Too Much of a Good Thing; Epic Burnout in the Jangar Cycle

Too much of a good thing isn't always fabulous. A hero of Jangar drinks a bowl of wine it would take sixty men to lift, a common occurrence in the Epic of Jangar, from the opera Baatar Jangar at the Jangar Cultural and Tourism Festival in Khovogsair, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 2016.

He created a heaven on earth, but one morning, he got bored. Jangar was tired of his duties, ruling and defending the state of Bomba, where everyone was perpetually twenty five, and he was worshipped almost as a god. Imagine King Arthur simply getting tired of Camelot, that magical land of “happily ever aftering” and going off to do something else.

It must be one of the stranger acts that lead to the destruction of a fairy tale kingdom, and yet, living through a pandemic that has pushed most of us to live and work in difficult conditions, Jangar’s king-burnout is, to me, one of the most remarkably human and sympathetic moments of the Mongolian epic cycle of Jangar. As depressions go, Jangar’s is recognizable to anyone who has experienced one: it arrives without warning or obvious cause. He wakes up quiet one morning and does not seem to enjoy his breakfast. Jangar’s status as great khan can be appreciated in that a moody morning leads to his servant calling in an army of advisors. This seemingly comic response is prophetic. Jangar puts his greatest warrior in charge of the kingdom, gathers some belongings, and leaves.

The analogy to King Arthur seems apt. Like the legendary British king, the Mongolian hero of the Epic of Jangar is smuggled away as a child from his father’s falling kingdom. The team of heroes he assembles sit around him in concentric rings. Each is storied and superhuman. Altan Gheej sees ninety-nine years into the past and future, knowing all that happens. Hongor’s roar sets boulders rolling from the mountains. Sabar of the crescent-shaped ax is indomitable. Big-bellied Guzen Gumba could eat up an ox and drink eight hundred bowls of wine for a meal. Most of the early tales in the cycle are about Jangar winning over hero after hero after defeating them in combat, a la Robin Hood and Little John. This pattern began to seem repetitious to me and I was led to wonder whether Jangar would face true foes, the forces of evil. The real struggles of the cycle though, seem to be internal.

A Soviet stamp commemorating the Epic of Jangar, illustration by Georgi Yecheistov, 1940. (Wikipedia). The Mongolian epic is celebrated in the Russian state of Kalmykia, by the ethnically Mongol Kalmykians.

Another tale in the cycle similar to Jangar’s struggle with himself and notable for its humanity regards the hero Sabar, who feels unappreciated. Sabar loses his temper and is too proud or stubborn to back down. Jangar’s heroes are eager to prove themselves and when Jangar praises Hongor once too many times, Sabar stands up and vows “Well, since you look down on me, I will leave here to serve the khans of Shar Gol!” Jangar and his court are shocked into silence, which shames Sabar further. Sabar knows he must follow through with his vow, but he regrets it immediately. Hopefully you haven’t done this since childhood, but it seems to me that most of us have made this mistake before. Sabar does go to the hall of an enemy khan and requests membership, but he is seated last in the hall and no one pays any attention to him. He was a respected hero in Jangar’s hall, but here he is no one. He lies alone in his yurt that night with “only the barks of the dogs to keep him company.” Sabar’s unlikely savior is his horse, who tells him off for his childish behavior and informs him that Bomba has been attacked and Jangar taken prisoner. Sabar has a chance to repay Jangar and regain his status in Bomba.

When Jangar leaves his kingdom, it is beset by bickering from his twelve heroes, who split up. Then a devil decides to invade, destroying Jangar’s glorious palace, enslaving the people and turning the earth to dust with the tramping of its mounted army. In the meantime Jangar meets a young woman, marries, has a son and lives as a common man for three years. As with Sabar, it is Jangar’s horse who informs him of the disaster and lectures him for his negligence: “Why did you choose to neglect your people...I am just a castrated horse, but I know my responsibility. I was born for Bomba and I would die for Bomba.” This part of the story reminded me of Lancelot’s wife and son, whom he leaves to be a hero. Jangar already had a queen and when he sends his wife and son Shovshuur to her uncle, I worried that they would bear the cost of his decisions. Unlike Lancelot though, or any man who left his wife to start a separate family, Jangar, his second wife and his son are welcomed by his queen and Shovshuur becomes a hero who helps Jangar retake Bomba and restore it to its glory.

