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Popular Tales from the Norse

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Title: Popular Tales from the Norse

Compiler: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen
        Jørgen Engebretsen Moe

Translator: Sir George Webbe Dasent


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8933]
                Most recently updated: January 15, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8933

Credits: Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POPULAR TALES FROM THE NORSE ***




Popular Tales from the Norse



by Sir George Webbe Dasent



WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON THE ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF POPULAR
TALES


Contents

 Notice to the Second Edition
 Notice to the First Edition
 INTRODUCTION
 ORIGIN
 DIFFUSION
 NORSE MYTHOLOGY
 NORSE POPULAR TALES
 CONCLUSION

 TALES
 I. TRUE AND UNTRUE
 II. WHY THE SEA IS SALT
 III. THE OLD DAME AND HER HEN
 IV. EAST O’ THE SUN, AND WEST O’ THE MOON
 V. BOOTS WHO ATE A MATCH WITH THE TROLL
 VI. HACON GRIZZLEBEARD
 VII. BOOTS WHO MADE THE PRINCESS SAY, “THAT’S A STORY”
 VIII. THE TWELVE WILD DUCKS
 IX. THE GIANT WHO HAD NO HEART IN HIS BODY
 X. THE FOX AS HERDSMAN
 XI. THE MASTERMAID
 XII. THE CAT ON THE DOVREFELL
 XIII. PRINCESS ON THE GLASS HILL
 XIV. HOW ONE WENT OUT TO WOO
 XV. THE COCK AND HEN
 XVI. THE MASTER-SMITH
 XVII. THE TWO STEP-SISTERS
 XVIII. BUTTERCUP
 XIX. TAMING THE SHREW
 XX. SHORTSHANKS
 XXI. GUDBRAND ON THE HILL-SIDE
 XXII. THE BLUE BELT
 XXIII. WHY THE BEAR IS STUMPY-TAILED
 XXIV. NOT A PIN TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THEM
 XXV. ONE’S OWN CHILDREN ARE ALWAYS PRETTIEST
 XXVI. THE THREE PRINCESSES OF WHITELAND
 XXVII. THE LASSIE AND HER GODMOTHER
 XXVIII. THE THREE AUNTS
 XXIX. THE COCK, THE CUCKOO, AND THE BLACK-COCK
 XXX. RICH PETER THE PEDLAR
 XXXI. GERTRUDE’S BIRD
 XXXII. BOOTS AND THE TROLL
 XXXIII. GOOSEY GRIZZEL
 XXXIV. THE LAD WHO WENT TO THE NORTH WIND
 XXXV. THE MASTER THIEF
 XXXVI. THE BEST WISH
 XXXVII. THE THREE BILLY-GOATS GRUFF
 XXXVIII. WELL DONE AND ILL PAID
 XXXIX. THE HUSBAND WHO WAS TO MIND THE HOUSE
 XL. DAPPLEGRIM
 XLI. FARMER WEATHERSKY
 XLII. LORD PETER
 XLIII. THE SEVEN FOALS
 XLIV. THE WIDOW’S SON
 XLV. BUSHY BRIDE
 XLVI. BOOTS AND HIS BROTHERS
 XLVII. BIG PETER AND LITTLE PETER
 XLVIII. TATTERHOOD
 XLIX. THE COCK AND HEN THAT WENT TO THE DOVREFELL
 L. KATIE WOODENCLOAK
 LI. THUMBIKIN
 LII. DOLL I’ THE GRASS
 LIII. THE LAD AND THE DEIL
 LIV. THE COCK AND HEN A-NUTTING
 LV. THE BIG BIRD DAN
 LVI. SORIA MORIA CASTLE
 LVII. BRUIN AND REYNARD
 LVIII. TOM TOTHERHOUSE
 LIX. LITTLE ANNIE THE GOOSE GIRL

 INTRODUCTION TO APPENDIX
 APPENDIX
 1. WHY THE JACK SPANIARD’S WAIST IS SMALL
 2. ANANZI AND THE LION
 3. ANANZI AND QUANQUA
 4. THE EAR OF CORN AND THE TWELVE MEN
 5. THE KING AND THE ANT’S TREE
 6. THE LITTLE CHILD AND THE PUMPKIN TREE
 7. THE BROTHER AND HIS SISTERS
 8. THE GIRL AND THE FISH
 9. THE LION, THE GOAT, AND THE BABOON
 10. ANANZI AND BABOON
 11. THE MAN AND THE DOUKANA TREE
 12. NANCY FAIRY
 13. THE DANCING GANG
 FOOTNOTES TO INTRODUCTION




Notice to the Second Edition


The first edition of these Tales being exhausted, and a demand having
arisen for a second, the Translator has thought it right to add
thirteen tales, which complete the translation of Asbjörnsen and Moe’s
collection, and to strengthen the Introduction by working in some new
matter, and by working out some points which were only slightly
sketched in the first edition.

The favour with which the book was welcomed makes it almost a duty to
say a word here on the many kind and able notices which have been
written upon it. Duties are not always pleasant, but the fulfilment of
this at least gives no pain; because, without one exception, every
criticism which the Translator has seen has shown him that his prayer
for “gentle” readers has been fully heard. It will be forgiven him, he
hopes, when he says that he has not seen good ground to change or even
to modify any of the opinions as to the origin and diffusion of popular
tales put forth in the first edition. Much indeed has been said by
others _for_ those views; what has been urged _against_ them, with all
kindness and good humour, in one or two cases, has not availed at all
to weigh down mature convictions deliberately expressed after the
studies of years, backed as they are by the researches and support of
those who have given their lives to this branch of knowledge.

And now, before the Translator takes leave of his readers for the
second time, he will follow the lead of the good godmother in one of
these Tales, and forbid all good children to read the two which stand
last in the book. There is this difference between him and the
godmother. She found her foster-daughter out as soon as she came back.
He will never know it, if any bad child has broken his behest. Still he
hopes that all good children who read this book will bear in mind that
there is just as much sin in breaking a commandment even though it be
not found out, and so he bids them good-bye, and feels sure that no
good child will dare to look into those two rooms. If, after this
warning, they peep in, they may perhaps see something which will shock
them.

“Why then print them at all?” some grown reader asks. Because this
volume is meant for you as well as for children, and if you have gone
ever so little into the world with open eyes, you must have seen, yes,
every day, things much more shocking. Because there is nothing immoral
in their spirit. Because they are intrinsically valuable, as
illustrating manners and traditions, and so could not well be left out.
Because they complete the number of the Norse originals, and leave none
untranslated. And last, though not least, because the Translator hates
family versions of anything, “Family Bibles”, “Family Shakespeares”.
Those who, with so large a choice of beauty before them, would pick out
and gloat over this or that coarseness or freedom of expression, are
like those who, in reading the Bible, should always turn to Leviticus,
or those whose Shakespeare would open of itself at Pericles Prince of
Tyre. Such readers the Translator does not wish to have.




Notice to the First Edition


These translations from the _Norske Folkeeventyr_, collected with such
freshness and faithfulness by MM. Asbjörnsen and Moe, have been made at
various times and at long intervals during the last fifteen years; a
fact which is mentioned only to account for any variations in style or
tone—of which, however, the Translator is unconscious—that a critical
eye may detect in this volume. One of them, _The Master Thief_, has
already appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine for November 1851; from the
columns of which periodical it is now reprinted, by the kind permission
of the Proprietors.

The Translator is sorry that he has not been able to comply with the
suggestion of some friends upon whose good-will he sets all store, who
wished him to change and soften some features in these tales, which
they thought likely to shock English feeling. He has, however, felt it
to be out of his power to meet their wishes, for the merit of an
undertaking of this kind rests entirely on its faithfulness and truth;
and the man who, in such a work, wilfully changes or softens, is as
guilty as he “who puts bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter”.

Of this guilt, at least, the Translator feels himself free; and,
perhaps, if any, who may be inclined to be offended at first, will take
the trouble to read the Introduction which precedes and explains the
Tales, they may find, not only that the softening process would have
spoilt these popular traditions for all except the most childish
readers, but that the things which shocked them at the first blush,
are, after all, not so very shocking.

For the rest, it ill becomes him to speak of the way in which his work
has been done: but if the reader will only bear in mind that this, too,
is an enchanted garden, in which whoever dares to pluck a flower, does
it at the peril of his head; and if he will then read the book in a
merciful and tender spirit, he will prove himself what the Translator
most longs to find, “a gentle reader”, and both will part on the best
terms.




