The Archetypal Structure of Hymisqviða
1980; Routledge; Volume: 91; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0015587x.1980.9716159
ISSN1469-8315
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistics and language evolution
ResumoT HE Eddic mythological lay Hymisqvida is regarded by most scholars as a late poem and as a conglomerate of older, originally independent mythical traditions.' The different materials comprising the poem are held together contextually by two interconnected and more or less continuous motifs, the fetching of a brewing-kettle by the gods Tyr and Thor, and the sea-journey or journeys which lead them to their goal. The former motif has been widely interpreted as a nature myth. In this view the kettle which the gods fetch represents either the ice-bound northern ocean which is freed from the wintergod Hymir by the summer-gods Thor and Tyr, or the vault of heaven, more precisely the cloud-covered autumnal sky, which according to Hellquist2 is freed from its demonic captor, the cloud-giant Hymir, by the thunder-god Thor and the (sunlit) sky-god Tyr. In the latter interpretation the gods bring about a purifying storm which causes rain to fall, represented symbolically by the ale or divine mead which is associated with the kettle. (A nature myth in which rain = divine mead falls in the autumn!) Like other scholars before him (Mannhardt, Rydberg) Hellquist notes the similarity between Thor's role in the kettlefetching episode and the role of the Indian god Indra, who steals the divine soma from his father Tvastar, thereby gaining supernatural strength and immortality. The similarity is taken to be evidence of the common Indo-European origin of the two myths. Franz Rolf Schrider has examined this parallel more thoroughly than his predecessors,3 has included Odin's theft of the Poetic Mead as a further analogue, and extended the parallelism of the two bodies of myth to encompass Thor's fight with the Midgard Serpent (it is assumed that the version of this fight told by Snorri in the Prose Edda, in which Thor kills the serpent, represents the original myth) and Indra's slaying of the monster Vritra. The motif of the overcoming of the monster by the strong hero is for Schri*der 'der Sieg des GtSttersohnes fiber die Chaosmaichte der Urzeit' (p.30). Ranging further afield, SchriSder sees a cognate to these myths in the story of the Polynesian god-hero Maui, who fishes up the island of New Zealand (among others) from the depths of the ocean while on a fishing expedition. Thus Thor's fishing expedition and battle with the Midgard-Serpent were originally an Indo-European creationmyth (p.32-33), not the eschatological vision which they eventually became in Christian Scandinavia of the late Middle Ages.4 Like Hellquist, SchrSder regards Hymir as a sky-god, 'ein alter Himmelsgott', who is dethroned and supplanted by his son (Thor, Tyr?). Etymological evidence, he suggests, supports this view, but he is forced to concede in the end that the name 'Hymir' may not be derived from *keu, 'leuchten, hell', at all but
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