This saga is evidently a sun myth, the blood of the final massacres and the flames of the pyre being emblems of the sunset, and the slaying of Fafnir representing the defeat of cold and darkness which have carried off the golden hoard of summer.

  Ye have heard of Sigurd aforetime, how the foes of God he slew;
  How forth from the darksome desert the Gold of the Waters he drew;
  How he wakened Love on the Mountain, and wakened Brynhild the Bright,
  And dwelt upon Earth for a season, and shone in all men’s sight. 
  Ye have heard of the Cloudy People, and the dimming of the day,
  And the latter world’s confusion, and Sigurd gone away;
  Now ye know of the Need of the Niblungs and the end of broken troth,
  All the death of kings and of kindreds and the Sorrow of Odin the Goth.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 34:  See the author’s “Myths of Northern Lands.”]

[Footnote 35:  All the quotations in this chapter are from Wm. Morris’ “Sigurd the Volsung.”]

RUSSIAN AND FINNISH EPICS

There is strong evidence that the Finns, or some closely allied race, once spread over the greater part of central Europe.  The two or more million Finns who now occupy Finland, and are subject—­much against their will—­to the Czar, are the proud possessors of an epic poem—­the Kalevala—­which until last century existed only in the memory of a few peasants.  Scattered parts of this poem were published in 1822 by Zacharias Topelius, and Elias Loennrot, who patiently travelled about to collect the remainder, was the first to arrange the 22,793 verses into 50 runes or cantos.  The Kalevala attracted immediate attention and has already been translated into most modern languages.  Like most epics, its source is in the mythology and folk-lore of the people, and its style has been closely imitated by Longfellow in his Hiawatha.  The latest English adaptation of this great epic is Baldwin’s “Sampo.”

Although Russian literature is rich in folk poetry and epic songs, none of the latter have been written down until lately, with the exception of the twelfth-century Song of Igor’s Band.  The outline of this epic is that Igor, prince of Southern Russia, after being defeated and made prisoner, effected his escape with the help of a slave.  Among the fine passages in this work we note Nature’s grief over the prince’s capture and the lament of his faithful consort.

It was only in the nineteenth century, after Zhukovski and Batyushkoff had translated into Russian some of the world’s great masterpieces, such as Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Homer’s Odyssey, that Pushkin wrote (1820) the epic Ruslan and Lyudmila, drawing the materials therefore from Russian antiquity and from popular legends.