INTRODUCTION




ORIGIN


The most careless reader can hardly fail to see that many of the Tales
in this volume have the same groundwork as those with which he has been
familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in fact, of
the days when there were tales in nurseries—old wives’ fables, which
have faded away before the light of gas and the power of steam. It is
long, indeed, since English nurses told these tales to English children
by force of memory and word of mouth. In a written shape, we have long
had some of them, at least, in English versions of the _Contes de ma
Mère l’ Oye_ of Perrault, and the _Contes de Fées_ of Madame D’Aulnoy;
those tight-laced, high-heeled tales of the “teacup times” of Louis XIV
and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much
disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a
London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the
English reciter was hushed—and it was hushed in England more than a
century ago—our great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and
Beauty and the Beast, of Little Red Riding-hood and Blue Beard, mingled
together in the _Cabinet des Fées_ with Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin’s
wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit breathed
hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe at once,
confusing the traditions and tales of all times and countries into one
incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and knotted as that famous
pound of flax which the lassie in one of these Tales is expected to
spin into an even wool within four-and-twenty hours. No poverty of
invention or want of power on the part of translators could entirely
destroy the innate beauty of those popular traditions; but here, in
England at least, they had almost dwindled out, or at any rate had been
lost sight of as home-growths. We had learnt to buy our own children
back, disguised in foreign garb; and as for their being anything more
than the mere pastime of an idle hour—as to their having any history or
science of their own—such an absurdity was never once thought of. It
had, indeed, been remarked, even in the eighteenth century—that dreary
time of indifference and doubt—that some of the popular traditions of
the nations north of the Alps contained striking resemblances and
parallels to stories in the classical mythology. But those were the
days when Greek and Latin lorded it over the other languages of the
earth; and when any such resemblance or analogy was observed, it was
commonly supposed that that base-born slave, the vulgar tongue, had
dared to make a clumsy copy of something peculiarly belonging to the
twin tyrants who ruled all the dialects of the world with a pedant’s
rod.

At last, just at the close of that great war which Western Europe waged
against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon; just as the
eagle—Prometheus and the eagle in one shape—was fast fettered by sheer
force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in
Central Germany, on the old Thuringian soil, to whom it was given to
assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of
classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech
a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom before unsuspected
and unknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoured name. For
the furtherance of the good work which he began nearly fifty years ago,
he still lives and still labours. There is no spot on which an accent
of Teutonic speech is uttered where the name of Jacob Grimm is not a
“household word”. His General Grammar of all the Teutonic Dialects from
Iceland to England has proved the equality of these tongues with their
ancient classical oppressors. His Antiquities of Teutonic Law have
shown that the codes of the Lombards, Franks, and Goths were not mere
savage, brutal customaries, based, as had been supposed, on the absence
of all law and right. His numerous treatises on early German authors
have shown that the German poets of the Middle Age, Godfrey of
Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Hartman von der Aue, Walter von der
Vogelweide, and the rest, can hold their own against any contemporary
writers in other lands. And lastly, what rather concerns us here, his
Teutonic Mythology, his Reynard the Fox, and the collection of German
Popular Tales, which he and his brother William published, have thrown
a flood of light on the early history of all the branches of our race,
and have raised what had come to be looked on as mere nursery fictions
and old wives’ fables—to a study fit for the energies of grown men, and
to all the dignity of a science.

In these pages, where we have to run over a vast tract of space, the
reader who wishes to learn and not to cavil—and for such alone this
introduction is intended—must be content with results rather than
processes and steps. To use a homely likeness, he must be satisfied
with the soup that is set before him, and not desire to see the bones
of the ox out of which it has been boiled. When we say, therefore, that
in these latter days the philology and mythology of the East and West
have met and kissed each other; that they now go hand and hand; that
they lend one another mutual support; that one cannot be understood
without the other,—we look to be believed. We do not expect to be put
to the proof, how the labours of Grimm and his disciples on this side
were first rendered possible by the linguistic discoveries of Anquetil
du Perron and others in India and France, at the end of the last
century; then materially assisted and furthered by the researches of
Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and others, in India and England during
the early part of this century, and finally have become identical with
those of Wilson, Bopp, Lassen, and Max Müller, at the present day. The
affinity which exists in a mythological and philological point of view
between the Aryan or Indo-European languages on the one hand, and the
Sanscrit on the other, is now the first article of a literary creed,
and the man who denies it puts himself as much beyond the pale of
argument as he who, in a religious discussion, should meet a grave
divine of the Church of England with the strict contradictory of her
first article, and loudly declare his conviction, that there was no
God. In a general way, then, we may be permitted to dogmatize, and to
lay it down as a law which is always in force, that the first authentic
history of a nation is the history of its tongue. We can form no notion
of the literature of a country apart from its language, and the
consideration of its language necessarily involves the consideration of
its history. Here is England, for instance, with a language, and
therefore a literature, composed of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Norse, and
Romance elements. Is not this simple fact suggestive of, nay, does it
not challenge us to, an inquiry into the origin and history of the
races who have passed over our island, and left their mark not only on
the soil, but on our speech? Again, to take a wider view, and to rise
from archaeology to science, what problem has interested the world in a
greater degree than the origin of man, and what toil has not been spent
in tracing all races back to their common stock? The science of
comparative philology—the inquiry, not into one isolated language—for
nowadays it may fairly be said of a man who knows only one language
that he knows none—but into all the languages of one family, and thus
to reduce them to one common centre, from which they spread like the
rays of the sun—if it has not solved, is in a fair way of solving, this
problem. When we have done for the various members of each family what
has been done of late years for the Indo-European tongues, its solution
will be complete. In such an inquiry the history of a race is, in fact,
the history of its language, and can be nothing else; for we have to
deal with times antecedent to all history, properly so called, and the
stream which in later ages may be divided into many branches, now flows
in a single channel.

From the East, then, came our ancestors, in days of immemorial
antiquity, in that gray dawn of time of which all early songs and lays
can tell, but of which it is as impossible as it is useless to attempt
to fix the date. Impossible, because no means exist for ascertaining
it; useless, because it is in reality a matter of utter indifference,
when, as this tell-tale crust of earth informs us, we have an infinity
of ages and periods to fall back on whether this great movement, this
mighty lust to change their seats, seized on the Aryan race one hundred
or one thousand years sooner or later.[1] But from the East we came,
and from that central plain of Asia, now commonly called Iran. Iran,
the habitation of the tillers and _earers_[2] of the earth, as opposed
to Turan, the abode of restless horse-riding nomads; of Turks, in
short, for in their name the root survives, and still distinguishes the
great Turanian or Mongolian family, from the Aryan, Iranian, or
Indo-European race. It is scarce worth while to inquire—even if inquiry
could lead to any result—what cause set them in motion from their
ancient seats. Whether impelled by famine or internal strife, starved
out like other nationalities in recent times, or led on by adventurous
chiefs, whose spirit chafed at the narrowness of home, certain it is
that they left that home and began a wandering westwards, which only
ceased when it reached the Atlantic and the Northern Ocean. Nor was the
fate of those they left behind less strange. At some period almost as
remote as, but after, that at which the wanderers for Europe started,
the remaining portion of the stock, or a considerable offshoot from it,
turned their faces east, and passing the Indian Caucasus, poured
through the defiles of Affghanistan, crossed the plain of the Five
Rivers, and descended on the fruitful plains of India. The different
destiny of these stocks has been wonderful indeed. Of those who went
west, we have only to enumerate the names under which they appear in
history—Celts, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Slavonians—to see and to know
at once that the stream of this migration has borne on its waves all
that has become most precious to man. To use the words of Max Müller:
“They have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and
have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active life
with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and
morals, and we learn from their literature and works of art the
elements of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy.
In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Mongolian
races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, and it
seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by
the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion.” We may add, that
though by nature tough and enduring, they have not been obstinate and
self-willed; they have been distinguished from all other nations, and
particularly from their elder brothers whom they left behind, by their
common sense, by their power of adapting themselves to all
circumstances, and by making the best of their position; above all,
they have been teachable, ready to receive impressions from without,
and, when received, to develop them. To show the truth of this, we need
only observe, that they adopted Christianity from another race, the
most obstinate and stiff-necked the world has ever seen, who, trained
under the Old Dispensation to preserve the worship of the one true God,
were too proud to accept the further revelation of God under the New,
and, rejecting their birth-right, suffered their inheritance to pass
into other hands.

Such, then, has been the lot of the Western branch, of the younger
brother, who, like the younger brother whom we shall meet so often in
these Popular Tales, went out into the world, with nothing but his good
heart and God’s blessing to guide him; and now has come to all honour
and fortune, and to be a king, ruling over the world. He went out and
_did_. Let us see now what became of the elder brother, who stayed at
home some time after his brother went out, and then only made a short
journey. Having driven out the few aboriginal inhabitants of India with
little effort, and following the course of the great rivers, the
Eastern Aryans gradually established themselves all over the peninsula;
and then, in calm possession of a world of their own, undisturbed by
conquest from without, and accepting with apathy any change of dynasty
among their rulers, ignorant of the past and careless of the future,
they sat down once for all and _thought_ —thought not of what they had
to do here, that stern lesson of every-day life which neither men nor
nations can escape if they are to live with their fellows, but how they
could abstract themselves entirely from their present existence, and
immerse themselves wholly in dreamy speculations on the future.
Whatever they may have been during their short migration and subsequent
settlement, it is certain that they appear in the Vedas—perhaps the
earliest collection which the world possesses—as a nation of
philosophers. Well may Professor Müller compare the Indian mind to a
plant reared in a hot-house, gorgeous in colour, rich in perfume,
precocious and abundant in fruit; it may be all this, “but will never
be like the oak, growing in wind and weather, striking its roots into
real earth, and stretching its branches into real air, beneath the
stars and sun of Heaven”; and well does he also remark, that a people
of this peculiar stamp was never destined to act a prominent part in
the history of the world; nay, the exhausting atmosphere of
transcendental ideas could not but exercise a detrimental influence on
the active and moral character of the Hindoos.[3]

In this passive, abstract, unprogressive state, they have remained ever
since. Stiffened into castes, and tongue-tied and hand-tied by absurd
rites and ceremonies, they were heard of in dim legends by Herodotus;
they were seen by Alexander when that bold spirit pushed his phalanx
beyond the limits of the known world; they trafficked with imperial
Rome, and the later empire; they were again almost lost sight of, and
became fabulous in the Middle Age; they were rediscovered by the
Portuguese; they have been alternately peaceful subjects and desperate
rebels to us English; but they have been still the same immovable and
unprogressive philosophers, though akin to Europe all the while; and
though the Highlander, who drives his bayonet through the heart of a
high-caste Sepoy mutineer, little knows that his pale features and
sandy hair, and that dusk face with its raven locks, both come from a
common ancestor away in Central Asia, many, many centuries ago.

