no connection with the stories of Scheria, which undoubtedly only referred to Odysseus. And finally, it is very strange that precisely those parts that are most deeply rooted in ancient and authentic fairy tales exist in a new, revised form. No, an ancient poem about Odysseus' wanderings can never be assumed to be the model for these books.
But what then? The correct answer, it seems to me, is not far off, and recent research has often come so close to it (consider, for example, B. Lamer's Urodyssee, Pauly-Wiss. X 1794) that only a small step is required. "Following the Argonaut legend," the Odyssey was localized in Pontus; Circe was "influenced by the Argonaut legend"; the Planctae were "taken from the Argonaut legend." One reads this and similar things wherever someone mentions these topics, and indeed, the solution is to be sought in the consistent pursuit of those allusive clues. All these suggestions transform into just as many appropriate explanations, so that we can use Kirchhoff's favorite phrase here when we assert that the poet used not a Pontic Odyssey, but an Argonaut poem. The Argonauts have always sailed to the East, for it was from the sun, from Helios, that the most beautiful maiden or the shimmering treasure could be won; their voyage had to be transferred, with the most natural consistency, from the epic of the heroic age to the Pontus, when the Ionian sailors opened its gates. In the Argonaut legend, which is so much older than the legend of the return of Odysseus, a motif such as that of the Planctae is meaningfully connected with myth; in the Argonaut legend, whose direct relationship to fairy tales we have noted, the depth and richness of the fairy tale tone need not surprise us. For the Odyssey poet, this does not result in a dull, mechanical activity of "translating an older poem"; he did, albeit less refined and with more naive power, essentially the same thing as Virgil, who leads his Aeneas to Scylla and Polyphemus and shows him Circe's dwelling from afar (Aen. III 554f., VII 10f.). Why should it not be possible that the Prince of Ithaca, like Jason before him, passed the Sirens' island unpunished, stayed with Circe, and saved himself through the horrors of the gates of Hell? Why should he not have surmounted the giant Laestrygonians and set foot on the island of Helios? For the figure of the bold Ionian adventurer may be a recent creation of legend; Odysseus, the hero of Ilios, through whose cunning the citadel was finally conquered, or Odysseus, the hero who freed his wife from her suitors on Apollo's Day, may be much older; the legends of his wanderings already presuppose the developed legend of the Trojan War or of the murder of the suitors. When he was then seen as the man who, after a long wandering, finally returned to a house beset by impudent suitors, the poets enriched his fortunes at sea by having him experience famous adventures elsewhere. The most momentous act of this kind was accomplished by the poet of ε—τ when he gave Odysseus a whole series of the Argonauts' adventures—in literary terms, when he based his poem, to a large extent, on an Argonaut epic. He always strove carefully and successfully to establish a connection between the individual adventures and Odysseus, but to anchor them as firmly in the narrative as they are in the Argonaut legend, or as he could do with his own creations Calypso, Polyphemus, and Nausicaa, was, of course, not possible. We will now examine in detail how each adventure belongs to the Argonaut legend and how it had to be adapted to Odysseus's particular circumstances.
The Planctae, as one of the countless forms of the mythical gate which poses a danger to those returning from the afterlife, belongs entirely to those tales that, like the Argonaut legend, tell of the acquisition of a precious possession in the otherworldly realm; quite correctly, our Odyssey begins with it on the return journey from Aëetes. In their description (μ 59-72), despite all the artificial interpretations that began very early on, we are surely to understand the two gate-rocks that once opened and closed, but now stand still after the ship Argo has successfully completed its daring passage. For at one point the poet specifically mentions the Argo; that was her most famous adventure, but we can neither infer a kind of magnetic mountain nor a dangerous surf in the ancient legend nor demonstrate it in any later tale. The designation of the rocks as Πλαγκταί is also clear to the unbiased: they are the πέτραι αἳ πλάζονται (clashing rocks). But they are also called plurally Πλαγκταί: so it is more than one rock. Finally, the story of the flock of doves bringing ambrosia, each of which the rock clips, can surely only be understood as meaning that the rock gate, which closes too soon, crushes the last dove. It is the familiar fairy tale motif, no different from the Argo just missing being smashed and losing the last piece of the rudder, or the eagle stealing soma losing a feather, or the German fairy tale where the prince, who has fetched the water of life, has a piece of himself torn off in the castle gate, which closes too soon (Grimm No. 97). The doves also bring the food of immortality, surely from the realms beyond Ocean. It is obvious that the idea of two narrow passages lying side by side cannot be original. That famous voyage of the demigods brought the movement of the beating rocks to an end (Pind. Pyth. IV 210), and so the famous, but now safe, adventure for Odysseus had to be replaced by another. We may assume that the narrow passage of Scylla and Charybdis was also invented in imitation of one of those conceptions of the gate of the afterlife, expressed in countless forms by legend, which the author of the Odyssey may have taken from a sailor's tale.
One would like to offer a better explanation; I must confess, unfortunately, that I am not capable of doing so. It must be readily admitted that the depiction of these fairy-tale-like, fantastical monsters would fit the Argonaut story; but for the peculiar juxtaposition of the two equally important mythical gates, no reason could be conceived in the Argonaut poetry, and so, for now, the proposed attempt at an explanation must be sufficient.
From this strange relationship, we can draw a not insignificant conclusion. The assertion that the rocks of the mythical gate stood still certainly only became apparent when people believed they had identified the narrow passage in a specific location of the navigable sea. In general, all of Antiquity (Herod. IV 85 and others, frequently) saw the ancient cliffs as the rocky islets of Cyaneai, located east of the Bosporus. The Argonaut legend was therefore already localized in the Black Sea before our Odyssey.
