42 Proceedings 
It is perhaps significant that although there are tales of wild 
men and women of the woods in many parts of Europe, they 
appear to be nowhere so precise and circumstantial or so similar 
to the old Greek stories as in the Alps. Here if anywhere one 
might expect the savage aborigines to have lingered long. 
Another likely region is the central mountain mass of Scan- 
dinavia. The highest part of the Norwegian chain is still called 
Jotunheim or Jotunfjeld, te. the home or mountain of the 
jotnar, pl. of the Old Norse jotunn, The word has been con- 
nected with the!verb ea/,t and appears to mean a devourer or 
cannibal. The jé¢zar were represented as savage, hairy, half- 
human beings of great strength and ferocity, who according to 
the Voluspa (c.1000 a.p.) lived very long ago. We gather from 
Old Norse poetry that they were the enemies of gods and men, 
hated for their wildness and treachery, but despised for their 
clumsiness and stupidity. It has been suggested that they pre- 
serve the memory of actual pithecoid beings. The Christians 
extended the name to their heathen neighbours. Various fen- 
nings, that is conventional poetic synonyms, often very fantastic, 
are applied to them, ¢.g. mountain-dwellers, crag-men, cave- 
men, dwellers in the waste, foes of earth, folk of the beach, 
whales of the wilderness, seals of the surfing caverns. Ati and 
Hrimgerthr} is a vivid dialogue between a warrior and a female 
jotunn. She says, ‘A rare rib-stretching thou shalt get, thou 
champion, if thou comest within my clutches.’ He calls her ‘a 
monster greedy for corpses,’ and taunts her, ‘Shaggy is the name 
of the jo¢unn that shall wed thee, loathsome as thou art to 
mankind.’ But what is probably the most graphic description 
of a jotunn is much older than this, and not in Old Norse, but 
in Old English, in the famous epic of Beowulf, which may be 
roughly dated c.700 a.p. Here Grendel is a monstrous man- 
shaped being of the cursed race, and is repeatedly described by 
the very rare Old English word e¢ofon, the equivalent of jotunn. 
His name,which has been interpreted either as ‘the grinder’ or 
1892, p. 180. Chap. X. contains some remarkable instances of the 
survival of savage types in the British Isles, notably in Wales. 
+ Cf. E.Mogk, in Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie,1898, 
iii. p.300. 
+ In York Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. i., with translation. 
~ | ys ee 
i ee ee 
Wg Cate =o eae Ce eed or a 
a 
