Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

head. 55 That Agni's span of horses were transformed into Heimdall's riding horse was
also a result of time and circumstances. In Rigveda, riding and cavalry are unknown;
there the horses of the gods draw the divine chariots. In the Germanic mythology, the
draught horses are changed into riding horses, and chariots occur only exceptionally.
We have reason to be surprised at finding that the Indo-European-Asiatic myths
and the Germanic have so broad surfaces of contact, on which not only the main outlines
but even the details completely resemble each other. But the fact is not inexplicable. The
hymns, the songs of the divine worship and of the sacrifices of the Rigveda Indo-
Europeans, have been preserved, but the epic-mythological poems are lost, so that there
remains the difficult task of reconstructing out of the former a clear and concise
mythology, freed from the "dissolving views" in which their mythic characters now blend
into each other. The Germanic mythology has had an opposite fate: here the genuine
religious songs, the hymns of divine worship and of sacrifices, are lost, and there remain
fragments of the mighty divine epic of the Teutons. But thus we have also been robbed of
the opportunity of studying those very songs which in a higher degree than the epic are
able to preserve through countless centuries ancient mythical traits; for the hymns belong
to the divine worship, popular customs are long-lived, and the sacred customs are more
conservative and more enduring than all others, if they are not disturbed by revolutions in
the domain of faith. If an epithet of a god, e.g., "the fast traveller," has once become fixed
by hymns and been repeated in the divine service year after year, then, in spite of the
gradual transformation of the languages and the types of the race, it may be preserved
through hundreds and thousands of years. Details of this kind may in this manner survive
the ravages of time just as well as the great outlines of the mythology, and if there be a
gradual change as to signification, then this is caused by the change of language, which
may make an old expression unintelligible or give it another meaning based on the
association of ideas.
From all this I am forced to draw the conclusion that Heimdall, like several other
Germanic gods - for example, Odin (Wodan, Rigveda's Vata) 56 -- belongs to the ancient
Indo-European age, and retained, even to the decay of the Germanic heathendom his
ancient character as the personal representative of the sacred fire, the fire produced by
friction, and, in this connection, as the representative of the oldest culture connected with
the introduction of fire.
This also explains Heimdall's epithet Vindlér, in Codex Regius of the Prose Edda
(Skáldskaparmál 15). 57 The name is a subform of vindill and comes from vinda, to twist
55 Ammianus Marcellinus Roman Emperor who wrote a catalogue of Egyptian fauna in the 4th century
A.D.
56 Speaking of these comparisons in 1964, E. O. G. Turville-Petre said Rydberg's views were "extreme, and
therefore, won less recognition than they deserved." Rydberg investigates the connections between the
Indo-European mythologies of the Greeks and the Scandinavians with those of Asia more fully in volume 2
of "Investigations in Germanic Mythology" (1889), pps 1-202, and extending into his examination of the
Baldur myth, pps. 203-295.
57 The variant Vindlhlér appears in Háttatal 7. For this Eysteinn Björnsson suggests Vind(h)lér might be
read Wind-Hlér. Hlér is a known name of (Ægir). Thus Vindhlér might be interpretted as "wind-oceangod,"
i.e. "god of the ocean of winds" = "god of the atmosphere."