A Subterranean Side Trip

Jangar makes a journey to the hell beneath the sea to save his friend Hongor. The story is a version of the Grimms' “Strong John”, where the hero is lowered into a cave and abandoned by his comrades. Illustration from The Child of the Cavern, by Jules Férat 1877.

The final chapters of He Dexiu’s The Epic of Jangar stuck out to me as incongruous to the rest for the amount of folkloric details that are largely absent for most of the text. One chapter, about the rescuing of Jangar’s friend Hongor, captured during Jangar’s break from ruling, is a version of a tale that has significance to me because it has been identified by Beowulf scholars R.W. Chambers and J.R.R. Tolkien as a possible antecedent to Beowulf. This tale is also described as Aarne-Thompson type 301, “The Three Stolen Princesses,” and as AT type 650A, “Strong John”. When Jangar goes to the hell beneath the sea to save his friend Hongar, he meets two children who lead him to a yurt with a fire and walk and deer meat. The boys wish to make food, and Jangar sleeps. The boys are tricked out of the meal twice by a devil posing as an old woman and finally Jangar faces and overcomes her. This pattern plays out between Strong John, his two friends and a giant dwarf, and it plays out in the Georgian tale “Asphurtzela” between that hero and a lame devi (a troll-like creature). In Jangar the she-devil has sunken eyes that see remarkably well. I find it interesting that in each version of the tale the antagonist has what I’ve called a split nature. The dwarf is giant, the devi is lame and the old woman’s eyes are sunken, but see well.

The second part of the pattern has the hero lowered into a hole or cave where he finds one or more maidens and is betrayed by his comrades who pull up the maiden(s) but leave him to die under the earth. Jangar finds a maiden, who directs him to the house of the she-devil. Jangar vanquishes her seven dwarf servants and her son, who are immune to Jangar’s sword. He sends up the woman, which He Dexiu or his translator, Pan Zhongming, later describes as a fairy. When he tries to get the boys to pull him up, they lift him half way and drop him to the ground, injuring him. Jangar manages to get out of the cave with the help of mice and a magic tree and later saves his friend Hongor.

This tale stands out from the others in Dexiu’s telling of Jangar in that its plot, with its repetitions of three and dramatic shifts in fortune, is more complicated than the rest. It has more supernatural elements than are apparent in the other tales and brings Jangar to a location other than the steppes or mountains of Mongolia where all of the other stories take place. I don’t know the origin of the “Strong John”/“Three Stolen Princesses” narrative, but I would be surprised if it was originally part of the Jangar tradition. The shifting of the haunted dwelling to a yurt, and the inclusion of the dwarfs, devils, mice and magic tree made for an entertaining retelling of the tale.

Notes on This Edition of Jangar

Dexiu’s prose version of The Epic of Jangar, translated to English by Pan Zhongming, is part of a set of three works of minority Chinese literature published by China Intercontinental Press in 1990. The other works are the Tibetan King Gezar and the Kyrgyz Manas. From the two-month wait and the quality of the text, I suspect that copies are printed on demand. It is also available electronically through Apple Books. To my knowledge, this is the only full-length English translation of the cycle, and it seems to be an abridgement. The edition’s shortcomings are a large enough number of grammatical mistakes to provoke my commenting upon them and a lack of cultural and scholarly context to fully understand some of the details of the stories. Footnotes would have saved me time in looking up common terms, such as bataar, warrior, and others I could not determine, such as bodong, which cannot refer to the Philippine peace treaty of that name (my current theory is that it is a type of monk, but it could also be a type of warrior). It was also unclear to me in early chapters of the text that the frequent enemy devils were supernatural creatures rather than just evil men. English speakers of the west would likely benefit from some amount of cultural context.

A monument to Jangarchis, or Jangar singers, Druzhba park, Elista, Kalmykia. (Wikipedia)

Jangar is an epic poem and there is a tradition of Jangarcis, or Jangar singers, accompanied by a stringed, lute-like tobshuur. Dexiu’s introduction and other sources state that there are versions of Jangar with as many as a hundred chapters, and others with as few as twenty five. It is not clear how Dexiu arrived at eleven in this edition or what elements may be missing. I believe that Jangar would be worth studying in a longer, verse format and that there are likely details lost in this edition that would make the story even richer. Essays explaining pertinent elements of the culture and other scholarly apparatus would add even more value.

