OEDENBURG (Hungarian, Sopron), one of the oldest and most prepossessing towns in Hungary, the chief place of a district of its own name, lies 3 miles to the west of the Lake of Neusiedl and 35 miles to the south-south-east of Vienna. It possesses several churches (one of which was built with the contents of a Turkish military chest found buried here), three convents, a Protestant. lyceum with a theological department, a Roman Catholic gymnasium, several other schools and charitable institutions, a museum, and a theatre. The inhabitants, most of whom are of German descent, are mainly engaged in making wine, of which the district yields a quality little inferior to Tokay. The crystallized fruits of Oedenburg form a well-known article of commerce; and a trade in grain and manufactures of beetroot-sugar, starch, and cloth are also carried on. Large cattle-markets are held here. The population in 1880 was 23,222.
Oedenburg, the Roman station Sopronium, was created a royal free town in the 11th century in return for help afforded to the king of Hungary against the Bulgarians. In 1619 it was pillaged by Bethlen Gabor. At a diet held here in 1681 the Hungarian Protestants presented the so-called “Oedenburg Articles," claiming the restitution of their churches and estates. The province of Oedenburg is rich in corn, fruit, cattle, and coal....
OeDIPUS, a Theban hero, is placed by genealogists among the descendants of Cadmus. His father Laius ordered him to be exposed as soon as he was born; he grew up ignorant of his parentage, and meeting his father once in a narrow way he quarrelled with him and slew him. The country was ravaged by a monster, the Sphinx; Oedipus by his cunning solved the riddle that the Sphinx proposed to its victims, freed the country, and married his own mother, Jocaste, or, as Homer calls her, Epicaste. In the Odyssey it is said that the gods disclosed the impiety. Epicaste hanged herself, and Oedipus lived as king in Thebes tormented by the Erinnyes of his mother. In the tragic poets the tale takes a different form. Oedipus fulfils an ancient prophecy in* killing his father; he is the blind instrument in the hands of fate. The further treatment of the tale by Aeschylus is unknown. Sophocles describes in his Oedipus the King how Oedipus was resolved to pursue to the end the mystery of the death of Laius, and thus unravelled the dark tale, and in horror put out his own eyes. The sequel of the tale is told in Oedipus at Colonus. Banished from the land by his sons, he is tended by the loving care of his daughters. He comes to Attica and dies in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus, in his death welcomed and pardoned by the fate which had pursued him throughout his life. This view of the myth, which reads in it a parable of the mystery of life, of the overwhelming might of fate and the weakness of man, of the final reconciliation of discord in death, is due to the tragic poets, is unknown in the epic poets, and is still more foreign to the primitive mythic form, where Oedipus and his father embody the vicissitudes of the annual life of nature: the son, the young year, slays his father, the old year, is wedded to his own mother, but finally loses his eyes, his light, and his life. The winter king is a god who slays his own father; this is a trait that occurs time after time in mythology.
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