Kathleen Herbert and the Lost Gods of the Harvest

(Left to right) Kathleen Herbert’s Looking for the Lost Gods of England; an epitaph for John Barleycorn in my wife's family cabin, dated to American Prohibition; the Gefion Fountain, Copenhagen and a corn dolly, both courtesy of Wikipedia.

We have entered September, or for the Anglo-Saxons, hærfest-mōnaþ, (Harvest Month, or earlier, hālig-mōnaþ, Holy Month) and I wanted to give a seasonal salute to what in New England (and in other places of our latitude, I presume) is the very beginning of Autumn, even if technically we have until September 22nd. This post will stand as a partial review of Kathleen Herbert’s Looking for the Lost Gods of England, but inspired by Herbert, I will also tackle some early fall traditions that I was not aware of until I researched them for this piece.

For my seasonal salute, I had particularly wanted to further research a figure that some have identified as the Old English god of grain, Beow, or Beowa, and the folk figure, John Barleycorn, a human representation of the grain used to make beer, whiskey and barleywine, a malty beer brewed to the alcoholic strength of wine. Barleycorn’s ritual death is memorialized in the song “John Barleycorn Must Die.” In the song, Sir John grows from child to bearded man in the growing season and is attacked with scythes, pitchforks and sticks, and crushed under a millstone. Each step represents the processing of barley into a brewable form. Robert Burns took his hand at the ballad, and there are many song renditions, but to my taste, the Watersons (as usual) produced the ghastliest version, to make one feel bound and gagged in the wicker man himself!

Beowa is not a figure you will find any stories about. His existence as a grain god is based entirely on his name, an analogous Norse figure and his proximity in genealogies and tales of other grain-oriented figures. Beowa though has gained traction as the root of Beowulf's name -- think "the wolf of Beowa," which would be similar to the name Thorulf, but with Beowa in place of Thor. I expected to find new information based on a Wikipedia entry using Herbert as a source. Herbert's various Old English oriented texts had appeared in online recommendations for a few years and though I didn't know anyone who had read her, I finally felt compelled to go to right to the source. Herbert, refers to an Anglo-Saxon royal genealogy and adds the following: “Beow; Barley, his son. This is the being , later known as John Barleycorn, whose passion, death and resurrection are told in a folk song, which also celebrates the reviving effects of drinking his blood” (Herbert, 16). Barley here is the son of Sheaf, another figure (and word) associated with grain. It is tempting to use the folk song to understand the Beowa figure, and perhaps the song does record an ancient tradition, handed down through the ages. The part of me that yearns for more knowledge of the past would like this to be the case. The (killjoy) part of me that wants the solid record attesting the firm connection simply says that it’s not there.

Herbert’s text is nevertheless full of thought-provoking theories about the harvest and other seasonal rituals and it is consistently based on the sources one would see in an academic text. Herbert surmises that if the English had an earlier name for September, if may have been based on the Old English word Gifan, to give, which also recalls the Norse Gefjon, who is associated with plows, the Danish island of Sjaelland (Zealand) and, according to the Heimskringla, marries Skjoldr, a figure associated with Scyld Seafing from Beowulf, another figure associated with grain because of his name, Sheaf. In the Norse story, Gefjon tricks a king into giving her as much land as she can plow in a day. She bears magical sons who turn into giant oxen and detach the landmass of Sjaelland from Sweden and tow it to its present location. Sjaelland, and excavations of a long hall in Lejre, have drawn associations with Heorot hall of Beowulf.

