and 16. 5 hverfandi hvél‘the roaming wheel’ is given as a name for the moon,
andfagrahvél‘the beautiful wheel’ for the sun. The phrases sunno hvél and
mána hvél appear in the non-Eddic poems Harmsól 36. 7 and Líknarbraut
- 3.^24
Another old Indo-European word for ‘wheel’ is represented in Latin rota,
Old Irish roth, Lithuanian rãtas, etc.; it provides an Indo-Iranian word for
‘chariot’ (Vedic rátha-, Avestan raθa-). We should expect it to appear in Italic
or Celtic reflexes of an inherited formula ‘wheel of the sun’. Such phrases
occur in Latin poetry from Ennius onwards. He called the sun rota candida,
andsolis rota is found in Lucretius and others. In Old Irish we have roth
gréine, ‘wheel of the sun’, or in one place just ‘the wheel’, and in Welsh rhod
tes, ‘wheel of heat’.^25
In RV 2. 11. 20 Indra is said to have felled the demon Arbuda and set him
rolling (ávartayat) as Su ̄ rya does his wheel. Here we have the simple picture of
a god rolling his wheel forward. If the sun’s daily path is seen as climbing up
to its high point and then descending, the wheel would need pushing, one
might suppose, only for the upward part, and then it would roll down of its
own accord. We cannot but recall the Greek myth of Sisyphus’ underworld
labour: he is forever rolling a stone up to the top of a hill, from which it runs
down again. It does not make sense to say, in the manner of the old nature-
mythologists, that Sisyphus’ stone ‘is’ the sun.^26 But it might well be that an
old solar myth provided the model for Sisyphus’ cruel and unusual
punishment.
As a pictorial device the solar wheel is abundantly attested. A simple circle,
or a circle with a central point, need not be a wheel, but when it has spokes
it clearly is. The connection with the sun is sometimes demonstrable.^27
For example, on early pottery from the hill fort of Vucˇedol on the middle
Danube the sun is depicted either by a series of concentric circles, with
stylized flames shooting from the outer rim, or by a cross inscribed within
circles (again with flames).^28 The cross characterizes the disc as a four-spoked
wheel. Achaemenian cylinder seals show a four-winged solar figure hovering
(^24) Old English sunnan hweogul, sometimes cited in this connection, should not be. It occurs
only in a word-for-word translation of a Latin hymn that uses the phrase Solis rotam: Joseph
Stevenson, Latin Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church (Durham 1851), 22.
(^25) Enn. Ann. 572 (with Skutsch’s note, pp. 712 f.); O’Rahilly (1946), 304, cf. 519–22; Saltair na
Rann 1077 ardRuiri ind roith, 2385 ardRı ̄ g re ̄ne; Bader (1989), 242.
(^26) So interpreted by V. Henry, Revue des études grecques 5 (1892), 289.
(^27) For methodological considerations in the identification of solar symbols see M. Green
(1991), 24 f., 34, 40, 44; Lucy Goodison, Death, Women and the Sun (Institute of Classical
Studies, Bulletin Supplement 53; London 1989), 11–15, 78–80.
(^28) M. Gimbutas in Cardona et al. (1970), 184.
202 5. Sun and Daughter