This conclusion is confirmed by another fact: the Laestrygonian adventure mentions the spring of Artakia, which, according to all evidence, was located in the city area of later Cyzicus, on the west coast of Arctonnesus, and whose name still clings to the same place today (χ 108). Apollonius (I 936f.) reports the following about the Argonauts' experiences there: The youthful King Cyzicus welcomed the Argonauts warmly. Jason entered Dindymon with most of the heroes to explore the route for their onward journey. Meanwhile, six-armed, earth-born giants attacked the ship, in which only Heracles and the younger ones remained, hurling mighty rocks and attempting to block the harbor. With the help of the heroes returning from Dindymon, they successfully fought and defeated the giants. The Argonauts continued their journey, but were driven back that same night by adverse winds. They do not recognize the shore; the Cyzicenians mistake them for enemies, and in the ensuing night-time battle, the young king is slain. When the disaster is recognized with dawn, the Argonauts honor the noble dead with ceremonial games, which the Cyzicenians still repeat annually. That two legends overlap in this account is as obvious as the fact that the legend of the Cyzicenian local hero, a deity similar to Adonis, whose death from the prime of his youth is mourned in annually recurring celebrations, must only be secondarily connected with the Argonauts. Originally, the Argonauts here only fought the six-armed giants; Heracles, to whom Herodorus's compromise (fr. 45, FHG II 38, according to Apollonius) seeks to give special glory for this, and whom the Argonauts subsequently have to assist, is not original here, as in the entire Argonaut legend. The earth-born giants, who are also significantly called Thessalian Pelasgians, had almost closed the harbor with their enormous stones; the walls now leave only a narrow entrance. The purpose of the harbor, famous for its "Pelasgian" walls, seems clear to me. The poet of the Odyssey has reshaped the adventure for his own purposes; he was forced to make somewhat violent changes. Odysseus's entire fleet sailed into the harbor, which is praised for its safe waters and calm winds (χ 91 f.): only Odysseus stops his ship outside. What prompts him to exercise this extraordinary caution? The poet gives us no answer. The giants smash the entire fleet with their stones, and only Odysseus escapes: the etiological narrative is lost, but the connection to the story of the Argonauts is now much easier to establish, as Odysseus, like Jason, only has one ship. Thus, the beginning of this adventure—the description of the land and its inhabitants with their many names—and the experiences of the scouts were taken by the poet from the Argonaut poem; he remodeled the conclusion, whose peculiarities are clearly determined by the economy of the whole.
Even the undertaking of the Sirens' adventure was not without violent remodeling. The Argonauts could easily and quickly protect themselves from the spell of the Sirens' song: they had a famous singer on board who recognized the danger at the first sound of the destructive song and could drown it out with the power of his stringed instrument (Apollon. IV 891 f. etc.). No complete account leaves Jason's band without a singer, and usually several are mentioned; even after the most recent statements by O. Kern, who seeks to reaffirm Lobeck's judgment, it seems likely to me that ὀνομακλυτὸς ̓Ορφής (the renowned Orpheus) (Ibyc. fr. 10) was the Argonauts' first singer. Not because I agreed with Welcker in his opinion that the Argonauts "could hardly have done without a priestly and prophetic singer" (Götterlehre II 544); it was precisely the fact that the later conception of the prophet and founder of the mysteries was not far removed from the older conception of the simple heroic singer that caused the resistance to a too early placement of Orpheus. And yet, there can be no doubt how ancient and famous Orpheus as an Argonaut is. He would be quite conceivable even in the old legendary form, although strict proof of this cannot be provided; but in any case, not only the overwhelming majority of all later sources, but especially the oldest ones, mention him. The metope from the Sicyonian treasury at Delphi, which certainly dates back to the 6th century, identifies the beardless singer as Ὀρφάς and Ibycus (loc. cit.) may well have named him among the Argonauts; at least he spoke of them, as the mention of Jason (fr. 39), the Boreads, and the Harpies (fr. 49) makes probable. Pindar (Pyth. IV 177) also certainly follows an older, recognized tradition. The existence of a mythical singer, Orpheus, was never disputed in antiquity; Herodotus (II 53) only objects to the alleged great antiquity of the Orphic poems if, as is likely, his allusion is directed toward it, and similarly, Aristotle's statement (fr. 10 Rose in Cicero de nat. deor. 1, 38, 107) is directed only against the alleged poet Orpheus. (Gruppe RML III 1060.) Indeed, Orpheus' participation in the Argonaut expedition was so generally established that most historians' chronologies for Orpheus and the associated Homeric texts are based on this fixed fact. And if, finally, later times add so much that is recent and distinctive to this name, this surely testifies to the great antiquity of the figure; it is precisely recent inventions that are often given the appearance of greater venerability by tracing them to anciently attested names. Something similar probably happened with Euphemus. He, too, is probably one of the oldest Argonauts (Müller Orchomenus 2 258), and it is precisely to him that Cyrene, founded relatively late (630), attributes its founding legend. Whether it was Orpheus or another singer who, drowning out the Sirens with his song, saved the Argonauts, Odysseus had to find another way. "Listen to what I tell you; but a god will also warn you," promises Circe to the inventive man as she prepares to describe the route and its dangers (μ 38); and indeed, it is said that as the ship rapidly approaches the island of the Sirens, the wind suddenly died down and the sea became calm, "for a god was calming the waves" (μ 169). Ancient and modern commentators have labored diligently to name this god; although I am also at a loss for a name, I have no doubt that it is precisely the god whose warning Circe promised Odysseus. The cessation of the wind is not meant to prolong Odysseus's torment, nor to make the Sirens' song more clearly audible, nor, as Crusius (Philol. 50, 1891, 93)1) so much more appealingly explained, to mark, together with the heat (μ 175), the hour of midday, the proper time for southern gusts: rather, it is meant to warn the hero of the nearness of danger. Odysseus, in any case, understands the warning: He takes a large disc of wax and plasters his companions' ears with it. (The pedant, so often instructed with a superior smile, who asked where Odysseus suddenly got such a disc of wax, may have been rightly offended; it may well be doubted whether ancient legend could really tell such a story.) But he has himself tied upright to the mast, so that he alone of all mortals can defy the magic song. With this, the poet has achieved such an exceedingly bold and magnificent image that it is easy to understand why, from then on, the Sirens remain primarily associated with Odysseus, and why the more original narrative of the Argonauts' legend fades into the background; an image that allows any receptive observer to readily forget the brutalities performed upon the previous account.