Two Trolls and a Dragon Walk into a Tale; Bridging the Grettir-Fafnir Divide in Beowulf

Two devis relax over a game with pieces that look suspiciously like human bones at Musthaid Park in Tblisi, Georgia. Devs are troll-like creatures in Georgian folk tales. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Books I’ve read about Beowulf analogues are invariably broken into two parts: the stories that resemble events from the first half of the poem and stories that resemble the second half. It’s the Grettir-Fafnir divide. The stories about protagonists fighting trolls or other giant humanoid horrors resemble the Grendel section and stories about dragon slayers resemble the dragon section. And this has always seemed reasonable because I hadn’t ever seen a story that incorporated both. That is, until I read “Asphurtzela.” The Georgian folktale, translated by English scholar Marjory Wardrop in 1894, opens with a hero killing two trolls (and a troll’s mother) and finishes up with conflicts with two dragons. I have not seen scholarly analyses of the tale by Beowulf scholars and feel that "Asphurtzela" must be entered into the record and addressed. Not only does Asphurtzela battle trolls and dragons, but many of the details of his encounters in these conflicts also exist in Beowulf. This article lays out the concordances between the poem and the folk tale with the understanding that these moments of agreement, as striking as they are, may still be the result of coincidence. That said, “Asphurtzela” deserves a place in Beowulf scholarship to rival those of Grettis saga and European folk tales like "Strong Hans." I also analyze the nature of the similarities between the folk tale and poem and offer suggestions for how the similarities could be based on a missing tradition of tales or traditions. This is the third of a series of articles investigating the possible relationship between “Asphurtzela,” Beowulf and the Beowulf-analogues Grettis saga and “Strong Hans.” There are links to those pieces at the bottom of this article.

Missing Fathers

In keeping with Friedrich Panzer's Bear’s Son tales, Beowulf and Asphurtzela are separated from a father. In Beowulf’s case, he knows of his father Ecgtheow and speaks of him proudly, but it is not clear what became of him or if he was part of Beowulf’s life. Beowulf has a father-son relationship with his uncle Hygelac and was raised by his grandfather and uncles. Hrothgar provides what we learn about Ecgtheow, whom he rescued from a feud by paying wergild, which seems to have motivated Beowulf’s expedition to Heorot Hall: his desire to repay his father's debt. Asphurtzela is born after his brothers and sister go searching for their father and are captured by a devi, a creature that resembles and functions very much like trolls in the Scandinavian tradition. His mother had mysteriously recommended that they go searching for their “patrimony,” but the story is silent on exactly what that means. As with Bear's Son tales, Asphurtzela is born through magical means, via an apple given to his mother by a stranger. When Asphurtzela is old enough to learn of his sibling's captivity, he goes on a quest to rescue them.

Dominating Through Words

Beowulf and Asphurtzela’s first physical battles are preceded by a battle of words and wills. Beowulf’s famous flyting scene with Unferth establishes Beowulf as the alpha male in Heorot, a man able to face down a verbal attack and a challenge to his ego. This verbal competition seems to prove him worthy to face Grendel. When Asphurtzela faces the hundred-headed devi, he first establishes himself as the devi's better in ways that his brothers previously failed. Granting hospitality to his guest, the devi asks Asphurtzela if he would prefer a bed or a stables; meat or the bone; the small or large container of wine. Whereas his brothers repeatedly choose the smaller or lesser choice, Asphurtzela always chooses the better. In choosing the lesser offers, Asphurtzela's brothers mark themselves as unworthy of respect and doomed to lose. Asphurtzela marks himself as a man of courage and self-respect. He not only chooses the better lot each time, but he berates the devi for offering him less than he deserves. When offered bones or flesh, Asphurtzela says: “Why should I eat bones? Am I a dog that I should do this?” (75). When offered a bed or stable, he says: “I am a man, what should I do in the stable? Give me a bed,” (75). Aspurtzela thus forces the devi to take the lesser accommodations and food and thereby places himself above the devi in the devi's own house.