Herbert also analyzes the Old English charm “Field Remedy,” which I had never considered to be the full blown ritual she describes. Parts of “Field Remedy” are spoken aloud, but others describe complicated steps to producing a fertile field. The charm seems to represent a midway point between pagan and Christian belief in that it involves the ritual plowing of the field and invocations of an earth mother, but also blessings by a Christian priest, holy water and invocations of the Christian Evangelists. Herbert convincingly argues that the steps taken in the charm describe the ritual impregnation of the earth mother, which Herbert identifies with Nerthus, the Mother Earth goddess worshiped by the Anglo-Saxons’ continental ancestors, according to the Roman historian Tacitus. Part of the ritual involved blessing cut sections of turf, and another, the anointing of the plow with a salve of incense, fennel and salt. Herbert argues that the plowing represented a sexual consummation: “Before the plough/penis was put into Mother Earth, it had to be anointed and made potent with semen” (Herbert, 15). One of the final steps was to bake a small loaf of bread made from all grains and to lay it under the earth of the first furrow, essentially putting a bun in the oven of Mother Earth.

If “Field Remedy” is more of a beginning-of-season procedure, I’m going to finish up with the end-of-harvest ritual of corn dollies. Corn dollies are craft goods made from corn sheaves -- in Europe the word corn means grain, and can apply to wheat, barley, etc. Corn dollies may be figural, shaped like various objects or abstract in shape. James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, relates the corn dolly to earth mother worship, which was widespread, Frazer theorizes, because early agricultural work before the invention of the plow was conducted by women with spades. Cultures across ancient Europe and beyond call this figure the maids, mothers, brides, grandmothers and queens, to name a few. How this fits with the notion of barley as a male god, Beow, or of another masculine figure, Sheaf, in Old English, I cannot say. This is another good reason to question ancient cultural beliefs derived only from tales. Whether or not women were associated with agriculture, Frazer relates the story of Demeter and Persephone to the practice of celebrating the corn mother and corn maiden, which the corn dolly could represent. Like the loaf of bread from the Old English “Field Remedy,” corn dollies were thought to play a role in the agricultural year, with the corn dolly being plowed into the first furrow of the new year.

To wrap up, I have enjoyed Kathleen Herbert's 60-page volume, but I must confess a wariness to seeing it as the sole evidence for certain assertions made in Wikipedia about a lost English pantheon. All of us who are drawn to mysteries of these largely unattested or lost pre-Christian religions long for the knowledge to more fully experience a past we feel a passion for. If you are looking for well-reasoned theories based on respectable sources, you may not find better than Kathleen Herbert, but if you want to subject to rigor what you choose to hold as fact about what the ancients believed, I think it is important to remember that these are, in the end, theories.

But what do you think? Am I being overly critical of people relying on Herbert for Wikipedia claims? Am I a stick-in-the-mud for wanting more evidence? Are you a fan of any of Herbert's other scholarly writing or of her fiction? I would love to hear from you. I think these things should be talked about. Please let me know in the comments below.

No Stone Unturned; An Investigation of Steinn from Grettis Saga

Rock eaters, controllers, destroyers and shapers: Left to right and top to bottom: The Rockbiter from The Neverending Story; Ludo from Labyrinth; an Ent from The Two Towers; and an earth-delving dwarf in Erebor from The Hobbit.

The giant looked mournfully at his hands, capable of breaking down mountains, but not strong enough to save his friends.  “They look like big, good strong hands. Don't they? I always thought that's what they were.”

Michael Ende’s Rockbiter is only one beloved creature from the modern legendarium with a proclivity to stone and the strength or power to manipulate it.  Add to him Ludo, from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth who can howl and call rocks up from the earth to help him.  These are modern creatures, but nothing is truly new.  There is an image in D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths of the stones moving closer to hear Orpheus’s song--and weeping!  And of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents pulverize stone at a touch and his dwarves, as the dwarves of Norse Mythology, live inside mountains and are great shapers of earth, stone and metal.  My point is that peoples who lived surrounded by stone had stories of beings who had power over it, and with the global spread of ancient tales today one needn’t even have descended from mountain folk to have encountered such beings.  But to some extent this was always true, tales breaching the boundaries of their culture’s bubble and passed on for generations, sometimes staying remarkably intact, sometimes changing, particularly when a writer sought to build them into something new.       