The close connection between Thrinakia's adventure and the others, now proven to be Argonautic, alone compelled us to claim it as part of the Argonaut poem; but the account of the Odyssey provides us with even stronger evidence. It should be recalled again that Odysseus possesses knowledge of the events on Olympus that otherwise belongs only to the poet himself. Before the decisive catastrophe, the poet could not have missed an Olympian scene, which his source provided him with precisely this one, and with the invention that Odysseus learned this from Calypso and the other from Hermes (μ 389 f.), he calmed his own misgivings and those of critical listeners. Above all, our assumption now explains a stumbling block that the poet himself was just as eager to eliminate, but which nevertheless has never completely put the critics to rest: The wrath of Helios stands as a striking duplication of motif alongside the wrath of Poseidon, which otherwise dominates the narrative. Undoubtedly, the original and unified legend could have also reported an independent transgression by Odysseus's companions against the sea god; a completely freely creative poet could have invented such a thing, indeed he would have had to: for Poseidon also promises his blinded son the fulfillment of this request (ι 534). How could he have come on his own to make Helios an enemy of Odysseus and later to drop the motif entirely? But it is immediately clear how much reason Helios had to pursue the Argonauts with his wrath. From the earliest form of the legend to its latest versions, it is Helios, the sun, or at least his royal son Aeëtes, from whom the heroes wrest their precious booty, and in all probability, the wrath of the sun god played the main role in our Argonaut epic. Difficulties that remain with this assumption must not be ignored. Helios's wrath must surely have been effectively portrayed earlier, starting with the abduction of the Sun Virgin or the death of Apsyrtus, for example, and not only when the Argonauts angered the god with another outrage. But what the Odyssey poet had before him was no longer a simple fairy tale; the mention of Hera, who was well disposed towards Jason (μ 72), the appearance of the helpful messenger of the gods, Hermes (χ 277), the echo of the Olympian scene (μ 374 f.) clearly show that this epic had a developed apparatus of gods, and thus the myth certainly also displayed many other further developments and interweaving of the original motifs. But the basic feature, the hostility of Helios, remained. That the calculation would work out perfectly everywhere is not to be expected, given the nature of the original and the manner in which our poet used it, as we have sought to recognize it so far.
But doesn't the name of the island of the sun, Thrinakia, point to the Peloponnese, the "forked island" (Wilamowitz H. U. 168) or the no less forked Chersonnese (Kranz ibid. 101), and thus, since both certainly lie on Odysseus's natural route, to their original affiliation with the Odysseus legend? I would not be surprised at all if Kranz's attempts to identify the forked island differently were followed by other such islands. For herds of Helios cattle still existed in some places (Jessen in Pauly-Wissowa VIII 71), as good as locations, and not just on the map, but they clearly looked like a winnowing shovel or a trident. For example, the urban terrain of Illyrian Apollonia is described "as a group of hills that protrude into the plain like a trident." I certainly do not intend to declare Apollonia as the original Homeric Thrinakia; I simply want to point out that this name does not necessarily indicate a definite location. We also have places named after farming instruments, for example, in the names Drepane and Zankle (Thuc. VI 4). Incidentally, it is precisely in Apollonia that sacred animals of Helios graze; the conservative Corinthian colony may have preserved a cult custom there that had been abandoned by the mother city. The conclusion of the adventure is also here rewritten by the Odyssey poet: the ship Argo could not be destroyed in the storm.
There remains the account of the events at Aeaea. The fact that Circe is called a sister of the wicked-minded Aeëtes (χ 137) has always prompted critics to draw connections to the Argonaut legend here as well; the fairy-tale character of the entire episode, its formal unoriginality, the violation of Jörgen's law, by which the appearance of Hermes must be judged, are decidedly favorable to our hypothesis. But it is precisely here that a more rigorous proof is most desirable; the Circe adventure holds all the others together, and if we succeed in proving its original connection to the Argonaut legend, we can well hope to have placed the keystone in the entire body of evidence. The proof will be attempted; however, this requires a further digression, which will lead us back to the questions posed in the first part of this book, to the study of legends.
Circe shows Odysseus the way. The famous guide of the Argonauts is Phineus. We must first briefly examine the Phineus story.
The Phineus legend was certainly treated several times in ancient epic poetry, but none of these versions seems to have been particularly successful—at least none became authoritative for later tradition. Thus, here, as with the entire Argonaut legend, there were no strict limits placed on the free-form imagination of the tragedians, and we can still infer from the few surviving verses of these tragedies the bold innovations of the poets. Antimachus again seems to have adhered closely to the account in the Hesiodic Catalogue, as did Apollonius. But this late, learned author, who was to succeed only in giving the legend its final form, is by no means lacking in his own modest inventions, and that he does not fail to make defensive or other references to differing accounts goes without saying for an Alexandrian poet. Given the abundance of variants that such a state of affairs gives rise to, one is almost tempted to join in the sighing of the mythographers, on whose diligence in collecting and balancing skill the wealth of forms in the accounts placed such great demands. It is clear that in the effort to bring together as many versions as possible into a coherent narrative, many a contradiction remained unreconciled. Every attentive reader will be puzzled when he comes across schol. V. to Od. μ 69 (ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ ̓Ασκληπιάδῃ—“the story according to Asclepiades”) or Hyginus (fab. 19), which claim that the Boread twins freed Phineus from his tormentors, the Harpies, who had his sons, the children of their sister, blinded.