Sneak Attack at Night

The Grendel episode can be compared to the Asphurtzela's contests with two separate devis. Like Grendel, the hundred-headed devi that Asphurtzela first faces lives with its mother. Asphurtzela first outwits the mother, who had facilitated the devi's kidnapping of his siblings. When the devi sees Asphurtzela, flames shoot from his eyes much as Grendel's do when he first sees the Geats sleeping: “From his eyes shone an unlovely light, most like a flame” (726-727). (Author’s translation, based on Benjamin Slade.) The elements of a sneak attack by night, and the hero outwitting the troll are present in "Asphurtzela." When Asphurtzela lies in bed, he is awoken by the sound of the devi sharpening a giant sword. Guessing his intentions, Asphurtzela puts a log in his bed and hides elsewhere. The devi chops the log in two and leaves and Asphurtzela then shakes off the bed and sleeps peacefully. The episode, along with the eating scene, is reminiscent of stories of the Norse god Thor's conflicts with trolls -- except that Thor is usually the one being outwitted. Asphurtzela and the devi wrestle when the devi, to his surprise, discovers Asphurtzela unscathed the next morning. The fight is short and the devi is outmatched: “The devi struggled and struggled, but could not move his brother-in-law. Then Asphurtzela attacked him, and buried him in the ground up to the neck” (76). Beowulf’s fight with Grendel is more developed than this, but it is similar in a crucial way. The moment Beowulf gasps him, Grendel is unable to gain power over him: “quickly (Beowulf) grasped his evil plan and clamped down on (Grendel’s) arm. At once the shepherd of atrocities discovered he had not met on earth, in the whole world a greater hand grip in another man on earth” (748-752). Beowulf and Asphurtzela then, immediately have their enemy in their power. Asphurtzela kills the devi and its mother with his arrows, which is unlike Grendel's escape, however, the second devi that Asphurtzela kills, by cutting it in half with an arrow, continues to move. Just as Grendel leaves a trail of blood to his lair, the second devi's head rolls to a hole in the ground, kicking off another episode in the story that resembles Beowulf's descent into Grendel's mere, and the analogous episode in Grettis saga.

Betrayals

In Beowulf and “Asphurtzela” the hero is betrayed or abandoned repeatedly. Beowulf's lack of a father reframes Beowulf as an orphan and outcast when he narrates his upbringing in the second half of the poem. Hrothgar and the Danes later leave him for dead when the blood bubbles up from Grendel’s mere after he kills Grendel’s mother. Finally, Beowulf’s men abandon him in his final battle with the dragon. Asphurtzela is similarly a figure who generally cannot count on the help of others. This begins when his mother deceives him about his missing siblings and his jealous brothers tie him to a tree after he saves them. They intend to abandon him, binding him so tightly “blood poured from his fingers” (77). Asphurtzela is again left to his death when he goes into the hole in the ground. His new companions draw up the princesses he finds and then cover the hole with rocks. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a folklore version of Beowulf intended to show what a missing link between the poem and the extant Bear’s Son Tales could have looked like. In Tolkien’s “Selic Spell,” the Unferth figure accompanies the hero to Grendel’s lair and lowers him down on a rope, only to abandon him. In a previous piece on Beowulf and “Asphurtzela” I investigate the similarities between “Asphurtzela” and the Beowulf-analogue Grettis saga, in which a companion abandons the rope Grettir expects to climb after facing a troll.

Voracious Enemies

Beowulf and Asphurtzela both face ravenous foes of fractional natures. Grendel, of course, eats thirty men in his first accounted attack on Heorot and then devours the Geat Hondscio, which the poet dramatizes in gross detail: “He quickly grasped a sleeping warrior, rended without restraint, bit into the bone-locks, from the veins drank blood, swallowed great chunks, soon he had the unliving one all devoured, feet and hands” (740-745). Grendel is also a physical being with magical protections and his cannibalism makes him beast-like while his emotions mark him as human. Protected by magic from the blades ordinary men could use to defeat him, it requires a man of superhuman strength to defeat him without weapons. Grendel is therefore invulnerable and torn apart; terrifying and, in a moment, pitiable. Asphurtzela’s second adversary is the lame devi, who demands food from him and his comrades and finally threatens to devour each of them: “'If thou wilt not give me to eat, I shall eat thee and thy food too'” (80). The lame devi's split nature makes him, like Grendel, strong and weak and as I wrote in a previous piece, this puts them in the position of an antagonist of the Bear's Son tales, as the giant dwarf from the Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans” is both large and small. The devi’s lameness is never described and plays no role in the plot. His family of devis leaves him behind in the house (hidden in a chimney) but they could just as easily leave a fully able devi behind to spy. And despite its lameness, the devi is more than a match for Asphurtzela's superpowered companions. The lame devi's name alone marks him as lame. This seems a significant detail because there is no obvious reason for the devi to be lame (or the dwarf to be a giant) and when details in stories are never followed up it makes me wonder if something may have been lost in their transmission. This is the logic that Beowulf scholar R.W. Chambers followed in determining that Grendel's mere was meant to be a cave behind a waterfall, and that the setting was imperfectly adjusted to address the new English audience that had no experience with Scandinavian waterfalls.