This brings me to the second of a series of pieces investigating the Georgian tale “Asphurtzela” in which I will discuss the possibility that a somewhat cowardly and ineffectual character with no special talent to speak of may have been based on a being with the power to control stone.  This character’s name is appropriately Steinn, which means stone, and we find him in the Icelandic Grettis saga.  In part of this multi-chapter saga, the hero Grettir must hunt down a she-troll he has grievously wounded and must descend a sheer cliff with a waterfall to an otherwise inaccessible pool of water whence this creature escaped.  Steinn’s very small role in the story is to doubt Grettir’s story about the she-troll without proof, suggest that they give up when they see the difficulties of reaching the troll’s cave, and then to fail in his duty to man a rope that will help Grettir escape from the pool once he has completed his task of finishing off the creature.  When Grettir kills a troll in the cave, Steinn sees blood in the water below and, assuming that Grettir is dead, abandons his post.  Beowulf readers may recognize Beowulf’s adventure in this, when he faces Grendel’s mother and Hrothgar and the Danes interpret her blood as Beowulf’s and leave the mere.  This is one of several correspondences to be found between Beowulf and Grettis saga, which scholars pointed out by the end of the nineteenth century.  Likewise have compelling similarities been identified between Beowulf, Grettis saga and more than two hundred folk tales which were first described as Bear’s Son Tales by the Germanist Friedrich Panzer.  These tales are also described as Aarne-Thompson type 301, “The Three Stolen Princesses,” and as AT type 650A, “Strong John”.  My purpose in this piece is to investigate the likelihood that the nebbishy Steinn character was based on the superpowered earth-eating companion of the hero Asphurtzela, and the rock-smashers of similar folk tales.

In my last “Asphurtzela” piece, I compared two characters with power over stone or earth, one who swallows earth (the Clod-swallower) and another who breaks stone with his hands (the Rock-splitter from the Grimms’ “Strong Hans”).  Beowulf scholar R.W. Chambers suggested a relationship between the Rock-Splitter and the Grettis saga character Steinn, because both Steinn and the Rock-splitter betray or let down the hero when he has descended the waterfall cliff or into the earth, and because both share the element of Stein in their names. The Rock-splitter and the Clod-swallower are figures with power over the earth and their names are grammatically compound words that follow the formula of MATERIAL + ROLE OF ACTION.  This naming convention is also true of the other characters in the respective tales (the Fir-twister and the Hare-catcher,) but the Rock-Splitter and the Clod-Swallower are related by the nature of the material each affects.  I have not yet read the entire corpus of Bear’s Son Tales, but would be interested in seeing if the other tales invariably have a figure with powers over earth or stone, and, considering that smashing rock and eating dirt are different abilities, if analogous characters in other Bear’s Son Tales tend toward the one ability or the other, or if they are even more divergent.  “Strong Hans’s” Fir-twister, for instance, is a being associated with transforming wood into a useful material (twine to bind firewood), as the Rock-splitter smashes rocks to build himself a place to sleep where animals will not disturb him. Could the Clod-swallower and Rock-splitter, for instance have descended from a being with both of their powers, or are there beings with powers over other elements?       