But here arises the question, what interest can we, the descendants of
the practical brother, heirs to so much historical renown, possibly
take in the records of a race so historically characterless, and so
sunk in reveries and mysticism? The answer is easy. Those records are
written in a language closely allied to the primaeval common tongue of
those two branches before they parted, and descending from a period
anterior to their separation. It may, or it may not, be the very tongue
itself, but it certainly is not further removed than a few steps. The
speech of the emigrants to the west rapidly changed with the changing
circumstances and various fortune of each of its waves, and in their
intercourse with the aboriginal population they often adopted foreign
elements into their language. One of these waves, it is probable,
passing by way of Persia and Asia Minor, crossed the Hellespont, and
following the coast, threw off a mighty rill, known in after times as
Greeks; while the main stream, striking through Macedonia, either
crossed the Adriatic, or, still hugging the coast, came down on Italy,
to be known as Latins. Another, passing between the Caspian and the
Black Sea, filled the steppes round the Crimea, and; passing on over
the Balkan and the Carpathians towards the west, became that great
Teutonic nationality which, under various names, but all closely akin,
filled, when we first hear of them in historical times, the space
between the Black Sea and the Baltic, and was then slowly but surely
driving before them the great wave of the Celts which had preceded them
in their wandering, and which had probably followed the same line of
march as the ancestors of the Greeks and Latins. A movement which
lasted until all that was left of Celtic nationality was either
absorbed by the intruders, or forced aside and driven to take refuge in
mountain fastnesses and outlying islands. Besides all these, there was
still another wave, which is supposed to have passed between the Sea of
Aral and the Caspian, and, keeping still further to the north and east,
to have passed between its kindred Teutons and the Mongolian tribes,
and so to have lain in the background until we find them appearing as
Slavonians on the scene of history. Into so many great stocks did the
Western Aryans pass, each possessing strongly-marked nationalities and
languages, and these seemingly so distinct that each often asserted
that the other spoke a barbarous tongue. But, for all that, each of
those tongues bears about with it still, and in earlier times no doubt
bore still more plainly about with it, infallible evidence of common
origin, so that each dialect can be traced up to that primaeval form of
speech still in the main preserved in the Sanscrit by the Southern
Aryan branch, who, careless of practical life, and immersed in
speculation, have clung to their ancient traditions and tongue with
wonderful tenacity. It is this which has given such value to Sanscrit,
a tongue of which it may be said, that if it had perished the sun would
never have risen on the science of comparative philology. Before the
discoveries in Sanscrit of Sir William Jones, Wilkins, Wilson, and
others, the world had striven to find the common ancestor of European
languages, sometimes in the classical, and sometimes in the Semitic
tongues. In the one case the result was a tyranny of Greek and Latin
over the non-classical tongues, and in the other the most uncritical
and unphilosophical waste of learning. No doubt some striking analogies
exist between the Indo-European family and the Semitic stock, just as
there are remarkable analogies between the Mongolian and Indo-European
families; but the ravings of Vallancy, in his effort to connect the
Erse with Phoenician, are an awful warning of what unscientific
inquiry, based upon casual analogy, may bring itself to believe, and
even to fancy it has proved.

These general observations, then, and this rapid bird’s eye view, may
suffice to show the common affinity which exists between the Eastern
and Western Aryans; between the Hindoo on the one hand, and the nations
of Western Europe on the other. That is the fact to keep steadily
before our eyes. We all came, Greek, Latin, Celt, Teuton, Slavonian,
from the East, as kith and kin, leaving kith and kin behind us; and
after thousands of years the language and traditions of those who went
East, and those who went West, bear such an affinity to each other, as
to have established, beyond discussion or dispute, the fact of their
descent from a common stock.




DIFFUSION


This general affinity established, we proceed to narrow our subject to
its proper limits, and to confine it to the consideration, _first_, of
Popular Tales in general, and _secondly_, of those Norse Tales in
particular, which form the bulk of this volume.

In the first place, then, the fact which we remarked on setting out,
that the groundwork or plot of many of these tales is common to all the
nations of Europe, is more important, and of greater scientific
interest, than might at first appear. They form, in fact, another link
in the chain of evidence of a common origin between the East and West,
and even the obstinate adherents of the old classical theory, according
to which all resemblances were set down to sheer copying from Greek or
Latin patterns, are now forced to confess, not only that there was no
such wholesale copying at all, but that, in many cases, the despised
vernacular tongues have preserved the common traditions far more
faithfully than the writers of Greece and Rome. The sooner, in short,
that this theory of copying, which some, even besides the classicists,
have maintained, is abandoned, the better, not only for the truth, but
for the literary reputation of those who put it forth. No one can, of
course, imagine that during that long succession of ages when this
mighty wedge of Aryan migration was driving its way through that
prehistoric race, that nameless nationality, the traces of which we
everywhere find underlying the intruders in their monuments and
implements of bone and stone—a race akin, in all probability, to the
Mongolian family, and whose miserable remnants we see pushed aside, and
huddled up in the holes and corners of Europe, as Lapps, and Finns, and
Basques—No one, we say, can suppose for a moment, that in that long
process of contact and absorption, some traditions of either race
should not have been caught up and adopted by the other. We know it to
be a fact with regard to their language, from the evidence of
philology, which cannot lie; and the witness borne by such a word as
the Gothic Atta for _father_, where a Mongolian has been adopted in
preference to an Aryan word, is irresistible on this point; but that,
apart from such natural assimilation, all the thousand shades of
resemblance and affinity which gleam and flicker through the whole body
of popular tradition in the Aryan race, as the Aurora plays and flashes
in countless rays athwart the Northern heaven, should be the result of
mere servile copying of one tribe’s traditions by another, is a
supposition as absurd as that of those good country-folk, who, when
they see an Aurora, fancy it must be a great fire, the work of some
incendiary, and send off the parish engine to put it out. No! when we
find in such a story as the Master-thief traits, which are to be found
in the Sanscrit _Hitopadesa_,[4] and which reminds us at once of the
story of Rhampsinitus in Herodotus; which are also to be found in
German, Italian, and Flemish popular tales, but told in all with such
variations of character and detail, and such adaptations to time and
place, as evidently show the original working of the national
consciousness upon a stock of tradition common to all the race, but
belonging to no tribe of that race in particular; and when we find this
occurring not in one tale but in twenty, we are forced to abandon the
theory of such universal copying, for fear lest we should fall into a
greater difficulty than that for which we were striving to account.

To set this question in a plainer light, let us take a well-known
instance; let us take the story of William Tell and his daring shot,
which is said to have been made in the year 1307. It is just possible
that the feat might be historical, and, no doubt, thousands believe it
for the sake of the Swiss patriot, as firmly as they believe in
anything; but, unfortunately, this story of the bold archer who saves
his life by shooting an apple from the head of his child at the command
of a tyrant, is common to the whole Aryan race. It appears in Saxo
Grammaticus, who flourished in the twelfth century, where it is told of
Palnatoki, King Harold Gormson’s thane and assassin. In the thirteenth
century the _Wilkina Saga_ relates it of Egill, Völundr’s—our Wayland
Smith’s—younger brother. So also in the Norse Saga of _Saint Olof_,
king and martyr; the king, who died in 1030, eager for the conversion
of one of his heathen chiefs Eindridi, competes with him in various
athletic exercises, first in swimming and then in archery. After
several famous shots on either side, the king challenges Eindridi to
shoot a tablet off his son’s head without hurting the child. Eindridi
is ready, but declares he will revenge himself if the child is hurt.
The king has the first shot, and his arrow strikes close to the tablet.
Then Eindridi is to shoot, but at the prayers of his mother and sister,
refuses the shot, and has to yield and be converted.[5] So, also, King
Harold Sigurdarson, who died 1066, backed himself against a famous
marksman, Hemingr, and ordered him to shoot a hazel nut off the head of
his brother Björn, and Hemingr performed the feat.[6] In the middle of
the fourteenth century, the _Malleus Maleficarum_ refers it to Puncher,
a magician of the Upper Rhine. Here in England, we have it in the old
English ballad of _Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough_, and _William of
Cloudesly_, where William performs the feat.[7] It is not at all of
Tell in Switzerland before the year 1499, and the earlier Swiss
chronicles omit it altogether. It is common to the Turks and
Mongolians; and a legend of the wild Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell
or saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of
their famous marksmen. What shall we say then, but that the story of
this bold master-shot was primaeval amongst many tribes and races, and
that it only crystallized itself round the great name of Tell by that
process of attraction which invariably leads a grateful people to throw
such mythic wreaths, such garlands of bold deeds of precious memory,
round the brow of its darling champion.[8]