Dragons

St. George the dragon slayer, 15th Century enamel icon, Art Museum of Georgia, Tbilisi.

In an prior piece, I established "Asphurtzela" as a tale with enough motifs to categorize it as one of Friedrich Panzer's Bear's Son tales, but the Bear’s Son tales were only meant to demonstrate how the Grendel section, including the fight with Grendel’s mother, could have been based on a folklore tradition. However, in addition to the Beowulf-like conflicts with trolls, “Asphurtzela” also includes a fight with a dragon. Like his conflicts with the trolls, the fight with the dragon is described in a sentence. I will therefore focus here on the point of greatest similarity between the dragon fights in the poem and folk tale, which is their settings. Both fights occur in or near a symbolic underworld, as Beowulf stands at the boundary of the dragon’s cave and Asphurtzela faces his dragon in a fairyland-like underworld.

“Asphurtzela’s” dragon episode introduces an entire kingdom underground that seems more like a fairyland, or in modern fantasy parlance, another dimension or plane of reality. Asphurtzela, trapped in the hole his companions shut him in, disregards instructions from the maiden he saved and puts his head under a stream and is “immediately carried to the lower regions” (80). This land is later contrasted with “the land of light” (82). There is no real physical detail to allow a reader to understand it as subterranean other than our knowledge that he has journeyed far underground. Asphurtzela is able to “wander about,” suggesting the land is large. He also finds an old woman’s cottage and travels to a well and meets a princess and the king of this land. The old woman and princess tell Asphurtzela that the dragon has stopped the water until it is given a human sacrifice. In this, the dragon resembles the Vedic serpent Vritra, a symbol of drought, and several other Indo-European myths dragons or serpents that cut off the water supply and must be defeated by a storm god to return the rains. As in Beowulf, “Asphurtzela’s” dragon is also a “fiery dragon” (80). Asphurtzela makes short work of the dragon with his arrows.

Beowulf’s dragon lives in a barrow from which issues a stream that is scalding hot: “the brook’s surge, hot with deadly fire, he could not near the hoard without burning” (2546-2548). As with Beowulf’s adventure in Grendel’s mere, the description of this stream is not very easy to follow. The text suggests that there is a natural spring flowing from a cave, but that it has been super heated by the passive heat of the dragon’s breath. Beowulf is burnt by the stream before he alerts the dragon to his presence. I have spent many readings of Seamus Heaney's translation of this passage unclear as to where the heat issues from and it may be that in looking at the original text I filled in blanks. Beowulf’s dragon is not a cause of drought, but as with the dragon from “Asphurtzela,” a source of water has been affected and it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to conceive of the water being more of a central issue in an earlier iteration of the tale. Beowulf’s dragon, in the Scandinavian tradition, is a hoarder of gold. This likens him to Fafnir of the Volsung Saga, a tale referred to in Beowulf. All evidence in Beowulf and other Old English texts clearly link good kingship with gift-giving and bad kingship with greed. Beowulf's Heremod shows that a king who stops the flow of gold stands in the way this culture operates, interrupts its economy, and Heremod's men betray him. If Anglo-Saxon kings were the central hub of the society, literally making it work, Beowulf's dragon is an inversion of a good king. The dragon in Beowulf is clearly a gold-hoarder and is also repeatedly described with the words and formulae otherwise reserved for kings. The dragon is a hordweard (2293), hoard-guardian, as opposed to kennings for king, folcesweard (2513) and a folceshyrde (2981), defenders of people. Hrothgar is also called goldwine gumena (1171), gold-friend of men, and the Old English poem "The Wanderer" twice uses goldwine as a kenning to indicate a king. Where the Anglo-Saxon culture and economy depended on the free flow of gold from the king to his thanes, perhaps the tradition of dragons hoarding gold grew out of a drought story of a dragon hoarding water. Perhaps the scalding, dragon-polluted stream in Beowulf reflects that earlier tradition.

