Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1884 — Apples in Mythology. [ARTICLE]

Apples in Mythology.

Probably because the apple is such a beautiful fruit, and so common, it holds a great place in European tradition. are to our legendary lore' what peaches are to the Chinese. The fruit is as old as Homer, and in the fairy gardens of Pemacia he tell us that “apple grew ripe on apple and pear on pear” through all the circuit of the year. Laertes the old was tending his garden when Odysseus met him and reminded him of the little boy that had begged for sq many apple trees “all for his own,” and who had now- returned a man tried/ in war and on the deep. It was an apple, the apple of discord, that caused all the Trojan w oes, and but for this golden fruit, Troy might still be a flourishing rival of Constantinople. Indeed, the whole eastern question would have taken different complexion, for the strife betw-een Asia and Europe notoriously began with that apple of discord. They show different forbidden fruits in different countries; one especially, a monstrous yellow thing, about as tempting as a turnip. But in Northern Europe at least we have always been sure that for no fruit but an apple would Eve have listened to the serpent. The heathen Scandinavians, indeed, made apples the very fruit of life and immortality. There were in the keeping of Idona, wife of Bragi, and the gods of Asgard tested them, as Horns (according to Diodorus) ate of the death-destroying drug of Isis. Then when they had tasted of the apples, the gods grew young again and forgot death. But Thiasse the giant, by the aid of Loki, seized Iduna and the apples of immortality, and then the gods grew old and gray and Wrinkled (as in Giordano Bruno’s satire), and the spring died out of the year. But Loki was made to restore the apples incorruptible, and spring came back, and the gods are as young as ever they were on Asgard.