Nor let any pious Welshman be shocked if we venture to assert that
Gellert, that famous hound upon whose last resting-place the traveller
comes as he passes down the lovely vale of Gwynant, is a mythical dog,
and never snuffed the fresh breeze in the forest of Snowdon, nor saved
his master’s child from ravening wolf. This, too, is a primaeval story,
told with many variations. Sometimes the foe is a wolf, sometimes a
bear, sometimes a snake. Sometimes the faithful guardian of the child
is an otter, a weasel, or a dog. It, too, came from the East. It is
found in the _Pantcha-Tantra_, in the _Hitopadesa_, in Bidpai’s
_Fables_, in the Arabic original of _The Seven Wise Masters_, that
famous collection of stories which illustrate a stepdame’s calumny and
hate, and in many mediaeval versions of those originals.[9] Thence it
passed into the Latin _Gesta Romanorum_, where, as well as in the Old
English version published by Sir Frederick Madden, it may be read as a
service rendered by a faithful hound against a snake. This, too, like
Tell’s master-shot, is as the lightning which shineth over the whole
heaven at once, and can be claimed by no one tribe of the Aryan race,
to the exclusion of the rest. “The Dog of Montargis” is in like manner
mythic, though perhaps not so widely spread. It first occurs in France,
as told of Sybilla, a fabulous wife of Charlemagne; but it is at any
rate as old as the time of Plutarch, who relates it as an anecdote of
brute sagacity in the days of Pyrrhus.

There can be no doubt, with regard to the question of the origin of
these tales, that they were common in germ at least to the Aryan tribes
before their migration. We find those germs developed in the popular
traditions of the Eastern Aryans, and we find them developed in a
hundred forms and shapes in every one of the nations into which the
Western Aryans have shaped themselves in the course of ages. We are
led, therefore, irresistibly to the conclusion, that these traditions
are as much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors, as
their language unquestionably is; and that they form, along with that
language, a double chain of evidence, which proves their Eastern
origin. If we are to seek for a simile, or an analogy, as to the
relative positions of these tales and traditions, and to the mutual
resemblances which exist between them as the several branches of our
race have developed them from the common stock, we may find it in one
which will come home to every reader as he looks round the domestic
hearth, if he should be so happy as to have one. They are like as
sisters of one house are like. They have what would be called a strong
family likeness; but besides this likeness, which they owe to father or
mother, as the case may be, they have each their peculiarities of form,
and eye, and face, and still more, their differences of intellect and
mind. This may be dark, that fair; this may have gray eyes, that black;
this may be open and graceful, that reserved and close; this you may
love, that you can take no interest in. One may be bashful, another
winning, a third worth knowing and yet hard to know. They are so like
and so unlike. At first it may be, as an old English writer beautifully
expresses it, “their father hath writ them as his own little story”,
but as they grow up they throw off the copy, educate themselves for
good or ill, and finally assume new forms of feeling and feature under
an original development of their own.

Or shall we take another likeness, and say they are national dreams;
that they are like the sleeping thoughts of many men upon one and the
same thing. Suppose a hundred men to have been eye-witnesses of some
event on the same day, and then to have slept and dreamt of it; we
should have as many distinct representations of that event, all turning
upon it and bound up with it in some way, but each preserving the
personality of the sleeper, and working up the common stuff in a higher
or lower degree, just as the fancy and the intellect of the sleeper was
at a higher or lower level of perfection. There is, indeed, greater
truth in this likeness than may at first sight appear. In the popular
tale, properly so called, the national mind dreams all its history over
again; in its half conscious state it takes this trait and that trait,
this feature and that feature, of times and ages long past. It snatches
up bits of its old beliefs, and fears, and griefs, and glory, and
pieces them together with something that happened yesterday, and then
holds up the distorted reflection in all its inconsequence, just as it
has passed before that magic glass, as though it were genuine history,
and matter for pure belief. And here it may be as well to say, that
besides that old classical foe of vernacular tradition, there is
another hardly less dangerous, which returns to the charge of copying,
but changes what lawyers call the _venue_ of the trial from classical
to Eastern lands. According to this theory, which came up when its
classical predecessor was no longer tenable, the traditions and tales
of Western Europe came from the East, but they were still all copies.
They were supposed to have proceeded entirely from two sources; one the
_Directorium Humanae Vitae_ of John of Capua, translated between
1262-78 from a Hebrew version, which again came from an Arabic version
of the 8th century, which came from a Pehlvi version made by one
Barzouyeh, at the command of Chosrou Noushirvan, King of Persia, in the
6th century, which again came from the _Pantcha Tantra_, a Sanscrit
original of unknown antiquity. This is that famous book of _Calila and
Dimna_, as the Persian version is called, attributed to Bidpai, and
which was thus run to earth in India. The second source of Western
tradition was held to be that still more famous collection of stories
commonly known by the name of the “Story of the Seven Sages,” but
which, under many names—Kaiser Octavianus, Diocletianus, Dolopathos,
Erastus, etc.—plays a most important part in mediaeval romance. This,
too, by a similar process, has been traced to India, appearing first in
Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth century in the Latin
_Historia Septem Sapientum Romae_, by Dame Jehans, monk in the Abbey of
Haute Selve. Here, too, we have a Hebrew, an Arabic, and a Persian
version; which last came avowedly from a Sanscrit original, though that
original has not yet been discovered. From these two sources of fable
and tradition, according to the new copying theory, our Western fables
and tales had come by direct translation from the East. Now it will be
at once evident that this theory hangs on what may be called a single
thread. Let us say, then, that all that can be found in _Calila and
Dimna_, or the later Persian version, made A.D. 1494, of Hossein Vaez,
called the _Anvari Sohaïli_, “the Canopic Lights”—from which, when
published in Paris by David Sahid of Ispahan, in the year 1644, La
Fontaine drew the substance of many of his best fables.—Let us say,
too, that all can be found in the _Life of the Seven Sages_, or the
Book of Sendabad as it was called in Persia, after an apocryphal Indian
sage—came by translation—that is to say, through the cells of Brahmins,
Magians, and monks, and the labours of the learned—into the popular
literature of the West. Let us give up all that, and then see where we
stand. What are we to say of the many tales and fables which are to be
found in neither of those famous collections, and not tales alone, but
traits and features of old tradition, broken bits of fable, roots and
germs of mighty growths of song and story, nay, even the very words,
which exist in Western popular literature, and which modern philology
has found obstinately sticking in Sanscrit, and of which fresh proofs
and instances are discovered every day? What are we to say of such a
remarkable resemblance as this?

The noble King Putraka fled into the Vindhya mountains in order to live
apart from his unkind kinsfolk; and as he wandered about there he met
two men who wrestled and fought with one another. “Who are you?” he
asked. “We are the sons of Mayâsara, and here lie our riches; this
bowl, this staff, and these shoes; these are what we are fighting for,
and whichever is stronger is to have them for his own.”

So when Putraka had heard that, he asked them with a laugh: “Why,
what’s the good of owning these things?” Then they answered “Whoever
puts on these shoes gets the power to fly; whatever is pointed at with
this staff rises up at once; and whatever food one wishes for in this
bowl, it comes at once.” So when Putraka had heard that he said “Why
fight about it? Let this be the prize; whoever beats the other in a
race, let him have them all”.

“So be it”, said the two fools, and set off running, but Putraka put on
the shoes at once, and flew away with the staff and bowl up into the
clouds”.

Well, this is a story neither in the _Pantcha Tantra_ nor the
_Hitopadesa_, the Sanscrit originals of _Calila and Dimna_. It is not
in the _Directorium Humanae Vitae_, and has not passed west by that
way. Nor is it in the _Book of Sendabad_, and thence come west in the
_History of the Seven Sages_. Both these paths are stopped. It comes
from the _Katha Sarit Sagara_, the “Sea of Streams of Story” of
Somadeva Bhatta of Cashmere, who, in the middle of the twelfth century
of our era, worked up the tales found in an earlier collection, called
the _Vrihat Katha_, “the lengthened story”, in order to amuse his
mistress, the Queen of Cashmere. Somadeva’s collection has only been
recently known and translated. But west the story certainly came long
before, and in the extreme north-west we still find it in these Norse
Tales in “The Three Princesses of Whiteland”, No. xxvi.

“Well!” said the man, “as this is so, I’ll give you a bit of advice.
Hereabouts, on a moor, stand three brothers, and there they have stood
these hundred years, fighting about a hat, a cloak, and a pair of
boots. If any one has these three things, he can make himself
invisible, and wish himself anywhere he pleases. You can tell them you
wish to try the things, and after that, you’ll pass judgment between
them, whose they shall be”.

Yes! the king thanked the man, and went and did as he told him.

“What’s all this?” he said to the brothers. “Why do you stand here
fighting for ever and a day? Just let me try these things, and I’ll
give judgment whose they shall be.”