In my study of “Asphurtzela,” Beowulf, “Strong Hans” and Grettis saga, I have found the closest correspondences between “Asphurtzela” and “Strong Hans,” and “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf. “Asphurtzela” definitely possesses the elements of the Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans,” but with its dragon episode, more closely resembles Beowulf than “Strong Hans.” There is more work to be done to chase this investigation to its end. A closer investigation of “Asphurtzela” in its original language and of translator Marjory Wardrop’s notes to the story are two ways to further this study that I don’t at the moment have access to. Neither have I investigated all of Friedrich Panzer’s Bear Son tales in order to see how closely they align with “Strong Hans” and “Asphurtzela.” These resources would be more easily obtainable if there were not a global pandemic affecting libraries, but I will surely continue looking for ways to answer my questions and satisfy my curiosity.

But what do you think? Is it worth while to even study Beowulf analogues? Do you think all of these similarities are evidence of a relationship, or shared history? Do you think it's all coincidence? Let me know in the comments.

This piece is the third in a series on “Asphurtzela” and a possible relationship with Beowulf. If you liked this post, read “No Stone Unturned,” and “‘Asphurtzela’ and the Bear’s Son Tale Tradition.” The first piece compares Steinn from Grettis saga with the Clod-swallower from “Asphurtzela,” and the second gives more context the theory that the Grendel-section of Beowulf could have been based on a folk tale.

No Stone Unturned; An Investigation of Steinn from Grettis Saga

Rock eaters, controllers, destroyers and shapers: Left to right and top to bottom: The Rockbiter from The Neverending Story; Ludo from Labyrinth; an Ent from The Two Towers; and an earth-delving dwarf in Erebor from The Hobbit.

The giant looked mournfully at his hands, capable of breaking down mountains, but not strong enough to save his friends.  “They look like big, good strong hands. Don't they? I always thought that's what they were.”

Michael Ende’s Rockbiter is only one beloved creature from the modern legendarium with a proclivity to stone and the strength or power to manipulate it.  Add to him Ludo, from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth who can howl and call rocks up from the earth to help him.  These are modern creatures, but nothing is truly new.  There is an image in D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths of the stones moving closer to hear Orpheus’s song--and weeping!  And of course J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents pulverize stone at a touch and his dwarves, as the dwarves of Norse Mythology, live inside mountains and are great shapers of earth, stone and metal.  My point is that peoples who lived surrounded by stone had stories of beings who had power over it, and with the global spread of ancient tales today one needn’t even have descended from mountain folk to have encountered such beings.  But to some extent this was always true, tales breaching the boundaries of their culture’s bubble and passed on for generations, sometimes staying remarkably intact, sometimes changing, particularly when a writer sought to build them into something new.       

This brings me to the second of a series of pieces investigating the Georgian tale “Asphurtzela” in which I will discuss the possibility that a somewhat cowardly and ineffectual character with no special talent to speak of may have been based on a being with the power to control stone.  This character’s name is appropriately Steinn, which means stone, and we find him in the Icelandic Grettis saga.  In part of this multi-chapter saga, the hero Grettir must hunt down a she-troll he has grievously wounded and must descend a sheer cliff with a waterfall to an otherwise inaccessible pool of water whence this creature escaped.  Steinn’s very small role in the story is to doubt Grettir’s story about the she-troll without proof, suggest that they give up when they see the difficulties of reaching the troll’s cave, and then to fail in his duty to man a rope that will help Grettir escape from the pool once he has completed his task of finishing off the creature.  When Grettir kills a troll in the cave, Steinn sees blood in the water below and, assuming that Grettir is dead, abandons his post.  Beowulf readers may recognize Beowulf’s adventure in this, when he faces Grendel’s mother and Hrothgar and the Danes interpret her blood as Beowulf’s and leave the mere.  This is one of several correspondences to be found between Beowulf and Grettis saga, which scholars pointed out by the end of the nineteenth century.  Likewise have compelling similarities been identified between Beowulf, Grettis saga and more than two hundred folk tales which were first described as Bear’s Son Tales by the Germanist Friedrich Panzer.  These tales are also described as Aarne-Thompson type 301, “The Three Stolen Princesses,” and as AT type 650A, “Strong John”.  My purpose in this piece is to investigate the likelihood that the nebbishy Steinn character was based on the superpowered earth-eating companion of the hero Asphurtzela, and the rock-smashers of similar folk tales.

