stood in the doorway of the house at sunrise with one foot on either side of
the threshold. As for the two sisters who never meet, they reappear in similar
guise in a Latvian riddle: ‘Two sisters who are at odds; one appears, the other
runs away; one is white, the other black’.^93
The idea of the Sun’s horses and chariot was easily transferred to Dawn, his
harbinger who goes before him. Her steeds and chariot(s) are referred to
several times in the Rigveda (1. 48. 7, 113. 14, 123. 7; 4. 14. 3; 7. 75. 6). In 7. 77.
3 she commands a fine-looking white horse. In the one Avestan passage where
she is personified, Ga ̄h 5. 5, she has the epithets ranjat
̃
.aspa-,ravat
̃.aspa-, both
explained by Bartholomae as ‘making her horses run nimbly’; at any rate
they mean something to do with horses. In the Odyssey (23. 246) Eos appears
once as a charioteer, with two swift horses named Lampos and Phaethon.
Bacchylides (fr. 20. 22) calls her λε3κιππο ,Α., ‘white-horsed Dawn’,
and tragedians use the similar phrase λευκο ́ πωλο (μρα, ‘white-colt Day’
(Aesch. Pers. 386, Soph. Aj. 673). Night, by contrast, has dark horses and a
dark chariot (Aesch. fr. 69, Cho. 660 f.). In Norse myth we hear of two horses
called Skinfaxi (Shine-mane) and Hrímfaxi (Soot-mane), who draw the cars
of Day and Night respectively (Vafþrúðnismál 11–14; Gylf. 10, Skáldsk. 58).
The Dawns ‘awaken the sleeper, two-legged and four-legged living things to
go forth’ (RV 4. 51. 5; cf. 1. 48. 5, 49. 3, 92. 9, 113. 4–6, 124. 12). Dawn comes
‘rousing the people, making the roads easy to travel’ (5. 80. 2, cf. 6. 64. 1; 7. 75.
1, 79. 1). Zarathushtra sings of ‘morning, noon, and night, which prompt the
prudent man to his endeavour’ (Y. 44. 5). The obscure compounds
framən.nar-,framən.naro ̄.vı ̄ra- applied to Usˇå in Ga ̄h 5. 5 probably meant
something of the same sort. Again we find something curiously similar in
Hesiod, this time in the Works and Days (579–81):
Dawn forwards the journey, forwards the task;
Dawn, whose appearing puts many a man on the road,
and sets the yoke on many an ox.Mannhardt adduced a Russian riddle about Night and Day: ‘The black cow
has laid everyone low; the white cow has brought them back to life’.^94
Us
̇
as too yokes oxen or cows (RV 1. 92. 2, 124. 11), but these are specified as
red ones, and are certainly not our farm animals but pictorial metaphors for
the red clouds or rays seen at morning light. Elsewhere the Dawns themselves
are likened to cows (4. 51. 8, 52. 5; cf. also 1. 92. 4, 12). The sense may well be
(^93) A. J. G. Bielenstein, 1000 lettische Rätsel (Mitau 1881), no. 138.
(^94) Mannhardt (1875), 308 n. 1 (with others from Ukraine and Slovakia); cf. Müller (1897),
98, 761–4; Aarne (1918–20), i. 147. The Vedic and Hesiodic passages are compared by Boedeker
(as n. 90), 75.
- Sun and Daughter 223