What can lead us through the convoluted, often obscure paths of tradition to the goal of establishing the original legendary form? The name Phineus? This approach seems to fail here. Heroic legend clothes the "primal fable" in the forms of its own heroic existence, places it within the geographical facts of the world known to it, and interprets its own historical experiences into it: It may very well have subsequently attached to a legendary figure whose character and function in the plot are fully developed a name taken from precisely these conceptual spheres. We have examples of such a process; for example, consider Apsyrtus from the same cycle of legend. This essentially un-Greek name was used only later to designate a fully developed mythic figure similar to Phaethon. The same is likely for Phineus. "Φινεύς is named after the place, Phineion, and not the other way around; the place will have its name from φῖναξ· δρῦς (Hesych.)" (Fick-Bechtel 433. Sittig in Pauly-Wissowa VII 2429, cf. Steph. Βyz. s. v. Φίνειον. Φινόπολις.) As soon as the land of the sun, to which the Argonauts are sailing, was imagined on the eastern edge of the Pontus, the advising seer had to be imagined somewhere on the way there. This has already happened in our oldest evidence: Hesiod in the Eoeia (fr. 53 Rz.2 = Schol. Parisin. Ap. Rhod. II 181) called the sons of Phineus Θυνός and Μαριανδυνός – ἐξ ὧν τὰ ἔθνη κέκληται (“Mariandynus – from whom the peoples are named”), adds the scholiast; we say that these are the eponymous heroes of the tribes in question, situated on the coast east of the Bosporus. And when Pherecydes (fr. 68 = Schol. Ap. Rhod. a. O.) calls him king of the Asian Thracians, and Hellanicus (fr. 38 = Schol. Ap. Rhod. II 178) king of Paphlagonia, all this leads to the same conclusion as the unanimity with which the other testimonies also make him a Thracian: The name is firmly established in the region of the Bosporus, so consequently, like the entire localization of the myth on the Pontus, it must be secondary and therefore cannot provide any information for the oldest form of the Argonaut legend.
Nevertheless, the essential features of the Phineus episode are a necessary part of the entire legend. All versions, which otherwise diverge so widely, seem to agree that the Argonauts receive instructions about their voyage from Phineus. There have, however, been attempts to exclude the episode, like the prequel of the Fleece (Friedländer Rh. Mus. 69, 1914, 299 f.): but this is unjustified, as the parallels between fairy tales and their related Greek legends demonstrate.
We draw this lesson from the same "Helper's Tale," whose close relationship to the Argonauts' Legend was demonstrated above. This tale is closely related, touching upon, and very often interpenetrating with what recent scholarship calls the "Tale of the Bear's Son." Like the hero of the Helper's Tale, the brave "Bear's Son" also enters an otherworldly or subterranean world and, in a difficult battle, snatches a maiden from a demon. It differs from the Helper's Tale primarily in the characteristics of its companions; they possess no supernatural powers; the hero's virtue accomplishes everything alone and even triumphs over a shameful betrayal by his companions. Furthermore, it often has a childhood narrative of the hero that serves as preface. This "reports his miraculous birth, in which animal origins play a major role" (Panzer p. 15, see below), his growing up in hidden solitude, and the acquisition of a miraculous weapon. I think one may safely compare here the account of Jason's secret upbringing in the wilderness of Pelion and his upbringing by the forest animal, the wise offspring of Philyra [i.e., Chiron] (probably first found in Pind. Pyth. IV 102).
A closer examination of this fairy tale is extremely beneficial and convenient for us. Indeed, it has received, through Fr. Panzer, perhaps the most comprehensive critical treatment a fairy tale has ever received. (Fr. Panzer, Studies in Germanic Legends, I. Beowulf. Munich 1910.) Panzer presents the typical course of the narrative and, in addition, continuously records the variants of the individual narrators, just as one records the variants of the writers in a critical text. Thus, we can gratefully utilize his abundant material, examined so clearly and critically.
The fairy tale thus reports the "adventure in the forest house," as Panzer (p. 74 f.) calls the episode, as the first experience of the companions who set out with the hero. They come to a lonely, deserted house in the forest, where they are invited to stay. It is filled with comfortable furnishings and especially a sumptuous kitchen. The companions settle in. But during the hero's absence, a companion who remains in the house is haunted by a demon who devours or contaminates all the food and, to top it off, mistreats the companion. However, when he later tries to play the same trick on the hero himself, things go badly for him: he is overpowered, forced to reveal the secret of the princess the hero is seeking and show the way to her. We see something similar in Beowulf: The demon is wounded in battle but escapes through the entrance to his subterranean realm; the hero pursues him, following his blood trail, and now wins the actual decisive battle in that realm. It is uncertain whether this incident is truly "original," as Panzer suggests, for who could assert that with confidence? Can we truly grasp the "original" in all its details with certainty? Nevertheless, it should be noted that as the narrative progresses, it doesn't really know what to do with the demon who has fled to his realm. Since the hero has to wage the decisive battle with the actual Lord of the Underworld, the other demon either completely retreats or, like Grendel in Beowulf, has already succumbed to his wounds.
We also have a very similar pre-adventure in Greek myths: The hero, who is assigned a difficult task, namely a journey to the afterlife, uses cunning and force to extract knowledge of the path and means from a demonic being. This is what Heracles does with Nereus in his search for the apples of the Hesperides; this is how Perseus gains knowledge of his path from the outwitted Graeae, and a similar story may have been told about Peleus's capture of Thetis. Friedländer (Heracles 36 f.), for example, has quite rightly objected to the exclusion of the Nereus adventure from the Heracles legend, citing such fairy tales and the account of the giant Kuperan in the Seyfried Song. The fairy tale from Lorraine of the filleul du roi d'Angleterre (Cosquin No. III) seems particularly worthy of comparison. It is somewhat watered down by repetition of the same motif, somewhat bloated by the striving for richer and more magnificent depiction, spiced up by soldierly narrators, and finally not free from misunderstandings. Thus, the pre-adventure with the knowing demon is repeated several times; a fight with him does not take place, although the narrator prepares for it. Nevertheless, the basic outlines are quite clear and correct. The hero, sent to seek the most beautiful maiden, learns from a giant the way and means to win her, sets out on a ship, and along the way, entrusts himself to the kingdoms of rats, fish, and other animals, with whose help he successfully solves the difficult tasks set before him. This pre-adventure, established in our myth—the victory over a demon and the questioning of the demon about the means and methods of solving the main task in the otherworldly realm—can also be found in the Phineus story.
But, one might object, the Argonauts don't fight Phineus at all. Admittedly, he is "originally one of those demons who must lend their aid to the lonely sailor in unknown. . . seas or upon entering the realm of the unknown (the afterlife would be even better) so that he can make progress.” But Phineus doesn't do this reluctantly, after being overwhelmed or outwitted, but out of gratitude to the Argonauts who free him from the Harpies. And this pursuit of the Harpies is, after all, already attested by Hesiod as well as by the oldest sculptures, such as the Olympian Cypsele, the Amyclaean throne, and the Würzburg Phineus bowl. And one might even say that the Argonauts only gain the information they need through a successfully won battle; it is a battle of the Boread twins with the Harpies and not of the first hero with Phineus. Where are the similarities for comparison when there are so many differences?
