later times, two of the most striking stories of ancient
legend--that of Thor, the Scandinavian thunder-god, who feasted
at night on the goats which drew his chariot, and in the
morning, by a touch of his hammer, brought them back to life;
and that of Orpheus in the beautiful Greek legend, the master of
divine song, who moved the streams, and rocks, and trees, by the
beauty of his music, and brought back his wife Eurydike from the
shades of death. In our Western fairy tales we still have these
Ribhus, or Arbhus, transformed, through various changes of
language, into Albs, and Elfen, and last into our English Elves.
It is not needful to go further into the fanciful way in which
the old Aryans slowly made ever-increasing deities and superhuman
beings for themselves out of all the forms and aspects of Nature;
or how their Hindu and Persian and Greek and Teuton descendants
peopled all earth, and air, and sky, and water, with good and
bad spirits and imaginary powers. But, as we shall see later,
all these creatures grew out of one thing only--the Sun, and his
influence upon the earth. Aryan myths were no more than poetic
fancies about light and darkness, cloud and rain, night and day,
storm and wind; and when they moved westward and southward, the
Aryan races brought these legends with them; and they were
shaped by degrees into the innumerable gods and demons of the
Hindus, the divs and jinns of the Persians, the great gods,
the minor deities, and nymphs, and fauns, and satyrs of Greek
mythology and poetry; the stormy divinities, the giants, and
trolls of the cold and rugged North; the dwarfs of the German
forests; the elves who dance merrily in the moonlight of an
English summer; and the "good people" who play mischievous tricks
upon stray peasants amongst the Irish hills. Almost all, indeed,
that we have of a legendary kind comes to us from our Aryan