Eclipse caused by monster devouring sun or moon.
Mythological motifs. · Cosmogony and cosmology. · The heavens. · The sun. · Nature and condition of the sun. · view the constellation · filed as A737.1
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On our shelf — the index’s citations, resolved to served chapters
- FinnishThe Kalevala, Rune XLVIIThompson cites: Kalevala rune 47
The motif on our shelf
— written from the served texts; every claim cited receiptFourteen apparatus rows, one resolved — and the resolved page contains no devouring. In the Finnish rune the lights go out by abduction: Louhi “Makes the Sun and Moon her captives”, “Hides the Moon, no more to glimmer, / In a rock of many colors”, “Hides the Sun, to shine no longer, / In the iron-banded mountain”, and “Night was king and reigned unbroken” [The Kalevala, Rune XLVII]. Swallowing does occur on the page, but it eats the replacement: Ukko kindles a new flame “That it might become a new-moon, / That a second sun might follow”, and when it falls to earth a lake-fish takes it — “Darted then the daring whiting, / Swallowed quick the wicked Fire-child” [ibid.]. The letter of the motif — a monster devouring sun or moon — is served elsewhere on this shelf, in the Norse doom: the wolf “devours the sun, and this will seem a great loss”; “The other wolf will devour the moon” [The Prose Edda (The Younger Edda), THE FOOLING OF GYLFE. XVI] — the very passage beside Thompson’s unresolved Icelandic row (MacCulloch). Between witch-theft and wolf-swallowing the shelf holds both ways of losing the sky; only the first is wired.
Witnesses: The Kalevala, Rune XLVII · The Prose Edda (The Younger Edda), THE FOOLING OF GYLFE. XVI