All these objections must be acknowledged. But could we expect much else from this narrative, which, as we have seen, has been modified and expanded upon by so many poets? Indeed, even the oldest evidence available to us reveals a profound transformation of the original. From the mythical land of the sun, Aea has become Colchis; the world-bordering river, beyond which Helios dwells, has become the Pontus Euxeinus, just as the Persians made it the Tigris; the gate of the clashing rocks, which in myth only becomes dangerous to the returning traveler, has been reinterpreted by bold rationalism as a narrow passage on the Bosporus and placed at the beginning of the voyage. And yet, if we possessed more than a few sparse fragments of the epic and later accounts, we would find the version we have postulated more than once. One remembers that in the tragedians the relationship between the Argonauts and Phineus is not a friendly one: they punish him because he has blinded his children, the sons of the sisters of the Boreaed twins, and in Sophocles the punishment of Phineus consisted, in a truly tragic way, in blinding. Dionysius Scytobrachion, in keeping with the whole tendency of his narrative, has Heracles carry out the punishment (Diodorus IV 43 f.), and in the Orphic Argonautica he is chased by the storms of Boreas through the forests and scrublands of Bistonia and is thus killed (v. 680 f.). That this is not a recent invention is demonstrated by the verse of Hesiod, attributed by Ephorus in Strabo 302 to a γῆς περίοδος (“circuit of the Earth”), in which Phineus is driven by the Harpies Γλακτοφάγων ἐς γαῖαν ἀπήνας οἰκί ̓ ἐχόντων (“To the land of the milk-eaters, who have their dwelling afar.”): evidently this is a related tradition. Thus, not a few and not insignificant reports speak of Phineus' enmity with the Argonauts. The fable, however, of how the Boread twins free Phineus from the Harpies, does not fit such a version; there must be a change in the original, the meaning of which remains a mystery to us. Two things are certain: the idea of wind demons stealing or contaminating food is very old and popular (Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte II 2 90 f.), and the account of the disrupted meal is a recurring feature in the fairy tale of the forest house adventure. I will pick out one from the wealth of examples collected by Panzer: An Estonian fairy tale tells that "a king in Kunglaland had already twice had his feast, which he used to celebrate every seven years, thwarted because every time the food was served, a small, gray-haired man asked the head cook for permission to taste something, but all the ingredients disappeared as soon as he dipped the spoon." A highly peculiar and interesting variant may be described in some detail, because it has not yet been recognized as such and, moreover, beautifully illustrates the view presented here: namely, that the poets of heroic legends often take a fable that is firmly established in its course of events and, with greater or lesser transformation, draw it into the spheres of heroic life. I refer to the legend of Thor and Utgardaloki.
Gangleri demands to know whether Thor, who was never defeated, had ever encountered something "so puissant and strong that it was too powerful for him"; "And despite the protests of those who know this about Thor, who point out the outrageousness and indecency of the story, because there is much evidence that Thor remains the strongest, and because we must all believe it," the story is told. Thor and Loki stop at a farmer's house; Thor slaughters his goats for a communal meal and revives them the next morning by swinging his hammer over the skin and bones. But one of them is lame: despite Thor's prohibition, Thjalfi, the farmer's son, had broken a bone to extract the marrow, and the farmer can only appease the god's terrible anger by giving him his children, Thjalfi and the girl Röskwa, as servants. They continue on, the swift-footed Thjalfi carrying the sack of food, and sail across the sea. There, they enter an endless forest and at night reach a large, empty house, where they rest. At midnight, a massive earthquake occurs; Thor flees with his companions into a smaller house next door. Early in the morning, they see that the earthquake of the previous night had been caused by the monstrous giant Skrymi, their dwelling was the giant’s gauntlet, and the house next door was his thimble. Skrymi offers to accompany them; they put their food together in a shared sack, which the giant ties up and now carries in Thjalfi's place. In the evening, he lies down without a meal and soon falls asleep. Thor, however, cannot open the tied-up sack of food; he suspects the giant's treachery, grabs the hammer in anger, and strikes the snoring man with a mighty blow. The giant awakens, asks if a leaf fell on his head, and if they have eaten. Thor answers evasively, saying they now wish to sleep. As the giant resumes snoring, the god strikes a second time, much more powerfully, and toward morning a third time with his hammer, but with no better effect than the first. Skrymi now advises Thor and his companions to go to Utgard Castle, where mighty men are to be found; and after giving them advice and showing them the way leading east, he separates from them. Thor and his men actually reach the castle, but since they cannot open the locked gate, they have to slip through its very narrow bars. With superior mockery, King Utgardaloki, enthroned among his men in the hall, greets the newcomers: "It is not easy to hear true news from afar, or is it different from what I think? Is this young fellow really Asa-Thor?" And then he asks about his and his companions' skill, "for no one is allowed among us who does not distinguish himself from other men through some skill or talent." Loki undertakes to eat faster than everyone else, Thjalfi wants to be first in a race: both are overtaken by Utgardaloki's men. Thor is supposed to drink first, but in three mighty gulps from the offered horn, he only manages to get a little of the drink down; then he is supposed to lift Utgardaloki's cat from the ground, but it arches its back, ever higher, and Thor, exerting all his strength, only manages to get the animal to lift one foot; finally, he is supposed to wrestle with the king's foster mother, the old woman Elli, who even causes him to sink to the knee with one leg. Utgardaloki then has enough of the competitions, treats them lavishly, and