Though basically similar to us in form, they are often differentiated from the
human race by their larger or smaller size, or by having some admixture of
animal features, or extra heads or limbs, or some other peculiarity.
In the case of sylvan deities there is some fluctuation between plural and
singular. Are the woods, after all, one domain or many? In Indic mythology
we have on the one hand the nymphs called Apsarases (on whom more
below), on the other Aran
̇
ya ̄nı ̄ ‘Mrs Forest’, who is praised in a late hymn of the
Rigveda and called ‘mother of wild creatures’ (mr
̇
ga ̄ ́na ̄m ma ̄táram, 10. 146. 6).
In Greece we have Silenus and Sileni, Pan and Panes; in Italy Faunus and
Fauni, Silvanus and Silvani, Silvana and Silvanae; in Lithuania Medeine
‘Wood-girl’ and Medeines.^3
Some of these have appellations derived directly from words for ‘forest’,
‘wood’. There may be one such name with a wider than regional attestation,
remaining from a late Indo-European stratum. An Illyrian god Vidasus,
known from a group of inscriptions from Croatia and corresponding to
Silvanus in other Balkan inscriptions, appears to be derived from *widhu-
‘tree, forest’, a word represented in Celtic and Germanic. It has been argued
that he has a counterpart in the Norse god Víðarr, whose name (apart from
the long first vowel) recalls viðr‘tree, forest’ and who is said to live amid long
grass and brushwood (Grímnismál 17). Nothing else is recorded about him,
however, except that he will avenge his father Odin at Ragnarøk by killing the
wolf Fenrir.^4
A god of ways and bywaysA longer-standing equation that many philologists have looked on with
favour is that of the Vedic god Pu ̄s
̇
an with the Greek Pan.^5 Pan is absent from
Homer and other early poetry: he became famous only in the fifth century,
his cult having previously, as it seems, been confined to Arcadia. There,
(^3) Mannhardt (1936), 356, 371, 402; Usener (1896), 95.
(^4) A. Mayer, Glotta 31 (1951), 238–43, cf. id. (1957–9), ii. 125 f.; F. M. Heichelheim, RE viiiA.
2095 f. On Víðarr cf. de Vries (1956), ii. 275–7.
(^5) P. v o n B r a d k e , Theologische Literaturzeitung 20 (1895), 581; A. Döhring, Etymologische
Beiträge zur griechischen und deutschen Mythologie (Progr. Königsberg 1907), 11; W. Schulze,
ZVS 42 (1909), 81, 374 = id. (1966), 217 f.; cf. Pisani (1969), 315 n. 3; Puhvel (1987), 63, 132;
F. Bader, Revue de Philologie 63 (1989), 7–46; E. C. Polomé in EIEC 415; M. S. Rodríguez, JIES
23 (1995), 209–11; N. Oettinger in Mír Curad, 539–48; id. in B. Forssman–R. Plath (edd.),
Indoarisch, Iranisch und die Indogermanistik (Wiesbaden 2000), 393–400; T. Oberlies, ibid. 380.
On Pu ̄s
̇
an see Macdonell (1898), 35–7; Oldenberg (1917), 234–7; Hillebrandt (1927–9), ii.
326–35; Oberlies (1998), 201–4.
- Nymphs and Gnomes 281