neonates are no less precocious. Váli avenges Baldr at one day old (Vo ̨luspá
32; Baldrs draumar 11). When Thor is pinned down by the leg of a giant he
has felled, his son Magni, three nights old, is the only one of the gods strong
enough to shift it off him (Skáldsk. 17).
The newborn Indra at once reached for his bow and asked who were his
rivals (RV 8. 45. 4). Apollo’sfirst words are ‘May the lyre be dear to me, and
the crooked bow’. Certain gods are firmly associated with a particular
weapon, and are imagined with it in their hand. Indra is frequently called
vájrahasta- or vájraba ̄hu-,‘vájra-handed, vájra-forearmed’; the vájra- is his
characteristic thunderbolt-weapon. In one passage (RV 10. 103. 2) he is
ís
̇
uhasta-, ‘arrow-handed’. Rudra-S ́iva in the Maha ̄bha ̄rata and elsewhere
iss ́u ̄lapa ̄n
̇
i-, ‘lance-handed’. These compounds have a parallel, though a less
than obvious one, in Artemis’ ancient formulaic epithet in Greek epic,
!οχαιρα. Its first element, !ο ́ ‘arrow’, is the same word as Vedic ís
̇
u-; its
second element was anciently understood as being from χω‘pour out’, but
the formation is anomalous, and most modern scholars derive it from
-khésaria < khésr
̊
-ia, the root being gˆhésr- (> χερ) ‘hand’. The Vedic hásta-
is from a by-form gˆhésto-.^100 Artemis was accordingly, like Indra, ‘arrow-
handed’. She is also called τοξοφο ́ ρο‘bow-carrying’, as is her brother
Apollo. There are other formulaic epithets in Homer that refer to charac-
teristic objects that gods carry, such as Hermes χρυσο ́ ρραπι‘of the gold
rod’, Apollo χρυσα ́ ορο‘of the gold sword’, Artemis χρυσηλα ́ κατο‘of the
gold distaff’.
While on the subject of gods’ special weapons, we may notice that the Irish
Dagda wielded a great club (lorg mor) which had ‘a smooth end and a rough
end: the one end kills the living and the other end brings to life the dead’.^101
We cannot but recall the rod that Hermes carries in his hands (Il. 24. 343–5=
Od. 5. 47–9), ‘with which he charms (to sleep) the eyes of men, those he
wishes to, and wakes others from sleep’.
The gods’ assemblyThe gods are imagined as meeting and debating in assembly. The motif,
familiar from the Homeric poems, was very well established in the Semitic
(^100) V. Pisani, Crestomazia Indeuropea (2nd edn., Turin 1947), 142; A. Heubeck, Beiträge zur
Namenforschung 7 (1956), 275–9=Kl. Schr. 275–9; Schmitt (1967), 177–81. J. Puhvel, however,
HS 105 (1992), 4–6, defends the traditional etymology, ‘arrow-shedding’.
(^101) Mesca Ulad 623–38; Yellow Book of Leinster 789, ed. O. Bergin in Medieval Studies in
Memory of Gertrude Schoepperle Loomis (New York 1927), 402–6.
150 3. Gods and Goddesses