accompanies them out of the castle the next day. And now that Thor is outside, Utgardaloki reveals the truth to him: "You almost brought us to great distress, but I deceived you with illusions. The first time I met you in the forest, in the form of the giant Skrymi; when you wanted to open the food bag, I had magically tied it with iron wire..." And with Thor's hammer blows, the giant had raised a hill in front of him, in which three deep, square valleys can still be seen as traces of the mighty blows. Loki succumbed to Logi, that is, wildfire, in the feeding contest, and Thjalfi was overtaken in the race by Hugi, thought; Thor himself, however, drank from the sea and with his mighty strokes caused the tide to go out. The cat was the Midgard Serpent, which coils around the entire globe, and to everyone's horror, Thor stretched it up close to the sky. Finally, he wrestled with Elli, the old age that slays all those born. And from now on, Utgardaloki will protect his castle from such dangerous guests. When Thor heard this speech, he reached for his hammer to strike Utgardaloki and his castle, but everything has vanished. --
This wonderful piece of skaldic poetry does not need to be fully analyzed here; nor do I understand enough about Norse mythology for that. It is not merely a matter of comparing individual fairy-tale features or eliminating motifs taken from elsewhere; what is essential here are two other things. The structure of the narrative is quite clearly the same as in our helper tale: the hero's departure and the acquisition of companions with supernatural powers, their first adventure in the solitary dwelling in the forest—the giant's glove is a bizarre new invention—the interrupted meal, the battle with the demon who points the way to the afterlife—this by no means self-evident combination of such peculiar motifs is no coincidence. That Utgard Castle bears features of the afterlife would be clear, even if Saxo did not explicitly describe Thor's journey as a descent into hell: They first cross the sea, and entrance must be forced through a very narrow gate. Utgardaloki's words at the end clearly express the idea that a return is now impossible. Thor's simple and invincible strength was not enough for the skalds of the Eddic period: they wanted to portray their tricks and intrigues, the eternal uncertainty of existence, and so they transformed the hero's victorious battles into meaningful defeats. Where the poet derived these concepts remains an open question; Heracles, for example, also struggles with Γῆρας, the old age; that its use in this story originates from the poet cannot be doubted. However, he could not award his hero a prize for defeats, and so the actual central element of the story, the winning of the beautiful maiden, was lost. Perhaps this was intended to be replaced by the account of Röskwa, the farmer's daughter, whom Thor receives.
In this example one can, it seems to me, grasp almost tangibly how bold transformations may be attributed to a poet’s individuality. With regard to the Phineus episode, the story of Skrymir especially interests us. Here too we find the motif of the disturbed meal; here too, through the poet’s intention that Thor should suffer defeats, the original has been blurred, and it remains recognizable only in traces—how the hero had to wrest advice and counsel from the demon.
But let us now return definitively to Phineus. Legend tells of another Phineus, brother of Cepheus, who was betrothed to Andromeda and, after her rescue by Perseus, disrupted the wedding feast with the noise of weapons, asserted his claims against the stranger. This is the story told by Ovid (Met. V 8 f.) and Apollodorus (II 4, 3, 6), probably based on Euripides' Andromeda. The two figures of the same name can hardly be separated, as Hiller, op. cit., 64, emphasizes, but a connection has so far been sought in vain. Is it permissible to ask whether the fact that he appears in the Andromeda legend as a disturber of the meal might not perhaps go back to ancient tradition and still contain a trace of his original nature?
Let us briefly summarize the original form of the legend and its transformations. Jason and his companions encountered a demon who initially treated them badly—probably by disrupting their meal—but was then overpowered and forced to reveal information about the onward journey. The heroic legend transforms the material; the knowledgeable demon becomes a seer, and this, simultaneously with the subsequent localization of the voyage in Pontus, is equated with an already established legendary figure, the Thracian king Phineus. It was natural to imagine the seer blind; just as natural that people later asked about the causes of this blindness. The variety of answers clearly shows how secondary all these explanations are. Sometimes it is Zeus, sometimes Helios, sometimes Poseidon, who blinds the king; and since Hesiod also knows of a second punishment, the plague of the Harpies, one must also consider the former as secondary. The tragedy clung to the seer, but in the account of his enmity against the Argonauts, preserved an older mythic form, which in the epic had been altered by the story of the Harpies, and invented a new explanation for his blindness: family discord; the slander and intrigue of his stepmother that led him to commit a crime against his sons. Antimachus again follows the account of the Catalog; Apollonius combines several versions so that their resolution is usually a matter as simple as it is amusing, and occasionally adds his own modest invention or a flat "elaboration." He calls him (II 237) the son, not the grandson of Agenor like Hesiod, but must therefore grant him an excessively long life (Schol. II 178). He was formerly king of Thrace, but now lives in Bithynia as a simple seer, honored and cared for by the surrounding inhabitants. (238, 450 f.) Apollonius evidently liked the idea that a seer also has a duty to remain silent in some matters; this is impressed upon us ad nauseam (311, 390, 425), and the impressive, profound phrase in Phineus's rejoinder (v. 444 f.) is clearly Apollonius's own: "Perhaps a god will restore your sight once more," Jason consoles; "I would rather he give me death," replies the blind man, "καί τε θανών πάσῃσι μετέσσομαι ἀγλαίῃσι" (“And I will join you in all your deaths”). This also shows that the author is familiar with Sophocles' story of the healing of Phineus' blinded sons. And it continues in this entertaining manner.
