Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/589

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V. THE SUN HERO.
573

and then in my native county of Cardigan, where one may also near a riddle in which the sun and the moon are alluded to as a gold-headed maid and a silver-headed youth respectively. Englishmen of the present day think it strange that the Germans, who use the same word as they do, should nevertheless make it a feminine sonne, forgetting that their own ancestors did the same thing, for the Anglo-Saxon sunne, 'sun,' was always feminine. The change from that gender to the masculine took place possibly under the influence of Latin and the Romance languages, and in Welsh under the influence of Latin and English. The Latin sol, as already stated, was always masculine, and so was the Greek ἥλιος, whether etymologically related to it or not, while Sanskrit not only calls the sun sûrya and sûryâ, masculine and feminine respectively, but also svar, neuter. Add to this the fact that the old Slavonic word was also a neuter slŭnĭce, with which the modern Slavonic forms agree. Still the Slaves cannot be said to have never personified the sun, for they sometimes regarded that heavenly body as a woman stepping into her bath in the evening, and rising in the morning refreshed and purified, or else as sinking at night into the arms of her mother the Sea.[1] To return to Celtic, the sun, personified under the Welsh name of Haul, has a trace of myth associated with her in the supposition that she enters a fortress in the evening: this betrays itself in the Snowdonian term for sunset, which is hauligaera, or (the going of the) Sun to (her) Fortifications. But the sun appears to have been the subject of another myth

  1. Max Müller's Chips, ij. 82.