In searching for evidence that Steinn was based on a figure with power over rocks, I have collected details from Grettis saga, other than his name, that not only connect Steinn to rock, but also associates stone with the supernatural realm.  To begin with references to stone or rock in the episode, Steinn is one of three characters to have the word stone in their names in the she-troll episode of Grettis saga.  Thorstein the White and Thorstein’s wife Steinvor are likewise introduced in the episode.  Grettis saga annotator R.C. Boer noted in his edition of the saga that the lack of information about these characters makes it likely that they were not based on real people.  Furthermore, Thorstein and Steinvor live in a place called Sandhaugar, which means sand mounds or sand piles, a name that relates to earth.  Reference to rocks in the episode abound. Grettir’s adventure with the she-troll brings him to a cliff where he is always near stone. The she-troll drags Grettir “to the rocks;” after Grettir cuts her arm off to escape her, she springs, “among the rocks;” and he lays exhausted “by the rock” (82).  When Grettir brings Steinn to the waterfall they see “a cave under the rock” (82).  It is clear that this part of the story takes place in a setting dominated by stone, but “the rocks” are repeatedly associated with the she-troll, not the humans.  Grettir tries during his fight to avoid the rocks and Steinn wants to leave the rocks as soon as he sees the cave.  In contrast, the she-troll yearns to get back to the rock-bound protection of her cave and tries to drag Grettir with her until he cuts off her arm at the shoulder.  In all of these details, the rocks, and cave, are associated with the supernatural and are clearly inimical to the human beings.  We are familiar with monumental stone tombs like the neolithic Newgrange funeral mound of Ireland and similar stone structures, which were meant to act as or represent gateways to another world. It is entirely reasonable that Grettir and Steinn are simply concerned for their safety in light of a clear physical threat, but the monstrous threats of Grettis saga, such as Glam, as well as Grendel of Beowulf are magical threats as well. Glam, for instance, is a corpse haunting the vicinity of his death. Glam is a giant capable of breaking all of the bones in the body of a horse or snapping a man's neck, but he also curses Grettir to gain no more strength. Grendel devours men, but has also charmed the edges of blades not to harm him. The physical dangers in these stories are backed by insidious magical threats as well. (I took all quotes and page numbers from the following online version of Grettis saga.)

If these repeated references to rock and stone in names and in the physical setting are not convincing in themselves, Steinn’s extremely limited role in the tale requires him and Grettir to use stones to accomplish a task.  It is Grettir who ties a stone in the rope and drops it down the waterfall, but a more active Steinn may have done this in an earlier version of the story.  The purpose of tying the rope to the stone is not explained.  It seems reasonable to conjecture that the stone could weight the rope, making it easier to access from the pool at the bottom of the falls, but Grettir also says he does not want to be tied to the rope, which signals that anything tied to the end of the rope could be attacked. This doesn’t outright suggest that the stone tied to the rope is meant as a decoy, or a test to see if there is a troll waiting to strike anything lowered down the falls, but neither does that seem an unreasonable conclusion for the reader to draw. After lowering the stone, Steinn uses rocks to secure the rope: “He drove a stake into the ground and laid stones against it” (83).  If Steinn were based on a figure with the power to smash rock with his fists, this would be an appropriate place for a tale teller to showcase the ability.  This would be further than the Rock-splitter or the Clod-swallower go in using their abilities to solve a problem in their respective stories.  It also seems worthwhile to point out, as I conjecture possible elements no longer in the text, that this rope now has stones on both sides.  Most of the moments in Beowulf that have been identified as having traces of earlier tales are those times when there are lingering questions about why characters act as they do.  Every detail then, of the Steinn episode should be scanned, no stone left -- ahem -- unturned.      

In my attempts to offer an ancient archetype to explain the nature of the powers of a folkloric version Steinn, I again return to Tolkien, who so often rooted his creations in historical linguistic details he found mysterious and therefore compelling.  This was true for the Ents of Middle Earth, tree-like giants who can smash stone and move earth.  Old English scholars are at something of a loss to understand references to the description “the work of ents,” which is used to describe the ruins of stone structures in several Old English poems.  Anglo-Saxonists conjecture that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had never seen Roman buildings, buildings made of stone, and that these rude tribesmen believed that they were the works of giants from a time when such beings roamed England.  Entish artifacts needn’t have been stone walls (in Beowulf, the word is used to describe at least one helmet), but generally carry the sense of being from an earlier time, from “the time of ents.”  The word looks somewhat like eoten, another word Old English uses to describe giants, but it is not clear if these words are synonyms.  Beowulf lists both eotens and gigantes as the creatures spawned by Cain, which suggests that they did not mean exactly the same thing.  But while Tolkien’s Ents are only responsible for destroying stone structures, the general understanding among students of Old English is that ents were builders, perhaps like the disguised jotun Odin and friends employ to build the wall around Asgard.  Tolkien delighted in leading his readers up to the edge of a problem without articulating it directly though, which makes me wonder (by way of a tangent)  if Tolkien was suggesting that perhaps Old English ents came upon fully built structures and their “work” was to smash them apart.  If the Anglo-Saxons were so amazed by stone buildings, I think they must have been just as concerned about what tore them down as what built them!  My argument though is that certainly the people who told the tale of Grettir believed in dwarves and giants and trolls and other creatures that dealt in earth and stone.  A creature that ate dirt and got into all sorts of trouble or adventures doesn’t seem hard to believe.                