They were very willing to do this; but as soon as he had got the hat;
cloak, and boots, he said: “When we meet next time I’ll tell you my
judgment”; and with these words he wished himself away.[10]

Nor in the Norse tales alone. Other collections shew how thoroughly at
home this story was in the East. In the Relations of _Ssidi Kur_, a
Tartar tale, a Chan’s son first gets possession of a cloak which two
children stand and fight for, which has the gift of making the wearer
invisible, and afterwards of a pair of boots, with which one can wish
one’s self to whatever place one chooses. Again, in a Wallachian tale,
we read of three devils who fight for their inheritance—a club which
turns everything to stone, a hat which makes the wearer invisible, and
a cloak by help of which one can wish one’s self whithersoever one
pleases. Again, in a Mongolian tale, the Chan’s son comes upon a group
of children who fight for a hood which makes the wearer invisible; he
is to be judge between them, makes them run a race for it, but
meanwhile puts it on and vanishes from their sight. A little further on
he meets another group, who are quarrelling for a pair of boots, the
wearer of which can wish himself whithersoever he pleases, and gains
possession of them in the same way.

Nor in one Norse tale alone, but in many, we find traces of these three
wonderful things, or of things like them. They are very like the cloth,
the ram, and the stick, which the lad got from the North Wind instead
of his meal. Very like, too, the cloth, the scissors, and the tap,
which will be found in No. xxxvi, “The Best Wish”. If we drop the
number three, we find the Boots again in “Soria Moria Castle”, No. lvi.
[Moe, Introd., xxxii-iii] Leaving the Norse Tales, we see at once that
they are the seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer. In the
_Nibelungen Lied_, when Siegfried finds Schilbung and Niblung, the
wierd heirs of the famous “Hoard”, striving for the possession of that
heap of red gold and gleaming stones; when they beg him to share it for
them, promising him, as his meed, Balmung, best of swords; when he
shares it, when they are discontent, and when in the struggle which
ensues he gets possession of the “Tarnhut”, the “cloak of darkness”,
which gave its wearer the strength of twelve men, and enabled him to go
where he would be unseen, and which was the great prize among the
treasures of the dwarfs;[11] who is there that does not see the broken
fragments of that old Eastern story of the heirs struggling for their
inheritance, and calling in the aid of some one of better wit or
strength who ends by making the very prize for which they fight his
own?

And now to return for a moment to _Calila and Dimna_ and _The Seven
Sages_. Since we have seen that there are other stories, and many of
them, for this is by no means the only resemblance to be found in
_Somadeva’s_ book[12] which are common to the Eastern and Western
Aryans, but which did not travel to Europe by translation; let us go on
to say that it is by no means certain, even when some Western story or
fable is found in these Sanscrit originals and their translations, that
that was the only way by which they came to Europe. A single question
will prove this. How did the fables and apologues which are found in
Æsop, and which are also found in the _Pantcha Tantya_ and the
_Hitopadesa_ come West? That they came from the East is certain; but by
what way, certainly not by translations or copying, for they had
travelled west long before translations were thought of. How was it
that Themistius, a Greek orator of the fourth century[13] had heard of
that fable of the lion, fox, and bull, which is in substance the same
as that of the lion, the bull, and the two jackals in the _Pantcha
Tantya_ and the _Hitopadesa_? How, but along the path of that primaeval
Aryan migration, and by that deep-ground tone of tradition by which man
speaks to man, nation to nation, and age to age; along which
comparative philology has, in these last days, travelled back thither,
listened to the accents spoken, and so found in the East the cradle of
a common language and common belief.

And now, having, as we hope, finally established this Indian affinity,
and disposed of mere Indian copying, let us lift our eyes and see if
something more is not to be discerned on the wide horizon now open on
our view. The most interesting problem for man to solve is the origin
of his race. Of late years comparative philology, having accomplished
her task in proving the affinity of language between Europe and the
East, and so taken a mighty step towards fixing the first seat of the
greatest—greatest in wit and wisdom, if not in actual numbers—portion
of the human race, has pursued her inquiries into the languages of the
Turanian, the Semitic, and the Chamitic or African races, with more or
less successful results. In a few more years, when the African
languages are better known, and the roots of Egyptian and Chinese words
are more accurately detected, Science will be better able to speak as
to the common affinity of all the tribes that throng the earth. In the
meantime, let the testimony of tradition and popular tales be heard,
which in this case have outstripped comparative philology, and lead
instead of following her. It is beyond the scope of this essay, which
aims at being popular and readable rather than learned and lengthy, to
go over a prolonged scientific investigation step by step. We repeat
it. The reader must have faith in the writer, and believe the words now
written are the results of an inquiry, and not ask for the inquiry
itself. In all mythologies and traditions, then, there are what may be
called natural resemblances, parallelisms suggested to the senses of
each race by natural objects and every-day events, and these might
spring up spontaneously all over the earth as home growths, neither
derived by imitation from other tribes, nor from seeds of common
tradition shed from a common stock. Such resemblances have been well
compared by William Grimm,[14] to those words which are found in all
languages derived from the imitation of natural sounds, or, we may add,
from the first lisping accents of infancy. But the case is very
different when this or that object which strikes the senses is
accounted for in a way so extraordinary and peculiar, as to stamp the
tradition with a character of its own. Then arises a like impression on
the mind, if we find the same tradition in two tribes at the opposite
ends of the earth, as is produced by meeting twin brothers, one in
Africa and the other in Asia; we say at once “I know you are so and
so’s brother, you are so like him”. Take an instance: In these Norse
Tales, No. xxiii, we are told how it was the bear came to have a stumpy
tail, and in an African tale,[15] we find how it was the hyaena became
tailless and earless. Now, the tailless condition both of the bear and
the hyaena could scarcely fail to attract attention in a race of
hunters, and we might expect that popular tradition would attempt to
account for both, but how are we to explain the fact, that both
Norseman and African account for it in the same way—that both owe their
loss to the superior cunning of another animal. In Europe the fox bears
away the palm for wit from all other animals, so he it is that
persuades the bear in the Norse Tales to sit with his tail in a hole in
the ice till it is fast frozen in, and snaps short off when he tries to
tug it out. In Bornou, in the heart of Africa, it is the weasel who is
the wisest of beasts, and who, having got some meat in common with the
hyaena, put it into a hole, and said:

“Behold two men came out of the forest, took the meat, and put it into
a hole: stop, I will go into the hole, and then thou mayst stretch out
thy tail to me, and I will tie the meat to thy tail for thee to draw it
out”. So the weasel went into the hole, the hyaena stretched its tail
out to it, but the weasel took the hyaena’s tail, fastened a stick, and
tied the hyaena’s tail to the stick, and then said to the hyaena “I
have tied the meat to thy tail; draw, and pull it out”. The hyaena was
a fool, it did not know the weasel surpassed it in subtlety; it thought
the meat was tied; but when it tried to draw out its tail, it was fast.
When the weasel said again to it “Pull”, it pulled, but could not draw
it out; so it became vexed, and on pulling with force, its tail broke.
The tail being torn out, the weasel was no more seen by the hyaena: the
weasel was hidden in the hole with its meat, and the hyaena saw it
not.[16]

Here we have a fact in natural history accounted for, but accounted for
in such a peculiar way as shows that the races among which they are
current must have derived them from some common tradition. The mode by
which the tail is lost is different indeed; but the manner in which the
common ground-work is suited in one case to the cold of the North, and
the way in which fish are commonly caught at holes in the ice as they
rise to breathe; and in the other to Africa and her pitfalls for wild
beasts, is only another proof of the oldness of the tradition, and that
it is not merely a copy.

Take another instance. Every one knows the story in the Arabian Nights,
where the man who knows the speech of beasts laughs at something said
by an ox to an ass. His wife wants to know why he laughs, and persists,
though he tells her it will cost him his life if he tells her. As he
doubts what to do, he hears the cock say to the house-dog “Our master
is not wise; I have fifty hens who obey me; if he followed my advice,
he’d just take a good stick, shut up his wife in a room with him, and
give her a good cudgelling.” The same story is told in Straparola[17]
with so many variations as to show it is no copy; it is also told in a
Servian popular tale, with variations of its own; and now here we find
it in Bornou, as told by Kölle.

There was a servant of God who had one wife and one horse; but his wife
was one-eyed, and they lived in their house. Now this servant of God
understood the language of the beasts of the forest when they spoke,
and of the birds of the air when they talked as they flew by. This
servant of God also understood the cry of the hyaena when it arose at
night in the forest, and came to the houses and cried near them; so,
likewise, when his horse was hungry and neighed, he understood why it
neighed, rose up, brought the horse grass, and then returned and sat
down. It happened one day that birds had their talk as they were flying
by above and the servant of God understood what they talked. This
caused him to laugh, whereupon his wife said to him “What dost thou
hear that thou laughest?” He replied to his wife “I shall not tell thee
what I hear, and why I laugh”. The woman said to her husband “I know
why thou laughest; thou laughest at me because I am one-eyed”. The man
then said to his wife “I saw that thou wast one-eyed before I loved
thee, and before we married and sat down in our house”. When the woman
heard her husband’s word she was quiet.

But once at night, as they were lying on their bed, and it was past
midnight, it happened that a rat played with his wife on the top of the
house and that both fell to the ground. Then the wife of the rat said
to her husband “Thy sport is bad; thou saidst to me that thou wouldst
play, but when we came together we fell to the ground, so that I broke
my back”.

When the servant of God heard the talk of the rat’s wife, as he was
lying on his bed, he laughed. Now, as soon as he laughed his wife
arose, seized him, and said to him as she held him fast: “Now this time
I will not let thee go out of this house except thou tell me what thou
hearest and why thou laughest”. The man begged the woman, saying “Let
me go”; but the woman would not listen to her husband’s entreaty.