In my last “Asphurtzela” piece, I compared two characters with power over stone or earth, one who swallows earth (the Clod-swallower) and another who breaks stone with his hands (the Rock-splitter from the Grimms’ “Strong Hans”).  Beowulf scholar R.W. Chambers suggested a relationship between the Rock-Splitter and the Grettis saga character Steinn, because both Steinn and the Rock-splitter betray or let down the hero when he has descended the waterfall cliff or into the earth, and because both share the element of Stein in their names. The Rock-splitter and the Clod-swallower are figures with power over the earth and their names are grammatically compound words that follow the formula of MATERIAL + ROLE OF ACTION.  This naming convention is also true of the other characters in the respective tales (the Fir-twister and the Hare-catcher,) but the Rock-Splitter and the Clod-Swallower are related by the nature of the material each affects.  I have not yet read the entire corpus of Bear’s Son Tales, but would be interested in seeing if the other tales invariably have a figure with powers over earth or stone, and, considering that smashing rock and eating dirt are different abilities, if analogous characters in other Bear’s Son Tales tend toward the one ability or the other, or if they are even more divergent.  “Strong Hans’s” Fir-twister, for instance, is a being associated with transforming wood into a useful material (twine to bind firewood), as the Rock-splitter smashes rocks to build himself a place to sleep where animals will not disturb him. Could the Clod-swallower and Rock-splitter, for instance have descended from a being with both of their powers, or are there beings with powers over other elements?       

In searching for evidence that Steinn was based on a figure with power over rocks, I have collected details from Grettis saga, other than his name, that not only connect Steinn to rock, but also associates stone with the supernatural realm.  To begin with references to stone or rock in the episode, Steinn is one of three characters to have the word stone in their names in the she-troll episode of Grettis saga.  Thorstein the White and Thorstein’s wife Steinvor are likewise introduced in the episode.  Grettis saga annotator R.C. Boer noted in his edition of the saga that the lack of information about these characters makes it likely that they were not based on real people.  Furthermore, Thorstein and Steinvor live in a place called Sandhaugar, which means sand mounds or sand piles, a name that relates to earth.  Reference to rocks in the episode abound. Grettir’s adventure with the she-troll brings him to a cliff where he is always near stone. The she-troll drags Grettir “to the rocks;” after Grettir cuts her arm off to escape her, she springs, “among the rocks;” and he lays exhausted “by the rock” (82).  When Grettir brings Steinn to the waterfall they see “a cave under the rock” (82).  It is clear that this part of the story takes place in a setting dominated by stone, but “the rocks” are repeatedly associated with the she-troll, not the humans.  Grettir tries during his fight to avoid the rocks and Steinn wants to leave the rocks as soon as he sees the cave.  In contrast, the she-troll yearns to get back to the rock-bound protection of her cave and tries to drag Grettir with her until he cuts off her arm at the shoulder.  In all of these details, the rocks, and cave, are associated with the supernatural and are clearly inimical to the human beings.  We are familiar with monumental stone tombs like the neolithic Newgrange funeral mound of Ireland and similar stone structures, which were meant to act as or represent gateways to another world. It is entirely reasonable that Grettir and Steinn are simply concerned for their safety in light of a clear physical threat, but the monstrous threats of Grettis saga, such as Glam, as well as Grendel of Beowulf are magical threats as well. Glam, for instance, is a corpse haunting the vicinity of his death. Glam is a giant capable of breaking all of the bones in the body of a horse or snapping a man's neck, but he also curses Grettir to gain no more strength. Grendel devours men, but has also charmed the edges of blades not to harm him. The physical dangers in these stories are backed by insidious magical threats as well. (I took all quotes and page numbers from the following online version of Grettis saga.)

