"I do not suppose that the struggle between light and darkness was Homer's subject in the 'Iliad' any more than it was Shakespeare's subject in 'Hamlet.' Homer's subject was the wrath of the Greek hero, as Shakespeare's subject was the vengeance of the Danish prince. Nevertheless, the story of 'Hamlet,' when traced back to its Norse original, is unmistakably the quarrel between summer and winter; and the moody prince is as much a solar hero as Odin himself. (See Simrock, Die Quellen des Shakespeare, I., 127-133.) Of course Shakespeare knew nothing of this, as Homer knew nothing of the origin of Achilleus. The two stories are therefore not to be taken _as sun-myths in their present form_. They are the offspring of other stories which were sun-myths. They are stories which conform to the sun-myth type.... The sun and the clouds, the light and the darkness, were once supposed to be actuated by wills analagous to the human will; they were personified and worshipped or propitiated by sacrifice; and their doings were described in language which applied so well to the deeds of human or quasi-human beings, that in course of time its primitive import faded from recollection. No competent scholar now doubts that the myths of the Veda and the Edda originated in this way, for philology itself shows that the names employed in them are the names of the great phenomena of nature. And when once a few striking stories had thus arisen--when once it had been told how Indra smote the Panis, and how Sigurd rescued Brynhild, and how Odysseus blinded the Kyklops--then certain mythic or dramatic types had been called into existence; and to these types, preserved in the popular imagination, future stories would inevitably conform.... In this view I am upheld by a most sagacious and accurate scholar, Mr. E. A. Freeman, who finds in Carlovingian romance an excellent illustration of the problem before us."
The Carlovingian romance thus cited is, indeed, almost an exact counterpart of the Arthurian one, with the certainly very important exception that we can appeal to reliable history in the former case to prove our position, while the mythical gloom of legend and tradition obscures so much of the probable historical facts in connection with the latter that our path is beset with difficulties which cannot be solved otherwise than by analogical inference. History informs us of the acts and deeds of Karl der Gross, a German by birth, name, race, and language. This warrior, who conquered nearly the whole of Europe and founded one of the most important dynastic houses in mediæval times, was born about the year 742, in the castle of Silzburg, in Bavaria, and died in 814 at Aachen, now called Aix-la-Chapelle. On the other hand, as Mr. Fiske says, "the Charlemagne of romance is a mythical personage. He is supposed to be a Frenchman at a time when neither the French nation nor the French language can properly be said to have existed; and he is represented as a doughty crusader, although crusading was not thought of until long after the Karolingian era. He is a myth, and what is more he is a solar myth--an _avatar_, or at least a representative of Odin in his solar capacity. If in his case legend were not controlled by history, he would be for us as unreal as Agamemnon.... To the historic Karl corresponds in many particulars the mythical Charlemagne. The legend has preserved the fact, which without the information supplied by history we might perhaps set down as a fiction, that there was a time when Germany, Gaul, Italy, and part of Spain formed a single empire. And as Mr. Freeman has well observed, the mythical crusades of Charlemagne are good evidence that there _were_ crusades, although the real Karl had nothing whatever to do with one."