The husband then tells his wife that he knows the language of beasts
and birds, and she is content; but when he wakes in the morning he
finds he has lost his wonderful gift; and the moral of the tale is
added most ungallantly: “If a man shews and tells his thoughts to a
woman, God will punish him for it”. Though, perhaps, it is better, for
the sake of the gentler sex, that the tale should be pointed with this
unfair moral, than that the African story should proceed like all the
other variations, and save the husband’s gift at the cost of the wife’s
skin.

Take other African instances. How is it that the wandering Bechuanas
got their story of “The Two Brothers”, the ground-work of which is the
same as “The Machandelboom” and the “Milk-white Doo”, and where the
incidents and even the words are almost the same? How is it that in
some of its traits that Bechuana story embodies those of that earliest
of all popular tales, recently published from an Egyptian Papyrus,
coeval with the abode of the Israelites in Egypt? and how is it that
that same Egyptian tale has other traits which reminds us of the Dun
Bull in “Katie Woodencloak”, as well as incidents which are the germ of
stories long since reduced to writing in Norse Sagas of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries?[18] How is it that we still find among the
Negroes in the West Indies[19] a rich store of popular tales, and the
Beast Epic in full bloom, brought with them from Africa to the islands
of the West; and among those tales and traditions, how is it that we
find a “Wishing Tree”, the counter-part of that in a German popular
tale, and “a little dirty scrub of a child”, whom his sisters despise,
but who is own brother to Boots in the Norse Tales, and like him
outwits the Troll, spoils his substance, and saves his sisters? How is
it that we find the good woman who washes the loathsome head rewarded,
while the bad man who refuses to do that dirty work is punished for his
pride; the very groundwork, nay the very words, that we meet in
Bushy-bride, another Norse Tale? How is it that we find a Mongolian
tale, which came confessedly from India, made up of two of our Norse
tales, “Rich Peter the Pedlar” and “The Giant that had no heart in his
body”?[20] How should all these things be, and how could they possibly
be, except on that theory which day by day becomes more and more a
matter of fact; this, that the whole human race sprung from one stock,
planted in the East, which has stretched out its boughs and branches
laden with the fruit of language, and bright with the bloom of song and
story, by successive offshoots to the utmost parts of the earth.




NORSE MYTHOLOGY


And now, in the second place, for that particular branch of the Aryan
race, in which this peculiar development of the common tradition has
arisen, which we are to consider as “Norse Popular Tales”.

Whatever disputes may have existed as to the mythology of other
branches of the Teutonic subdivision of the Aryan race—whatever
discussions may have arisen as to the position of this or that divinity
among the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Goths—about the Norsemen
there can be no dispute or doubt. From a variety of circumstances, but
two before all the rest—the one their settlement in Iceland, which
preserved their language and its literary treasures incorrupt; the
other their late conversion to Christianity—their cosmogony and
mythology stands before us in full flower, and we have not, as
elsewhere, to pick up and piece together the wretched fragments of a
faith, the articles of which its own priests had forgotten to commit to
writing, and which those of another creed had dashed to pieces and
destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could reach. In the two Eddas,
therefore, in the early Sagas, in Saxo’s stilted Latin, which barely
conceals the popular songs and legends from which the historian drew
his materials, we are enabled to form a perfect conception of the creed
of the heathen Norsemen. We are enabled to trace, as has been traced by
the same hand in another place,[21] the natural and rational
development of that creed from a simple worship of nature and her
powers, first to monotheism, and then to a polytheistic system. The
tertiary system of Polytheism is the soil out of which the mythology of
the Eddas sprang, though through it each of the older formations crops
out in huge masses which admit of no mistake as to its origin. In the
Eddas the natural powers have been partly subdued, partly thrust on one
side, for a time, by Odin and the Aesir, by the Great Father and his
children, by One Supreme and twelve subordinate gods, who rule for an
appointed time, and over whom hangs an impending fate, which imparts a
charm of melancholy to this creed, which has clung to the race who once
believed in it long after the creed itself has vanished before the
light of Christianity. According to this creed, the Aesir and Odin had
their abode in Asgard, a lofty hill in the centre of the habitable
earth, in the midst of Midgard, that _middle earth_ which we hear of in
early English poetry, the abode of gods and men. Round that earth,
which was fenced in against the attacks of ancient and inveterate foes
by a natural fortification of hills, flowed the great sea in a ring,
and beyond that sea was Utgard, the outlying world, the abode of Frost
Giants, and Monsters, those old-natural powers who had been
dispossessed by Odin and the Aesir when the new order of the universe
arose, and between whom and the new gods a feud as inveterate as that
cherished by the Titans against Jupiter was necessarily kept alive. It
is true indeed that this feud was broken by intervals of truce during
which the Aesir and the Giants visit each other, and appear on more or
less friendly terms, but the true relation between them was war; pretty
much as the Norseman was at war with all the rest of the world. Nor was
this struggle between two rival races or powers confined to the gods in
Asgard alone. Just as their ancient foes were the Giants of Frost and
Snow, so between the race of men and the race of Trolls was there a
perpetual feud. As the gods were men magnified and exaggerated, so were
the Trolls diminished Frost Giants; far superior to man in strength and
stature, but inferior to man in wit and invention. Like the Frost
Giants, they inhabit the rough and rugged places of the earth, and,
historically speaking, in all probability represent the old aboriginal
races who retired into the mountainous fastnesses of the land, and
whose strength was exaggerated, because the intercourse between the
races was small. In almost every respect they stand in the same
relations to men as the Frost Giants stand to the Gods.

There is nothing, perhaps, more characteristic of a true, as compared
with a false religion, than the restlessness of the one when brought
face to face with the quiet dignity and majesty of the other. Under the
Christian dispensation, our blessed Lord, his awful sacrifice once
performed, “ascended up on high”, having “led captivity captive”, and
expects the hour that shall make his foes “his footstool”; but false
gods, Jupiter, Vishnu, Odin, Thor, must constantly keep themselves, as
it were, before the eyes of men, lest they should lose respect. Such
gods being invariably what the philosophers call _subjective_, that is
to say, having no existence except in the minds of those who believe in
them; having been created by man in his own image, with his own desires
and passions, stand in constant need of being recreated. They change as
the habits and temper of the race which adores them alter; they are
ever bound to do something fresh, lest man should forget them, and new
divinities usurp their place. Hence came endless avatars in Hindoo
mythology, reproducing all the dreamy monstrosities of that passive
Indian mind. Hence came Jove’s adventures, tinged with all the lust and
guile which the wickedness of the natural man planted on a hot-bed of
iniquity is capable of conceiving. Hence bloody Moloch, and the foul
abominations of Chemosh and Milcom. Hence, too, Odin’s countless
adventures, his journeys into all parts of the world, his constant
trials of wit and strength, with his ancient foes the Frost Giants, his
hair-breadth escapes. Hence Thor’s labours and toils, his passages
beyond the sea, girt with his strength-belt, wearing his iron gloves,
and grasping his hammer which split the skulls of so many of the
Giant’s kith and kin. In the Norse gods, then, we see the Norseman
himself, sublimed and elevated beyond man’s nature, but bearing about
with him all his bravery and endurance, all his dash and spirit of
adventure, all his fortitude and resolution to struggle against a
certainty of doom which, sooner or later, must overtake him on that
dread day, the “twilight of the gods”, when the wolf was to break
loose, when the great snake that lay coiled round the world should lash
himself into wrath, and the whole race of the Aesirs and their
antagonists were to perish in internecine strife.

Such were the gods in whom the Norseman believed—exaggerations of
himself, of all his good and all his bad qualities. Their might and
their adventures, their domestic quarrels and certain doom, were sung
in venerable lays, now collected in what we call the Elder, or Poetic
Edda; simple majestic songs, whose mellow accents go straight to the
heart through the ear, and whose simple severity never suffers us to
mistake their meaning. But, besides these gods, there were heroes of
the race whose fame and glory were in every man’s memory, and whose
mighty deeds were in every minstrel’s mouth. Helgi, Sigmund, Sinfjötli,
Sigurd, Signy, Brynhildr, Gudrun; champions and shield-maidens,
henchmen and corse-choosers, now dead and gone, who sat round Odin’s
board in Valhalla. Women whose beauty, woes, and sufferings were beyond
those of all women; men whose prowess had never found an equal. Between
these, love and hate; all that can foster passion or beget revenge. Ill
assorted marriages; the right man to the wrong woman, and the wrong man
to the right woman; envyings, jealousies, hatred, murders, all the
works of the natural man, combine together to form that marvellous
story which begins with a curse—the curse of ill-gotten gold—and ends
with a curse, a widow’s curse, which drags down all on whom it falls,
and even her own flesh and blood, to certain doom. Such was the theme
of the wondrous Volsung Tale, the far older, simpler and grander
original of that Nibelungen Need of the thirteenth century, a tale
which begins with the slaughter of Fafnir by Sigurd, and ends with
Hermanaric, “that fierce faith-breaker”, as the Anglo-Saxon minstrel
calls him, when he is describing, in rapid touches, the mythic glories
of the Teutonic race.