In bringing to a close this second piece in a series I am writing to investigate similarities between “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf, I must say that I will not feel that I have a complete understanding of of the Clod-swallower or his earth-breaking brother, the Rock-splitter, until I’ve more fully investigated Panzer’s Bear’s Son Tales.  I do feel that a better understanding of Steinn’s relationship with these figures could be discovered in such an undertaking, perhaps with the conclusion that there is no meaningful relationship.  Steinn though is a curious figure made more curious by his many associations, and his episode’s many associations, with stone. I would close by saying that “Asphurtzela” is less like the Beowulf-analogue Gretiss saga than it is like its fellow Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans.”  In my last piece I addressed Asphurtzela’s fights with troll-like Devis, his braving a haunted house and his finding his way to a cave, which of course are similar to Grettir's adventures.  In the next installment of this series, I will analyze the correspondences I see between “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf directly.   

"Asphurtzela" and the Bear's Son Tradition

Public statue of the giant- and dragon-slaying Georgian culture hero Amirani, ამირანი, a figure associated with the Greek Prometheus myth. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

A year or more ago, I read the Georgian tale “Asphurtzela,” collected, translated and published by the English scholar Marjory Wardrop in 1894, and immediately I recognized elements I knew I had seen in various scholarly texts related to Beowulf. I recently began working through all of the sources I have that deal with the topic to determine which works of literature share the closest affinity with “Asphurtzela” and at this time, I’ve come to the conclusion that “Asphurtzela” falls into a category of tale described by Friedrich Panzer as Bear’s Son tales, one or more of which may have been an orally-transmitted antecedent to the Grendel section of Beowulf. In 1910, Panzer identified more than 200 such tales, with the purpose of identifying the roots of this particular section of Beowulf. He published his findings in a volume titled Studies in German Saga History. The theory found resonance in scholarly Beowulf circles and the larger purpose of my posts on “Asphurtzela” is to determine the nature of the relationship between the folk tale and the Old English poem. This post will begin by laying out an argument for “Asphurtzela” as a Bear’s Son Tale in the mold of “Strong Hans,” a tale in the Grimm collection that is often used as the exemplar of the type, which is also described as Aarne-Thompson type 301, “The Three Stolen Princesses,” and as AT type 650A, “Strong John”. To say that “Asphurtzela” qualifies as a Bear’s Son Tale does not give it a direct relationship with Beowulf. It would give the tale a relationship with a tradition of tales that the Beowulf poet may have drawn from. The next step of this study will investigate similarities and differences “Asphurtzela” shares with the premier Beowulf analogue, Grettis Saga.

