Every country has its store of myths, legends and folk tales handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. In parts of the British Isles country folk still tell these tales; but as towns and cities have grown up and families have moved away from the villages of their birth, so these legends have gradually been forgotten. Indeed, were it not for scholars who have preserved these stories, most of them would already be lost.

Many legends owe their origins to the attempts of primitive people to explain away natural happenings that were rather frightening. A number of pillars of stone off the Norwegian coast that we know were caused by the sea and the rain eating away the earth and softer stone around them became in legend a number of rebellious giants turned to stone by the gods. We know what causes storms, but you can easily understand primitive man telling his friends that the gods were angry with each other or with man and that thunderbolts and lightning were their weapons. The growth of new crops each year seemed nothing less than a miracle, and every mythology has its story to account for this miracle.

Have you ever read the story of the Greek God of Fire, Hephaistos? He was the son of Hera, the wife of Zeus, who was the King of the Gods. One day he took sides with his mother when she was quarrelling with her husband, and Zeus

seized him by the foot and hurled him from the threshold of Heaven. He flew all day, and as the sun sank fell half dead on the Greek Isle of Lemnos, where he was picked up and looked after by the inhabitants. Ever after he was lame; and there on Lemnos, below the ground, he built a palace. In this palace the God of the Crooked Foot set up a smithy in which he and his servants forged wonderful gifts for the Gods, made from bronze and gold and silver.

How did this story come into existence? On Lemnos, and in a number of other places in Greece, there are areas where, because of oil deposits underground, great jets of natural gas spout out, and burn everlastingly like pillars of fire.