This was the story of the Volsungs. They traced themselves back, like
all heroes, to Odin, the great father of gods and men. From him sprung
Sigi, from him Rerir, from him Volsung, ripped from his mother’s womb
after a six years’ bearing, to become the Eponymus of that famous race.
In the centre of his hall grew an oak, the tall trunk of which passed
through the roof, and its boughs spread far and wide in upper air. Into
that hall, on a high feast day, when Signy, Volsung’s daughter, was to
be given away to Siggeir, King of Gothland, strode an old one-eyed
guest. His feet were bare, his hose were of knitted linen, he wore a
great striped cloak, and a broad flapping hat. In his hand he bore a
sword, which, at one stroke, he drove up to the hilt in the oak trunk.
“There”, said he, “let him of all this company bear this sword who is
man enough to pull it out. I give it him, and none shall say he ever
bore a better blade.” With these words he passed out of the hall, and
was seen no more. Many tried, for that sword was plainly a thing of
price, but none could stir it, till Sigmund, the best and bravest of
Volsung’s sons, tried his hand, and, lo! the weapon yielded itself at
once. This was that famous blade _Gram_, of which we shall hear again.
Sigmund bore it in battle against his brother-in-law, who quarrelled
with him about this very sword, when Volsung fell, and Sigmund and his
ten brothers were taken and bound. All perished but Sigmund, who was
saved by his sister Signy, and hidden in a wood till he could revenge
his father and brethren. Here with Sinfjötli, who was at once his son
and nephew, he ran as a werewolf through the forest, and wrought many
wild deeds. When Sinfjötli was of age to help him, they proceed to
vengeance, and burn the treacherous brother-in-law alive, with all his
followers. Sigmund then regains his father’s kingdom, and in extreme
old age dies in battle against the sons of King Hunding. Just as he was
about to turn the fight, a warrior of more than mortal might, a
one-eyed man in a blue cloak, with a flapping hat, rose up against him
spear in hand. At that outstretched spear Sigmund smites with his
trusty sword. It snaps in twain. Then he knows that his luck is gone;
he sees in his foe Odin the giver of the sword, sinks down on the gory
battle-field, and dies in the arms of Hjordis, his young wife, refusing
all leechcraft, and bowing his head to Odin’s will. By the fortune of
war, Hjordis, bearing a babe under her girdle, came into the hands of
King Hialprek of Denmark, there she bore a son to Sigmund, Sigurd, the
darling of Teutonic song and story. Regin, the king’s smith, was his
foster-father, and as the boy grew up the fairest and stoutest of all
the Volsungs, Regin, who was of the dwarf race, urged him day by day to
do a doughty deed, and slay Fafnir the Dragon. For Fafnir, Regin, and
Otter had been brothers, sons of Reidmar. In one of their many
wanderings, Odin, Loki, and Haenir came to a river and a forge. There,
on the bank under the forge, they saw an otter with a salmon in its
mouth, which it ate greedily with its eyes shut. Loki took a stone,
threw it, and killed the beast, and boasted how he had got both fish
and flesh at one throw. Then the Aesir passed on and came at night to
Reidmar’s house, asked a lodging, got it, and showed their spoil.
“Seize and bind them lads”, cried Reidmar; “for they have slain your
brother Otter”. So they were seized and bound by Regin and Fafnir, and
offered an atonement to buy off the feud, and Reidmar was to name the
sum. Then Otter was flayed, and the Aesir were to fill the skin with
red gold, and cover it without, that not a hair could be seen. To fetch
the gold Odin sent Loki down to the abodes of the Black Elves; there in
a stream he caught Andvari the Dwarf, and made him give up all the gold
which he had hoarded up in the stony rock. In vain the Dwarf begged and
prayed that he might keep one ring, for it was the source of all his
wealth, and ring after ring dropped from it. “No; not a penny should he
have” said Loki. Then the dwarf laid a curse on the ring, and said it
should be every man’s bane who owned it. “So much the better” said
Loki; and when he got back, Odin saw the ring how fair it was, and kept
it to himself, but gave the gold to Reidmar. So Reidmar filled the skin
with gold as full as he could, and set it up on end, and Odin poured
gold over it, and covered it up. But when Reidmar looked at it he saw
still one grey hair, and bade them cover that too, else the atonement
was at an end. Then Odin drew forth the ring and laid it over the grey
hair. So the Aesir was set free, but before they went, Loki repeated
the curse which Andvari had laid upon the ring and gold. It soon began
to work. First, Regin asked for some of the gold, but not a penny would
Reidmar give. So the two brothers laid their heads together and slew
their sire. Then Regin begged Fafnir to share the gold with him. But
“no”, Fafnir was stronger, and said he should keep it all himself, and
Regin had best be off, unless he wished to fare the same way as
Reidmar. So Regin had to fly, but Fafnir took a dragon’s shape; “and
there”, said Regin, “he lies on the ‘Glistening Heath’, coiled round
his store of gold and precious things, and that’s why I wish you to
kill him.” Sigurd, told Regin who was the best of smiths, to forge him
a sword. Two are made, but both snap asunder at the first stroke.
“Untrue are they like you and all your race” cries Sigurd. Then he went
to his mother and begged the broken bits of _Gram_, and out of them
Regin forged a new blade, that clove the anvil in the smithy, and cut a
lock of wool borne down upon it by a running stream. “Now, slay me
Fafnir”, said Regin; but Sigurd must first find out King Hunding’s
sons, and avenge his father Sigmund’s death. King Hialprek lends him
force; by Odin’s guidance he finds them out, routs their army, and
slays all those brothers. On his return, his foster-father still eggs
him on to slay the Dragon, and thus to shew that there was still a
Volsung left. So, armed with Gram, and mounted on Gran, his good steed,
whom Odin had taught him how to choose, Sigurd rode to the “Glistening
Heath”, dug a pit in the Dragon’s path, and slew him as he passed over
him down to drink at the river. Then Regin came up, and the old feeling
of vengeance for a brother’s blood grew strong, and as an atonement,
Sigurd was to roast Fafnir’s heart, and carry it to Regin, who swilled
his fill of the Dragon’s blood, and lay down to sleep. But as Sigurd
roasted the heart, and wondered if it would soon be done, he tried it
with his finger to see if it were soft. The hot roast burned his
finger, and he put it into his mouth, and tasted the life-blood of the
Dragon. Then in a moment he understood the song of birds, and heard how
the swallows over his head said one to the other, “There thou sittest,
Sigurd, roasting Fafnir’s heart. Eat it thyself and become the wisest
of men.” Then another said “There lies Regin, and means to cheat him
who trusts him.” Then a third said “Let Sigurd cut off his head then,
and so own all the gold himself.” Then Sigurd went to Regin and slew
him, and ate the heart, and rode on Gran to Fafnir’s lair, and took the
spoil and loaded his good steed with it, and rode away.

And now Sigurd was the most famous of men. All the songs and stories of
the North made him the darling of that age. They dwell on his soft
hair, which fell in great locks of golden brown, on his bushy beard of
auburn hue, his straight features, his ruddy cheeks, his broad brow,
his bright and piercing eye, of which few dared to meet the gaze, his
taper limbs and well knit joints, his broad shoulders, and towering
height. “So tall he was, that as he strode through the full-grown rye,
girt with Gram, the tip of the scabbard just touched the ears of corn.”
Ready of tongue too, and full of forethought. His great pleasure was to
help other men, and to do daring deeds; to spoil his foes, and give
largely to his friends. The bravest man alive, and one that never knew
fear. On and on he rode, till on a lone fell he saw a flickering flame,
and when he reached it, there it flamed and blazed all round a house.
No horse but Gran could ride that flame; no man alive but Sigurd sit
him while he leaped through it. Inside the house lay a fair maiden,
armed from head to foot, in a deep sleep. Brynhildr, Atli’s sister, was
her name, a Valkyrie, a corse-chooser; but out of wilfulness she had
given the victory to the wrong side, and Odin in his wrath had thrust
the horn of sleep into her cloak, and laid her under a curse to slumber
there till a man bold enough to ride through that flame came to set her
free, and win her for his bride. So then she woke up, and taught him
all runes and wisdom, and they swore to love each other with a mighty
oath, and then Sigurd left her and rode on.