But let us finally return from these late games to the Circe adventure. Just as we explored the ancient form of the legend, the close relationship and firm affiliation with this cycle is now revealed in it too. The lonely castle in the forest, in which a demonic being dwells, attracts the companions; things go badly for them, the witch enchants them, and only the hero overcomes the demon and receives instructions from him for the next phase of the journey. The accumulation of genuine fairy tale motifs is thus explained by the larger context of the entire story, and it no longer needs to be assumed that independent fairy tale motifs are sometimes less frequent, sometimes more numerous, in this or that episode. The Circe and Phineus adventures are two different epic elaborations of the same ancient legendary episode, precisely this preliminary adventure in which the hero, through a fight with a demon, gains knowledge of the path to be taken. The fairy tale itself introduces this demon sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman (Panzer, op. cit., 79); In one epic development, the male demon was fused with a legendary figure, the Thracian king Phineus, who was already somewhat developed and attached to a specific location; in the other version, the female demon became the sister of Aeëtes. This other version contained the Argonaut poem that forms the basis of the Odyssey. Undoubtedly, the appearance and helpful assistance of the messenger of the gods (χ. 277 f.) also belongs to the overall context, an episode that emerges from the strict style of the first-person narrative, but is very natural in the context of our fairy tale and probably has its precise parallels. We remain more in the dark about other questions. Did Circe give Jason her advice willingly or under duress? Did the Argonauts also stay on the hospitable island for so long? Did they, like Odysseus, also land on Aeaea a second time and only then receive instructions for the return journey? Little can be deduced from the "original fable" about such details; our Argonaut poem, as a fully developed epic, is far removed from the primitive narrative. We can at least make some probable assumptions about some points. The long stay in the opulent enchanted castle is a common fairy tale motif; by assuming that our Argonaut poem, like the Odyssey, also reported an extended period of idle luxury, the still striking circumstance would receive a not insignificant explanation: that the otherwise inactive companions must remind their leader Odysseus, who is otherwise primarily concerned with returning home, of this seems much more appropriate for the equally important heroes of the Argo. Whether and how this account is connected to the Lemnian adventure, we cannot examine here. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that the description of the camp in χ. 345 f. is also taken from the Argonaut poem. This is the starting point for the story of the four maids, whose activities have no comparable significance in Homer, and the equally singular, Hesiodic teaching in the Odyssey that such creatures originate from springs, forests, and rivers (χ. 350 f.). In a picture of the Olympian Cypsele, Pausanias (V. 19, 7) saw "a woman lying on a couch with a man in a grotto," surrounded by four maids engaged in the activity described in our passage. Perieget, since inscriptions are missing, surmises that the pair are Odysseus and Circe. But the grotto does not fit the Odyssey, and besides, this would probably be the only depiction from the Odyssey's legendary cycle on the Kypsele, while it had images from the Argonauts' cycle (Jason, Medea, and Aphrodite V 18, 3. ἆθλα ἐπὶ Πελίᾳ [Battles on Pelion], V 17, 9); were they, as presented in our Argonaut epic, Jason and Circe? We can hardly reach any certainty on all these matters and are content with having clearly answered at least one question: the adventure at the Aeaean Circe is a fixed episode in the Argonauts' fable, just as the Planctae are, and was only transferred to Odysseus later. What the poet changed in this process is uncertain. But with this evidence, the probability has increased even further that the other adventures closely connected with the Circe episode were also transferred from the Argonauts' cycle to Odysseus.
Only a brief word remains to be said about Nekyia, that central figure in the Odyssey's composition, which we have so far omitted from our consideration; not unjustly, we hope. For it should probably be generally admitted that the narrative of the journey to Hades was only subsequently and artificially inserted into our present context. On the other hand, however, one must also acknowledge that the poem fulfills a high poetic purpose with admirable certainty. Not only do all the threads converge here and intertwine inextricably: the wrath of Poseidon and Helios, proclaimed by Tiresias, the sadly confused conditions of the homeland, which the mother lamentably describes. But the hero is also presented against the backdrop of the great Trojan events, his fate contrasted with that of the other heroes. In these most inextricable parts of the poem, the exclusive reference to Odysseus is clear; in the others, the list of heroic mothers and the penitents, at least no reference to the Argonauts can be discerned. Kirchhoff, much to the dismay of later critics, assigned the Nekyia to his "old Nostos" (Hom. Odyssey 2 225 f. Wilamowitz Hom. Unt. 133): he found no trace of a developed model, but he did find the main motif of his "Nostos," the wrath of Poseidon, inextricably linked to the entire poem. We now see how right he was here as well. Admittedly, the Nekyia was only subsequently inserted into a completed context; but this context itself belonged not to the Odyssey, but to the Argonautica, and nothing prevents us from assuming that the same poet who transferred the Argonaut stories to Odysseus inserted his own invention at this point with the Nekyia. How far later authors have expanded this poem is not our concern here; only the question remains whether the poet of the Nekyia also received the inspiration for his creation from the Argonautica. At this point, Jason's adventures at Aeëtes must have been reported; but what the relationship between the otherworldly realm of the sun and the actual underworld is still an open question—a question that would be worthy of extensive investigation and is by no means settled by the brief reference given above.
Conclusion.
The goal of our investigations was actually solely the ancient Argonaut poem; the Odyssey interested us only insofar as it must be considered as a source for it. However, since questions of composition cannot be limited to individual sections, it became necessary to consider the structure of at least books ε—ξ in their entirety. The following summarizes the results for these books in the convenient form of a genesis hypothesis.
Wilamowitz had believed he could exclude the poem about Calypso as a single song; our effort was aimed at demonstrating how inextricably linked its connection with the Phaeacian books is. However, it is also closely linked to the Cyclopia and the Tiresias episode through the shared motif of the wrath of Poseidon. We imagine that the poet of the "older Odyssey" (ε—ξ resp. ϙστ) essentially recreated all those pieces to which we believe we can see a particularly strong mark of individual invention: for example, Calypso, the most important of the Phaeacian books, first and foremost Nausicaa, and from the Apologue, the Cyclopia with the smaller adventures grouped around it, and the Journey to Hades with the proclamation of Tiresias, the conversations with the mother, and the Trojan heroes. This same poet then, by transferring a whole series of adventures originally belonging to the Argonaut legend to Odysseus, truly elevated his hero to the most fateful of all Trojan warriors. But it was not so easy to assign these adventures to him. For one thing, they were all located in the East, indeed even in Pontus; Odysseus, however, lived in the West and had his first adventures there. The poet of the Odyssey made the connection of the separate settings possible through the invention of the floating island of Aeolus; for he had to adhere to the facts of mythical geography. We have seen how he adopted the Argonauts' adventures in their entirety, adapting the individual adventures to Odysseus, often through somewhat violent means, but almost always also through successful reinvention. His poetry supplanted the older version of the Argonauts, and just as the wonderful image of the bold Ionian, bound to the mast and defying the enchanting song of the Sirens, had to supplant the more consistent image of the singer Orpheus, who drowns out their song, so too did the older fame of the Argonauts give way to the more magnificent creation of Odysseus. Since, as must be emphasized once again, we can only form an idea, from the epics available to us in their uniform shape, of the extent to which the same poet may be credited with original or formulaic expression, it seems reasonable to maintain the view that the less vivid expression of the Argonautic passages, assuming the poet to be the same, is due above all to his use of the Vorlage (model text). At the very point where the Argonaut story recounted Jason's battles in the otherworldly land of the sun, this poet inserted into the context a wonderful piece of his own invention: the Nekyia. Like all other major pieces of his invention, it contains the basic features of the composition: the wrath of Poseidon and the form of the first-person narrative. Later adaptations have focused particularly on the Nekyia and the Phaeacian books, which are as well-suited as they are tempting for further embellishment.
