leave the castle, escorted by Útgarða-loki, who now explains that the contests
were not what they seemed and that they had in fact performed frighteningly
well; he is glad to see the back of them. At this, he and the castle vanish from
sight.
The Norse story is much the more detailed, and it contains much that is
absent from the Ossetic. But there is a common scheme. A party of adven-
turers from ‘our’ world enters Giantland, is benighted, and takes shelter in
what they think to be a cave or building. In the morning they discover that it
is a part or appurtenance of a giant, of a quite different order of magnitude
from what the corresponding thing would be among us. The giant to whom it
belongs is roused from death or slumber and dialogue ensues. The parties are
curious about each other’s habits and competitive abilities, which are put to
the test. Finally the giant disappears and the travellers return home to tell the
tale.
The story of Thor’s encounter with Skrýmir also shows significant
similarities with the north Russian legend of Ilya Murometz and the giant
Svyatogor. These, however, are almost certainly to be explained from first-
millennium contacts between the Vikings and Russia.^77 The kinship between
the Nordic and Ossetic narratives seems to lie at a deeper level. It reflects,
I suggest, a late, regional Indo-European tale illustrating the nature of giants.
CONCLUSIONWe must now take stock and ask how much of the comparative material
surveyed in this chapter can be projected back to atavistic mythologies. Do
these nymphs, satyrs, giants, etc., all represent inherited concepts, or must we
reckon extensively with secondary diffusion by folk-tale? If these beings had a
place in the Indo-European world-view from the beginning, what was their
social or poetic status? Did they rank beside the heavenly gods as recipients
of cults and hymns? Did they play an equal role in stories of heroes? Or was
there always a dichotomy between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ mythology, the one
sustained by bards, the other by grandmothers?
Not for the first or last time in this book, there are more questions than
answers. But unanswered questions are better than unasked ones.
Pu ̄s
̇
an and Pan agree well enough in name and nature –– especially when
Hermes is seen as a hypostasis of Pan –– to make it a reasonable conclusion
that they are parallel reflexes of a prototypical god of ways and byways, a
(^77) See N. K. Chadwick, Folklore 75 (1964), 243–59.
302 7. Nymphs and Gnomes