thanks to the wondrous voice that they have breathed into him (Th. 32, 38).
The Nart hero Syrdon ‘could not only relate what had already happened, but
also predict the future’.^99 In a fifteenth-century Polish sermon the Christian is
admonished that he will have no need of dream-interpreters, astrologers,
incantation-mongers, or ‘divinatores badaczye, qui futura ac eventus fortuitos
et preterita occulta et presencia suis supersticionibus prenosticant’:^100 the
Slavonic seers of the time evidently still canvassed the old formula.
Past and future are also brought together in expressions of uniqueness: RV
- 5 ná tva ̄ ́va ̄m ̇ Indra kás ́ caná | ná ja ̄tó ná janis
̇
- 5 ná tva ̄ ́va ̄m ̇ Indra kás ́ caná | ná ja ̄tó ná janis
yate, ‘none like thee, Indra,
has ever been born nor ever will be’ (cf. 7. 32. 23, 99. 2); MBh. 10. 5. 26 ‘that
man has not been born, nor will be, who.. .’; Sappho fr. 56, ‘[... ,] nor do I
think that there will ever (again) be any girl of such musical skill born to the
light of day’; in Armenian, Sassountsy David 303 ‘David, in all the world there
has never been one as brave as you, and there never will be one as brave as
you’; in Welsh, ‘of all who were and will be, there is not your equal’; ‘there
does not come and will not come anything more grievous’;^101 in Norse, Gylf.
47 engi hefir sá orðit ok engi mun verða ... at eigi komi ellin o ̨llum til falls, ‘no
such man has existed and none will exist, that old age will not bring them
all down’.
The unique weapon or piece of armour is the subject of an interesting little
group of parallels. Heracles appears to Odysseus in the underworld wearing
an elaborately ornamented sword-belt, of which the poet exclaims, almost
untranslatably (Od. 11. 613 f.),
μ^ τεχνησα ́ μενο μηδ’Eλλο ́ τι τεχν σαιτο,
οU ` κε4νον τελαμω
να η
ι $γκα ́ τθετο τχνηι.
He need have crafted nothing else before or since,
the man who compassed that sword-belt in his craft.There is nothing else like this in Homer. But in a little-known Norse saga
the dying Hildibrand sings of his sword, now broken, which ‘dwarfs now
dead had forged, such as no one (else) can, before or hereafter’. And in a
Serbo-Croat heroic song Marko Kraljevic ́, after establishing that the crafts-
man of his sword has never made a better one, cuts off his right arm to ensure
that he never will.^102
(^99) Sikojev (1985), 250.
(^100) C. H. Meyer (1931), 71.
(^101) Uryen Erechwydd 42 f. (Book of Taliesin 57), trs. Koch–Carey (2000), 344; Y Gododdin
1119.
(^102) Edd. min. 53, 2. 5–8, from Ásmundarsaga Kappabana; SCHS ii, no. 7. 71–83.
104 2. Phrase and Figure