If the Odyssey offers the image of a poetry that owes its best to an outstanding individual creative power, then in the old Argonaut epic we see instead a much closer adherence to an ancient, fixed mythical tradition. The basic outlines of the tale—the departure of the heroes into the sunlit land of the beyond, the overcoming of a demon and the discovery of the way, the perilous return through the mythical gate—are preserved in their old sequence, and even in the details the fairy-tale motif, the fairy-tale tone, emerges clearly. The marvelous lays claim to much greater importance than in the Odyssey; the witch’s powers of transformation, the fabulous Sirens are examples of this. And yet this Argonaut poem was already a true epic. The voyage was, as the spring Artakia and the fixed Clashing Rocks show, already localized in the Pontus; it seems that still more aetiological tales were told in it, and the heroic element reveals itself clearly, for instance, in the fact that the ruler of the otherworld is named as King Aeëtes, and that the demon of that other world, who in the forest-castle plays his tricks on the heroes, is said to be a magic-skilled sister of this king. Indeed, the epic had a developed apparatus of gods: Hera favors Jason, Helios brings his complaint before Zeus, and Hermes is sent to protect the hero against the witch’s arts. As for the course of the voyage as the epic related it, the material considered so far offers hardly much more information; it is possible that an examination of the direct tradition of the Argonaut voyage might further enrich our view of it. Perhaps the question of the home of our poem could also be resolved. But we have already ventured so many uncertain conjectures that we prefer for the present to leave this question to more knowledgeable hands for examination, and also, for the time being, to forgo entering into the conclusions and questions that arise from our hypothesis for the Odyssey saga.
Wilamowitz had believed he could exclude the poem about Calypso as a single song; our effort was aimed at demonstrating how inextricably linked its connection with the Phaeacian books is. However, it is also closely linked to the Cyclopia and the Tiresias episode through the shared motif of the wrath of Poseidon. We imagine that the poet of the "older Odyssey" (ε—ξ resp. ϙστ) essentially recreated all those pieces to which we believe we can see a particularly strong mark of individual invention: for example, Calypso, the most important of the Phaeacian books, first and foremost Nausicaa, and from the Apologue, the Cyclopia with the smaller adventures grouped around it, and the Journey to Hades with the proclamation of Tiresias, the conversations with the mother, and the Trojan heroes. This same poet then, by transferring a whole series of adventures originally belonging to the Argonaut legend to Odysseus, truly elevated his hero to the most fateful of all Trojan warriors. But it was not so easy to assign these adventures to him. For one thing, they were all located in the East, indeed even in Pontus; Odysseus, however, lived in the West and had his first adventures there. The poet of the Odyssey made the connection of the separate settings possible through the invention of the floating island of Aeolus; for he had to adhere to the facts of mythical geography. We have seen how he adopted the Argonauts' adventures in their entirety, adapting the individual adventures to Odysseus, often through somewhat violent means, but almost always also through successful reinvention. His poetry supplanted the older version of the Argonauts, and just as the wonderful image of the bold Ionian, bound to the mast and defying the enchanting song of the Sirens, had to supplant the more consistent image of the singer Orpheus, who drowns out their song, so too did the older fame of the Argonauts give way to the more magnificent creation of Odysseus. Since, as must be emphasized once again, we can only form an idea, from the epics available to us in their uniform shape, of the extent to which the same poet may be credited with original or formulaic expression, it seems reasonable to maintain the view that the less vivid expression of the Argonautic passages, assuming the poet to be the same, is due above all to his use of the Vorlage (model text). At the very point where the Argonaut story recounted Jason's battles in the otherworldly land of the sun, this poet inserted into the context a wonderful piece of his own invention: the Nekyia. Like all other major pieces of his invention, it contains the basic features of the composition: the wrath of Poseidon and the form of the first-person narrative. Later adaptations have focused particularly on the Nekyia and the Phaeacian books, which are as well-suited as they are tempting for further embellishment.
If the Odyssey offers the image of a poetry that owes its best to an outstanding individual creative power, then in the old Argonaut epic we see instead a much closer adherence to an ancient, fixed mythical tradition. The basic outlines of the tale—the departure of the heroes into the sunlit land of the beyond, the overcoming of a demon and the discovery of the way, the perilous return through the mythical gate—are preserved in their old sequence, and even in the details the fairy-tale motif, the fairy-tale tone, emerges clearly. The marvelous lays claim to much greater importance than in the Odyssey; the witch’s powers of transformation, the fabulous Sirens are examples of this. And yet this Argonaut poem was already a true epic. The voyage was, as the spring Artakia and the fixed Clashing Rocks show, already localized in the Pontus; it seems that still more aetiological tales were told in it, and the heroic element reveals itself clearly, for instance, in the fact that the ruler of the otherworld is named as King Aeëtes, and that the demon of that other world, who in the forest-castle plays his tricks on the heroes, is said to be a magic-skilled sister of this king. Indeed, the epic had a developed apparatus of gods: Hera favors Jason, Helios brings his complaint before Zeus, and Hermes is sent to protect the hero against the witch’s arts. As for the course of the voyage as the epic related it, the material considered so far offers hardly much more information; it is possible that an examination of the direct tradition of the Argonaut voyage might further enrich our view of it. Perhaps the question of the home of our poem could also be resolved. But we have already ventured so many uncertain conjectures that we prefer for the present to leave this question to more knowledgeable hands for examination, and also, for the time being, to forgo entering into the conclusions and questions that arise from our hypothesis for the Odyssey saga.
Source: Karl Meuli, Odyssee und Argonautika (Berlin: Weidmannsch Buchhandlung, 1921).