The Bear’s Son Tale narrative, Bärensohn, Jean l’Ours, is widespread in Europe and has been identified as far away as Asia. The tales refer to an unusual child parented by a bear in some way. In the French tradition, the character may even have the ears of a bear, but bear-like strength is the most common element. Because these tales were transmitted orally in different cultures, there are differences among them, and the element of bear parentage may present as simply as the child being raised in a cave. Beowulf scholar R.W. Chambers identified six aspects of the Bear’s Son Tale narrative: a young man of extraordinary strength:

1. Sets out on adventures and joins with companions;

2. Resists a magical being in a house which his companions have failed to resist;

3. Follows the path of the magical being to a spring, or hole in the earth;

4. Is lowered into the earth by a rope or cord;

5. Overcomes foes in the underworld, sometimes with the help of a magic sword which he finds below;

6. Is betrayed by his companions, who leave him in the hole when it was their duty to have helped him back out.

Those with a knowledge of the plot of Beowulf will already recognize some of these elements but not others. Chambers, J.R.R. Tolkien and others identified what amount to the fossilized remains of some of the less apparent Bear's Son motifs in Beowulf. These elements seem to have existed in source material for Beowulf because they tend to coincide with moments in Beowulf where the text is ambiguous or doesn’t seem to follow the logic of the story. The most striking example of this for me, and for the many students I have taught Beowulf, is the death of the Geat, Hondscio, whom Beowulf allows Grendel to eat without raising a finger. From Benjamin Slade’s online translation, Grendel “bit into the bone-locks, from the veins drank blood, swallowed great chunks, soon he had the unliving one all devoured, feet and hands” (742-745). It is hard to imagine lying still while a companion was devoured in this manner. It is grossly inconsistent with what we’ve been taught about an Anglo-Saxon comitatus, or what we would expect of any band of warriors in any time period. Chambers argues that Hondscio is a vestigial remnant of a folktale element where Beowulf and two other companions take turns facing a marauding creature on successive nights. Tolkien goes further in his “Selic Spell,” a tale he wrote to emulate a lost antecedent of the Beowulf story, in which Hondscio and Hrothgar’s adviser Asher were not only Beowulf’s two companions, but they were companions with magic powers of their own; Hondscio (whose name means glove) had magical gloves; Asher (whose name is related to the tree that spears were made of) had a magic spear. Tolkien surmised that Asher in this tradition may also have related to the coast guard who raises his spear to challenge the Geats upon their landing in Hrothgar's lands. Tolkien renamed the characters Handshoe and Ashwood to help them relate to make their natures clearer to English speakers. Again, the Bear’s Son Tales do not need to agree in all details, and some of the typical elements of the Bear’s Son Tale narrative are definitely absent from Beowulf: the rescue of a princess from the hole, for instance. Furthermore, this tale is thought to relate only to the part of Beowulf in which the hero faces Grendel and Grendel’s mother and obviously eschews the courtly particulars of later legendary figures, like Hrothgar, and places, like Heorot.

Standing guard in a dwelling with companions against a monster is an element Beowulf readers will recognize that occurs in both “Strong Hans” and “Asphurtzela.” In both stories, the hero has gathered to him companions who, like him, have supernatural talents. Hans has the aptly named Fir-twister and Rock-splitter, who respectively can twist trees into twine and smash rock with his fists. Asphurtzela has the Clod-swallower and the Hare-catcher, a man who swallows clods of dirt that fly up while plowing, and a man so fast that even with mill stones tied to his feet can catch rabbits. Unlike in Tolkien's “Selic Spell,” the specific superpowers of the companions in “Strong Hans” and “Asphurtzela” do not play any particular role in the stories. The characters are introduced as having special powers, but those powers are not referred to again. Tolkien’s characters not only have special names that reflect their special talents, but use the talents to overcome particular challenges in the tale. Tolkien’s Handshoe uses his magic gloves to open a locked gate and Ashwood uses his magic spear to clear away enemies. I take from these details that Tolkien would have believed that in an earlier version of “Strong Hans,” the Ash-twister’s ash twisting must have played a more significant role in the tale, likewise with the Rock-splitter. Chambers saw the character Stein, in the Beowulf-analogue Grettis Saga as analogous to the Rock-splitter: Stein “seems to represent the faithless companions of the folk tale... for in the folktale one of the three faithless companions of the hero is called the Stone-cleaver, Steinhauer, Stenklover or even, in one Scandinavian version, simply Stein” (Chambers, Beowulf, An Introduction, 66). Detecting evidence of Stein’s power over stone would be thrilling and I will explore this in my next post, reviewing the similarities between “Asphurtzela” and Grettis Saga.

