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.This is the giantess Modgud, whose name ( fierce battle ) could well bethat of a valkyrie; she guards the bridge which Hermod must cross to reachHelgate and find Balder, and challenges all who pass over it.There is nothingparticularly sinister recorded of her, and she waits under a roof of gold.Anotherfemale being present at a great funeral is the giantess called Hyrrokin ( Witheredby fire ?), who launches the ship on which the dead Balder is burnt at his funeral.Yet another giantess, Hyndla (Little dog), in the poem Hyndluljóð named afterher, is called by Freyja her  sister in the cave ; she is in the underworld, andknows the secrets of ancestry.She is persuaded to recite the genealogy of Ottar,Freyja s lover, whom the goddess supports like a guardian valkyrie.Once more itseems that the power of the goddess over the realm of death is strongly linkedwith the cult of the dead ancestors whose enduring presence in their burialmounds benefits their people (Davidson 1988: 116).Patricia Lysaght (1986: 216) in her study of the Banshee, the death-messengerin Ireland, distinguishes two separate early traditions, one of a  red womanassociated primarily with death in battle,  an aggressive and horrible figure , andanother supernatural woman with a  more benign, ancestral role who is a type ofguardian.She is associated with certain families considered of noble Irish descent,and with the ownership and fertility of land (Lysaght 1996: 154ff.).This guardianfigure laments when one of the family dies, sharing the concern of relatives andfriends.In south-east Ireland, however, she screams and shrieks in the mannerof a hostile supernatural being.Here we seem to have once more the opposedcharacters of the goddess of death, represented as  a beautiful woman or as a179 Mistress of Life and Death horrible loathsome hag (Lysaght 1996: 160).Undoubtedly there is a widespread link between female supernatural figuresand the land of the dead, and it is they, rather than a male ruler like Pluto in Greekmythology, who are represented as possessing power over it, admitting mortalsfrom the upper world, and conducting them along the lonely road, as well aspossessing a store of wisdom concerning dead ancestors.The goddess of deathappears in three different aspects: she foretells the coming of death so that shemay be described as its messenger, like the Banshee.She helps to bring it about,as do the valkyries in Norse tradition, and the Mórrígan when she seeks thedestruction of the hero Cú Chulainn.She acts as the conductor of the dead fromthis world to the next, another aspect of the valkyries and a possible role ofFreyja as Great Goddess, while she welcomes the dead when they cross thethreshold.The associations between death and the goddess are by no means isolatedfrom her other aspects in the world of the living.The goddess worshipped bythe hunters over a vast stretch of time had her destructive, terrifying side, bringingdeath as well as bounty.This link with death lingered on in the figure of Artemisthe Huntress, whose  gentle arrows could bring death to women (see p.18).Another development of the hunting-goddess might be seen in the sinisterHekate, a goddess of the ancient world who was a powerful figure in popularbelief among the women of eastern Asia Minor and classical Greece (Downing1985).Offerings of dogs and selected foods such as eggs, garlic, cheese, mulletand a special cake surrounded by lighted torches were made to her (Flower Smith1913), and she was regarded as a protectress against evil spirits because of herpower over them.Hekate might be seen as queen of the underworld, linking herwith Persephone (Paulys 1912: 2773), and she was a goddess of crops and offishing as well as of death.She was held to roam the earth on moonlit nightsaccompanied by barking dogs and restless spirits who could not lie quiet in theirgraves; her influence may be seen in the widespread tradition of the Wild Huntin north-western Europe, which might sometimes be led by a female huntress(see p.49).Yet another strange figure thought to be connected with the hunting-goddessis that of the Baba Yaga who plays an important part in Russian fairy-tales(Kravchenko 1987: 86ff.).She is depicted as a powerful old woman who devoursliving victims, including children, and her description recalls some of the earliestgoddess figures, since she has huge breasts, posterior and thighs; she is alsosaid to have a leg of bone, a long pointed nose and teeth of iron.She lies in a hutwithout doors or windows, which blocks the road by which the hero has to pass;it is supported on hen s or animal legs, and can be entered only by reciting aspecial formula to make it revolve.Inside the Baba Yaga squats or lies beside afire, spinning or weaving.The hut, which sometimes seems to fit her tightly andmay be fenced with human bones, has been compared to a coffin.One of her functions seems to be that of a guardian of the road to the land of180 Mistress of Life and Death the dead, like Modgud; when the hero finds his way in, he demands food and abath, and it has been suggested that this resembles the washing and funeralfeast given to the dead (Kravchenko 1987: 124 5).The Baba Yaga also fliesthrough the air in a mortar driven by a pestle, and this, together with her pokerand broom point to a being connected with the hearth.However, she is alsorepresented as the mistress of the forest, and can call on animals to help the heroif he wins her favour (Kravchenko 1987: 131).Another figure linked with the world of the hunter from an earlier period inAnglo-Saxon England is the mother of Grendel in Beowulf (see p.22).Here wehave again a destructive being who blocks the way of the hero when he isdescending to the lower world beneath the lake.She squats on his body andattempts to dispatch him with her knife, so that she too has something in commonwith the dangerous death-dealing aspect of the goddess of the forest and thewild creatures [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]