Why the Stork Brings Babies

I figure I can't be the first person bringing some of these connections, but the last one, about the souls at sea, I am not finding anywhere else, so I am giving myself some kind of credit for it.

The word sea and the word soul are connected, back to the proto-Germanic word *saiwaz or *saiwalo (OE sawol) meaning sheet of water, lake, sea, pool. The belief was that souls went after death to a contained area at the bottom of a lake, and some lakes were considered more likely than others. There is ambiguity around the word sea, because some tribes had no contact with the ocean and thus used *saiwaz for any body of water, while others knew about both salt water and fresh and had different words for the two.  But it seems that the idea of the dead going to a chilly, damp resting place under lakes after death was the main one, and extending this to places under the ocean came later. 

Ship burials occured because the Germanic peoples were among the many who believed that you might need certain objects after death, and a ship to get to the place of the dead was necessary for the important people like kings and queens. The stork comes in because this Hel, this cell under some Baltic lakes also became known as the place where souls waited before they were born into this world. Storks are lake-birds, picking up souls and bringing them to the land of the living.

If you look up where this belief about storks comes from, you get stories about how this comes from the Greek goddess Hera, only it is cranes, not storks. However, the belief in storks bringing the babies seems to be purely Germanic and already in place when first contact occurred. As Greek is also an Indo-European language it is possible that they also had some previous belief about large birds bringing babies. Hera had one of her rivals, a beautiful mortal, into a crane and banished her, but the woman would not leave without her child and so carried it off herself. Fine.  Except the Greeks didn't go from there to believing cranes or any other bird brought babies in general.  The Egyptians believed a heron delivered the world. Okay...but there's no record of them believing herons brought babies. Large birds can carry large things, yes. The mind does revolt against the idea of warblers bringing infants. But that still doesn't get us to belief in storks bringing babies, which was Germanic and Norwegian.

Most likely, the people guessing at the explanations didn't know the history of where souls went or came from in northern Europe.

 

The person receiving said souls under the sea was Hel, goddess of the dead, and when Christianity moved into the Germanic areas she seemed to be the obvious answer for a place name for the dead, and the name was well-enough established by the time the KJV came along that it was used to translate the Greek place-name Hades. Her name comes from *kel in Proto Indo-European, meaning "to cover, enclose, conceal," from which we also get our words for cell, cellar, helm, helmet.

The phrase "How many souls were lost?" and the reference to people on board as "souls" likely stems from a similar ignorance. The reference to souls lost is confined to nautical and later aviation uses. It goes back to at least 1300 and again, is first found in the north of Europe. Those lost to disease, or battle, or famine are not called souls. I propose that all the explanations that "souls" was used because they didn't need to differentiate between the important and the poorer folk, nor between nationalities, nor even clearing up the ambiguity between passengers and crew or whether they were alive or not makes the least bit of sense once you have a better explanation.  It's the sort of thing one cooks up when a fact is in place without explanation and people throw darts.  I propose here - and I swear I can't find it anywhere else, amazingly - that the association with souls and the sea, first in some Baltic lakes where Hel received them into some sort of cellar  - was still present in the minds of those living around the North Sea, where ship burial was still practiced until at least 1000AD.  Admittedly, such burials might only be custom at that point, without belief that the queen would need a ship to get to the bottom of some lake. But souls were lost at sea because that's where souls went.