Not only do Asphurtzela and Strong Hans participate in staying alone in a haunted house, but both folk tales have another element, which is not to be found in Beowulf or Grettis Saga, but is notable in its similarity between the folk tales. In both tales one companion is left alone at the dwelling to cook a meal while the other two go hunting. In both tales the supernatural enemy, a dwarf in “Strong Hans,” a lame devi in “Asphurtzela,” appear and demand the companion for food or food and drink. Devis in Georgian tales function as trolls in Scandinavian tales. They can be gruesome and monstrous, but they can also be found living in families in houses just like humans. In both tales the companions refuse the enemy and are beaten or chased out of the dwelling. Finally, Asphurtzela and Hans rout the enemy, who escapes (in two pieces in “Asphurtzela”) to the hole where the next part of the story takes place. I have read that this enemy is sometimes called the giant dwarf in “Strong Hans,” stories, which brings to my mind the lame element of the devi, in that both have fractional natures; they are both powerful and weak. In Beowulf, Grendel’s nature is also split: he is both impervious and torn apart. Furthermore, although Grendel attacks while Beowulf merely keeps watch instead of preparing food, Grendel, like the dwarf and devi, has come for food and is by nature insatiable. When Hans faces the dwarf, he gives him food twice before refusing the third demand and coming to blows with the creature.

Tracking the monster to a hole in the ground is present in both folk tales, Grettis Saga and Beowulf, if one accepts Grendel’s mere to be a hole in the ground, which I do: it is a cave underwater. In the respective tales, the hero and companions follow the enemy to a hole, whereupon the hero is lowered down by rope by his companions. Both Asphurtzela and Hans find captive(s) in the hole; Hans finds one maiden; Asphurtzela finds three princesses. This element does not occur in Beowulf, but a remnant of the next part does, albeit in fossilized form. Both Hans’s and Asphurtzela’s companions strand the hero in the hole after the maiden, or princesses, are extracted from the hole. Chambers and Tolkien see this element in Beowulf when Hrothgar and the Danes lose heart and leave Beowulf behind in Grendel’s mere when blood from Grendel’s mother boils up the surface. A similar thing happens in Grettis Saga, when Stein, entrusted to watch the rope, sees blood below the waterfall and likewise abandons his post. Chambers found it unreasonable that allies would abandon a hero expressly going to kill an enemy when they saw blood bubble up in the water. Clearly blood was in the plan. This then is interpreted by Chambers and Tolkien as a detail from the source material that no longer made sense, but remained in the story in altered form. Unlike the faithless comrades who wish to make off with the reward of the maiden or princesses, neither the Danes, nor Stein, has a motive to betray their hero. In "Selic Spell" Tolkien actually has the Unferth figure, named Unfriend, abandon the rope on which he lowers the hero, here named Beewolf, into the cave. Unfriend purposely leaves Beewolf to die because he bears him a grudge for the insult which we know from Beowulf. Incidentally, it has always seemed suspicious to me that Unferth’s magnanimously-offered ancestral blade would then fail Beowulf in his fight with Grendel’s mother. In early readings, I always expected something to go wrong with Hrunting and I know that my students were always likewise suspicious.

I think that I’ve made it clear that “Asphurtzela” shares many remarkable similarities with the Grimms’ “Strong Hans,” and as such belongs to the tradition of tales identified by Panzer as Bear’s Son Tales, and by Aarne-Thompson type 301, “The Three Stolen Princesses,” or type 650A, “Strong John”. I’ve also shared details to explain why a further study and comparison should be made to determine how many degrees of separation exist between “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf and the Beowulf-analogue Grettis Saga. I will pick up my writing on the topic of “Asphurtzela” and Grettis Saga next.