SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

26 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
Welsh and French literatures the totally different
character of the Celtic and the Germanic mind and spirit.
Once aware of this different atmosphere of their literary
productions, we can easily detect Celtic motifs and
incidents in the medieval literature of Germany. To be
sure they are not apparent in the Nibelungenlied, but they
pop up in the Kudrun. and they submerge the poems about
Wolfdietrich. One instance may suffice: for example,
the meeting of the hero with the ugly old hag, who
transforms herself into a lovely young maiden. We are
reminded at once of similar instances in Irish tales: in
a poem of the sons of king Daire Doimthech we are told,
that a very forbidding old hag requires them to sleep with
her; they all shrink back from it with the exception of
Lugaid; when all has become dark, she is changed into
a lovely maiden and reveals to him, that she is the
sovereignty of Ireland. This shows the hidden meaning
of scenes of this kind; the future king must show his
prowess and courage to win the beautiful woman, who
represents the flaith or sovereignty.' Stripped, however,
of its mythical meaning, the scene shows a quite unusual
fantasy. Such maidens in the appearance of ugly hags
move through the British romances and are even admitted
into the tales of Wolfdietrich, who is after all the East­
Gothic king Theodoric the Creat.>
So far I have tried to point out the difference in the
methods of Germanic and Celtic story-tellers. We would
like to understand the reason for these contradictory
attitudes towards the real and the unreal, but we should
run the risk of grappling with the dangerous problem of
the psychology of peoples and races. This is moreover
outside the scope of this paper.
The fact that literary motifs wander from one people
to another is not surprising at all. More interesting,
however, is the fact that in this case we cannot restrict
1 See for other examples my Keltische Religion (1961), 242.
2 For this identification see my paper in Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift
XXXIX (1958), 1-18.