explicit account the Soma’s guardian Kr
̇
s ́a ̄nu shot an arrow at the bird and
sheared off one of its tail feathers –– an analogue of the one dove from the
flight that gets caught in the Homeric myth.^132 According to the Avesta (Y. 10.
10–12) the Haoma (which corresponds to the Indian Soma) was first planted
on the cosmic mountain Haraitı ̄ and then carried by birds to other more
accessible mountains.
In other countries the divine nourishment was conceived in different
forms. I have quoted the testimony that Odin did not eat but only drank wine
(vín); in earlier tradition his beverage was probably called ale or mead. I have
referred also to Goibniu’s ale, clearly a different brew from any obtainable at
your regular Irish Pub, that made the Dé Danann immortal and exempt from
old age and disease.
In other Irish sources these blessings are conferred by certain berries that
grow in the Land of Promise, or on an island in a loch, guarded by a
dragon.^133 In Nordic myth the gods keep themselves from ageing by eating
certain apples which are in the custody of the goddess Idunn.^134 These fruits
recall the golden apples of Greek myth that grow in the garden of the
Hesperides in the far west (where Euripides locates the ambrosia springs) and
are guarded by a great serpent. Heracles’ acquisition of them may once have
been an essential step in his attainment of immortality.^135
There is a further parallel in Ossetic legend, which tells of a tree on which
golden life-giving apples grew. They were regularly stolen by three doves
that carried them overseas. The tree’s guardian shot an arrow at them, and
succeeded in wounding one of them, but it escaped all the same.^136 This is
clearly another version of the Indic and Greek myth of the bird or birds that
fetch the ambrosia for the chief god but suffer loss in the process.
There are various stories of how the elixir was stolen from the gods by some
interloper and then recovered. Here again the bird motif plays a recurrent
part. Near the start of the Maha ̄bha ̄rata (1. 23–30, cf. Rm. 3. 33. 33 f.) there is
(^132) RV 4. 27. 3 f., cf. 9. 77. 2; Hillebrandt (1927–9), i. 289–93. Other Vedic passages: RV 1. 80.
2, 93. 6; 3. 43. 7; 4. 18. 13, 26. 4–7; 5. 45. 9; 6. 20. 6; 8. 82. 9, 100. 8; 9. 68. 6, 86. 24; 10. 11. 4, 144. 4.
In Apollonius Rhodius (2. 571–3, 601, following Asclepiades of Tragilos, FGrHist 12 F 2, 31) the
Argonauts release a dove to test the state of the Clashing Rocks, and it has its tail feathers cut off
as it passes through; the ship itself loses the tip of its stern.
(^133) S. H. O’Grady, Transactions of the Ossianic Society 3 (1855), 113 f.; ballad from the Dean
of Lismore’s Book, ed. T. McLauchlan (Edinburgh 1862), 54 f.; J. A. MacCulloch (as n. 112),
54 f., 131.
(^134) Thiodolf, Haustlo ̨ng 1–13; Gylf. 26; Skáldsk.G56, 22. In Skírnismál 19/20, where Skirnir
offers a giant’s daughter ‘eleven’ golden apples, Grundtvig attractively emended the pointless
ellifo into ellilyfs, ‘of medicine for age’, a word used of Idunn’s apples in Haustlo ̨ng 9 and
Skáldsk. 22.
(^135) See M. P. Nilsson, The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley 1932), 214.
(^136) Sikojev (1985), 12; cf. Colarusso (2002), 13–15, 50 f., 183.
- Gods and Goddesses 159