an elaborate narrative telling how Garud
̇
a, the mighty king of birds, captured
the Soma on behalf of the Snakes, but Indra got it back before the Snakes
could drink more than a little of it. In the Norse myth the giant Thiazi, taking
the form of an eagle, carries Idunn off, apples and all. The gods begin to grow
old and grey, until she is recaptured by Loki, flying in the form of a falcon.
Another tale (Skáldsk.G58) concerns ‘Odrœri’s Drink’, the special mead,
made from honey and the blood of the omniscient Kvásir, which inspires
poets: not an elixir of life or youth, but still a divine, magical tipple. The
dwarfs who created it were forced to surrender it to the giant Suttung. Odin
inveigled his way into Suttung’s daughter’s bed; she allowed him to drink up
the stored liquor, and he then escaped in the form of an eagle. Here the bird
who obtains the precious fluid is the chief god himself. This in turn recalls a
story related in the Yajurveda (Ka ̄t
̇
haka 37. 14). The amr
̇tam was in the
possession of the demon S ́us
̇
n
̇a and the Asuras, so that when death came to
the Asuras they revived, but when it came to the Devas they died. This
unsatisfactory state of affairs was put right when Indra, in the form of a
falcon, stole the vital juice.^137
The language of the godsIn narratives about the gods there is no difference between their speech, when
they are represented as speaking, and that of men. On occasion, however,
certain persons or things are said to have a different name among the gods
(and sometimes among other orders of being) from the one familiar to
mankind.^138
The oldest examples are found in Hittite and proto-Hattic ritual texts.^139
For example (CTH 733 ii 1), ‘When he speaks prayers to his (the god’s) wife,
the singer [says]: “(Among mankind) you (are) Tahatanuitis, among the gods
[you] (are) the fountain mother, the Queen” ’, and so on. These formulae
perhaps come from Hattic rather than Indo-European tradition. But there are
parallels in Indic, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic.
Early in the last chapter I quoted a verse of the Rigveda about the division
of language into four parts, three of which were stored in secret, known only
(^137) Compared with the myth of Odrœri’s mead by Kuhn (1859), 144–61. On the opposition
between Asuras and Devas see below.
(^138) On this topic cf. H. Güntert, Von der Sprache der Götter und Geister (Halle 1921); de Vries
(1956), i. 299; R. Lazzeroni, Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa ser. 2: 26 (1957), 1–25;
West (1966), 387 f.; id. (1997), 352 f.; V. N. Toporov, Poetica 13 (1981), 201–14; Watkins (1994),
456–72.
(^139) E. Laroche, JCS 1 (1947), 187; J. Friedrich in Sprachgeschichte und Wortbedeutung
(Festschrift für A. Debrunner, Bern 1954), 135–9.
160 3. Gods and Goddesses