CREATIVE RESPONSES IN MINIATURE 57

may also hazard a guess at the provenance of this lost tribe whose dress
was thus immortalized by being taken as the model for the clothing of
imaginary Dwarfs, we may picture to ourselves a band of Nomad herds-
men straying beyond the limits of their cattle ranges in the Great Western
Bay of the Eurasian Steppe as they push their way up the valley of the
Dniestr into the Galician forests; and we may go on to picture these
stray stock-breeders finding themselves constrained, in a strange
physical environment, to change their economic occupation by taking
to mining. The historic prototypes of the mythical Dwarfs would then
be a mining community in some secluded valley of the Carpathians or
the Riesengebirge whose Nomad origin was still advertised in their an-
cestral dress at the time when the first aggressive Medieval German
mineral prospectors arrived on the scene to put these ci-devant Nomad
miners out of business.

The itch to find explanations for connexions between historical facts
is, of course, excited by facts of other kinds besides identities in fashions of
clothes. In the field of Language, for example, how had it come to pass
that the vocabulary of a iate-nineteenth-century middle-class English
nursery included the name of the Sumeric goddess Inanna? The history
of the translation of Inanna to an English nursery from a Sumerian
temple was illuminated by her epiphany under her original name—
none the worse for its long journey through Time and Space, save for the
weathering away of its initial vowel—as the Nanna who, in the pagan
pantheon of a post-Carolingian Scandinavian heroic age, was still being
honoured as the consort of Balder, 'the Lord* who dies and rises from
the dead. Though, in Scandinavia in the tenth century after Christ, the
Norse version of the dying and rising god's traditional epithet has
eclipsed this Sumeric god's proper name, Balder's identity with
Tammuz, which is proclaimed in Balder*s passion, is established by the
tell-tale survival of the Sumerian proper name of a great Mother who is
Tammuz-Balder's wife.1 In a Victorian nursery, where the child's nurse
meant more than its mother meant to the child, it was natural enough
that the child should apply the name of this unforgettable Mother God-
dess to the most puissant female figure within its miniature horizon.2

What, again, was the etymology of jSctatAofe, the Greek word for'king*,
which was as enigmatic as it was familiar? Krai, the Slavonic word for
*kingj, was familiar without being enigmatic. The word kralvras known
to have originated in the coining of a common noun out of the proper
name of an historical King Karl whose fame had made so wide and so
deep and so lasting an impression on the imaginations of the Slavonic-
speaking barbarians beyond the eastern borders of Charlemagne's em-
pire that in all Skvonic dialects, from those of the adjacent Wends and
Srbs to those of the distant Russians and Bulgarians, the Great Karl's

1 SeeV.v. 150.

2 The writer could remember how once in his nursery, -when his nurse and his mother
seemed to him to be annoyingly preoccupied by talking business with one another, he
sought in vain to distract their attention to himself by repeatedly crawling under the bed,
exclaiming, each time: 'Mother and Nanny are good; Mother and Nanny are God; I am
hiding from God.' Without knowing it, he was playing at one of the principal cults of a
Sumeric religion which, on the adult surface of life, had been extinct for some two
thousand years in its native land of Shinar.