If these repeated references to rock and stone in names and in the physical setting are not convincing in themselves, Steinn’s extremely limited role in the tale requires him and Grettir to use stones to accomplish a task.  It is Grettir who ties a stone in the rope and drops it down the waterfall, but a more active Steinn may have done this in an earlier version of the story.  The purpose of tying the rope to the stone is not explained.  It seems reasonable to conjecture that the stone could weight the rope, making it easier to access from the pool at the bottom of the falls, but Grettir also says he does not want to be tied to the rope, which signals that anything tied to the end of the rope could be attacked. This doesn’t outright suggest that the stone tied to the rope is meant as a decoy, or a test to see if there is a troll waiting to strike anything lowered down the falls, but neither does that seem an unreasonable conclusion for the reader to draw. After lowering the stone, Steinn uses rocks to secure the rope: “He drove a stake into the ground and laid stones against it” (83).  If Steinn were based on a figure with the power to smash rock with his fists, this would be an appropriate place for a tale teller to showcase the ability.  This would be further than the Rock-splitter or the Clod-swallower go in using their abilities to solve a problem in their respective stories.  It also seems worthwhile to point out, as I conjecture possible elements no longer in the text, that this rope now has stones on both sides.  Most of the moments in Beowulf that have been identified as having traces of earlier tales are those times when there are lingering questions about why characters act as they do.  Every detail then, of the Steinn episode should be scanned, no stone left -- ahem -- unturned.      

In my attempts to offer an ancient archetype to explain the nature of the powers of a folkloric version Steinn, I again return to Tolkien, who so often rooted his creations in historical linguistic details he found mysterious and therefore compelling.  This was true for the Ents of Middle Earth, tree-like giants who can smash stone and move earth.  Old English scholars are at something of a loss to understand references to the description “the work of ents,” which is used to describe the ruins of stone structures in several Old English poems.  Anglo-Saxonists conjecture that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had never seen Roman buildings, buildings made of stone, and that these rude tribesmen believed that they were the works of giants from a time when such beings roamed England.  Entish artifacts needn’t have been stone walls (in Beowulf, the word is used to describe at least one helmet), but generally carry the sense of being from an earlier time, from “the time of ents.”  The word looks somewhat like eoten, another word Old English uses to describe giants, but it is not clear if these words are synonyms.  Beowulf lists both eotens and gigantes as the creatures spawned by Cain, which suggests that they did not mean exactly the same thing.  But while Tolkien’s Ents are only responsible for destroying stone structures, the general understanding among students of Old English is that ents were builders, perhaps like the disguised jotun Odin and friends employ to build the wall around Asgard.  Tolkien delighted in leading his readers up to the edge of a problem without articulating it directly though, which makes me wonder (by way of a tangent)  if Tolkien was suggesting that perhaps Old English ents came upon fully built structures and their “work” was to smash them apart.  If the Anglo-Saxons were so amazed by stone buildings, I think they must have been just as concerned about what tore them down as what built them!  My argument though is that certainly the people who told the tale of Grettir believed in dwarves and giants and trolls and other creatures that dealt in earth and stone.  A creature that ate dirt and got into all sorts of trouble or adventures doesn’t seem hard to believe.                

In bringing to a close this second piece in a series I am writing to investigate similarities between “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf, I must say that I will not feel that I have a complete understanding of of the Clod-swallower or his earth-breaking brother, the Rock-splitter, until I’ve more fully investigated Panzer’s Bear’s Son Tales.  I do feel that a better understanding of Steinn’s relationship with these figures could be discovered in such an undertaking, perhaps with the conclusion that there is no meaningful relationship.  Steinn though is a curious figure made more curious by his many associations, and his episode’s many associations, with stone. I would close by saying that “Asphurtzela” is less like the Beowulf-analogue Gretiss saga than it is like its fellow Bear’s Son Tale “Strong Hans.”  In my last piece I addressed Asphurtzela’s fights with troll-like Devis, his braving a haunted house and his finding his way to a cave, which of course are similar to Grettir's adventures.  In the next installment of this series, I will analyze the correspondences I see between “Asphurtzela” and Beowulf directly.