So on he rode to King Giuki’s hall, Giuki the Niflung, King of
Frankland, whose wife was Grimhildr, whose sons were Gunnar and Hogni,
whose stepson was Guttorm, and whose daughter was the fair Gudrun. Here
at first he was full of Brynhildr, and all for going back to fetch his
lovely bride from the lone fell. But Grimhildr was given to dark arts;
she longed for the brave Volsung for her own daughter, she brewed him
the philtre of forgetfulness, he drained it off, forgot Brynhildr,
swore a brother’s friendship with Gunnar and Hogni, and wedded the fair
Gudrun. But now Giuki wanted a wife for Gunnar, and so off set the
brothers and their bosom friend to woo, but whom should they choose but
Brynhildr, Atli’s sister, who sat there still upon the fell, waiting
for the man who was bold enough to ride through the flickering flame.
She knew but one could do it, and waited for that one to come back. So
she had given out whoever could ride that flame should have her to
wife. So when Gunnar and Hogni reached it, Gunnar rode at it, but his
horse, good though it was, swerved from the fierce flame. Then by
Grimhild’s magic arts, Sigurd and Gunnar changed shapes and arms, and
Sigurd leapt up on Gran’s back, and the good steed bore him bravely
through the flame. So Brynhildr the proud maiden was won and forced to
yield. That evening was their wedding; but when they lay down to rest,
Sigurd unsheathed his keen sword _Gram_, and laid it naked between
them. Next morning when he arose, he took the ring which Andvari had
laid under the curse, and which was among Fafnir’s treasures, and gave
it to Brynhildr as a “morning gift”, and she gave him another ring as a
pledge. Then Sigurd rode back to his companions and took his own shape
again, and then Gunnar went and claimed Brynhildr, and carried her home
as his bride. But no sooner was Gunnar wedded, than Sigurd’s eyes were
opened, and the power of the philtre passed away, he remembered all
that had passed, and the oath he had sworn to Brynhildr. All this came
back upon him when it was too late, but he was wise and said nothing
about it. Well, so things went on, till one day Brynhildr and Gudrun
went down to the river to wash their hair. Then Brynhildr waded out
into the stream as far as she could, and said she wouldn’t have on her
head the water that streamed from Gudrun’s; for hers was the braver
husband. So Gudrun waded out after her, and said the water ought to
come on her hair first, because her husband bore away the palm from
Gunnar, and every other man alive, for he slew Fafnir and Regin and
took their inheritance. “Aye”, said Brynhildr, “but it was a worthier
deed when Gunnar rode through the flame, but Sigurd dared not try!”
Then Gudrun laughed, and said “Thinkst thou that Gunnar really rode the
flame? I trow _he_ went to bed with thee that night, who gave me this
gold ring. And as for that ring yonder which you have on your finger,
and which you got as your ‘morning-gift’; its name is Andvari’s-spoil,
and _that_ I don’t think Gunnar sought on the ‘Glistening Heath’”. Then
Brynhildr held her peace and went home, and her love for Sigurd came
back, but it was turned to hate, for she felt herself betrayed. Then
she egged on Gunnar to revenge her wrong. At last the brothers yielded
to her entreaties, but they were sworn brothers to Sigurd, and to break
that oath by deed was a thing unheard of. Still they broke it in
spirit; by charms and prayers they set on Guttorm their half-brother,
and so at dead of night, while Gudrun held the bravest man alive fast
locked in her white arms, the murderer stole to the bedside and drove a
sword through the hero. Then Sigurd turned and writhed, and as Guttorm
fled he hurled Gram after him, and the keen blade took him asunder at
the waist, and his head fell out of the room and his heels in, and that
was the end of Guttorm. But with revenge Brynhildr’s love returned, and
when Sigurd was laid upon the pile her heart broke; she burst forth
into a prophetic song of the woes that were still to come, made them
lay her by his side with Gram between them, and so went to Valhalla
with her old lover. Thus Andvari’s curse was fulfilled.

Gudrun, the weary widow, wandered away. After a while, she accepts
atonement from her brothers for her husband’s loss, and marries Atli,
the Hun King, Brynhildr’s brother. He cherished a grudge against
Giuki’s sons for the guile they had practised against their
brother-in-law, which had broken his sister’s heart, and besides he
claimed, in right of Gudrun, all the gold which Sigurd won from the
Dragon, but which the Niflung Princes had seized when he was slain. It
was in vain to attack them in fair fight, so he sent them a friendly
message, and invited them to a banquet; they go, and are overpowered.
Hogni’s heart is cut out of him alive, but he still smiles; Gunnar is
cast into a pit full of snakes, but even then charms them to sleep with
his harp, all but one, that flies at his heart and stings him to death.
With them perished the secret of the Dragon’s hoard, which they had
thrown into the Rhine as they crossed it on the way to Hunland. Now
comes horror on horror. Revenge for her brothers now belongs to Gudrun;
she slays with her own hand her two sons by Atli, makes him eat their
flesh, and drink their blood out of their skulls, and, while the king
slept sound, slew him in his bed by the help of her brother Hogni’s
son. Then she set the hall a-blaze, and burnt all that were in it.
After that she went to the sea-shore, and threw herself in to drown.
But the deep will not have her, the billows bear her over to King
Jonakr’s land. He marries her, and has three sons by her, Saurli,
Hamdir, and Erp, black-haired as ravens, like all the Niflungs.
Svanhild, her daughter by Sigurd, who had her father’s bright and
terrible eyes, she has still with her, now grown up to be the fairest
of women. So when Hermanaric the mighty, the great Gothic king, heard
of Svanhild’s beauty, he sent his son Randver to woo her for him, but
Bikki the False said to the youth: “Better far were this maiden for
thee than for thy old father”; and the maiden and the prince thought it
good advice. Then Bikki went and told the king, and Hermanaric bade
them take and hang Randver at once. So on his way to the gallows, the
prince took his hawk and plucked off all its feathers, and sent it to
his father. But when his sire saw it, he knew at once that, as the hawk
was featherless and unable to fly, so was his realm defenceless under
an old and sonless king. Too late he sent to stop the hanging; his son
was already dead. So one day as he rode back from hunting, he saw fair
Svanhild washing her golden locks, and it came into his heart how there
she sat, the cause of all his woe; and he and his men rode at her and
over her, and their steeds trampled her to death. But when Gudrun heard
this, she set on her three Niflung sons to avenge their sister. Byrnies
and helms she gave them so true that no sword would bite on them. They
were to steal on Hermanaric as he slept; Saurli was to cut off his
hands, Hamdir his feet, and Erp his head. So as the three went along,
the two asked Erp what help he would give them when they got to
Hermanaric. “Such as hand lends to foot” he said. “No help at all” they
cried; and passing from words to blows, and because their mother loved
Erp best, they slew him. A little further on Saurli stumbled and fell
forward, but saved himself with one hand, and said “Here hand helps
foot: better were it that Erp lived.” So they came on Hermanaric as he
slept, and Saurli hewed off his hands, and Hamdir his feet, but he
awoke and called for his men. Then said Hamdir: “Were Erp alive, the
head would be off, and he couldn’t call out.” Then Hermanaric’s men
arose and took the twain, and when they found that no steel would touch
them, an old one-eyed man gave them advice to stone them to death. Thus
fell Saurli and Hamdir, and soon after Gudrun died too, and with her
ends the Volsung and the Niflung tale.

And here it is worth while to say, since some minds are so narrowly
moulded as to be incapable of containing more than one idea, that
because it has seemed a duty to describe in its true light the old
faith of our forefathers, it by no means follows that the same eyes are
blind to the glorious beauty of Greek Mythology. That had the rare
advantage of running its course free and unfettered until it fell
rather by natural decay than before the weapon of a new belief. The
Greeks were Atheists before they became Christian. Their faith had
passed through every stage. We can contemplate it as it springs out of
the dim misshapen symbol, during that phase when men’s eyes are fixed
more on meaning and reality than on beauty and form, we can mark how it
gradually looks more to symmetry and shape, how it is transfigured in
the Arts, until, under that pure air and bright sky, the glowing
radiant figures of Apollo and Aphrodite, of Zeus and Athene—of perfect
man-worship and woman-worship, stand out clear and round in the
foreground against the misty distance of ancient times. Out of that
misty distance the Norseman’s faith never emerged. What that early
phase of faith might have become, had it been once wedded to the Muses,
and learnt to cultivate the Arts, it is impossible to say. As it is,
its career was cut short in mid-course. It carried about with it that
melancholy presentiment of dissolution which has come to be so
characteristic of modern life, but of which scarce a trace exists in
ancient times, and this feeling would always have made it different
from that cheerful carelessness which so attracts us in the Greeks; but
even that downcast brooding heart was capable of conceiving great and
heroic thoughts, which it might have clothed in noble shapes and forms,
had not the axe of Providence cut down the stately sapling in the North
before it grew to be a tree, while it spared the pines of Delphi and
Dodona’s sacred oaks, until they had attained a green old age. And so
this faith remained rude and rough; but even rudeness has a simplicity
of its own, and it is better to be rough and true-hearted than polished
and false. In all the feelings of natural affection, that faith need
fear no comparison with any other upon earth. In these respects it is
firm and steadfast as a rock, and pure and bright as a living spring.
The highest God is a father, who protects his children; who gives them
glory and victory while they live, and when they die, takes them to
himself; to those fatherly abodes Death was a happy return, a glorious
going home. By the side of this great father stands a venerable
goddess, dazzling with beauty, the great mother of gods and men. Hand
in hand this divine pair traverse the land; he teaching the men the use
of arms and all the arts of war,—for war was then as now a noble
calling, and to handle arms an honourable, nay necessary, profession.
To the women she teaches domestic duties and the arts of peace; from
her they learn to weave, and sew, and spin; from her, too, the
husbandman learns to till his fields. From him springs poetry and song;
from her legend and tradition. Nor should it ever be forgotten that the
footsteps of Providence are always onward, even when they seem taken in
the dark, and that their rude faith was the first in which that
veneration for woman arose, which the Western nations may well claim as
the brightest jewel in their crown of civilization; that while she was
a slave in the East, a toy to the Greeks, and a housewife to the
Romans, she was a helpmeet to the Teuton, and that those stern warriors
recognized something divine in her nature, and bowed before her clearer
insight into heavenly mysteries. The worship of the Virgin Mary was
gradually developed out of this conception of woman’s character, and
would have been a thing absurd and impossible, had Christianity clung
for ever to Eastern soil. And now to proceed, after thus turning aside
to compare the mythology of the Greek with the faith of the Norseman.
The mistake is to favour one or the other exclusively instead of
respecting and admiring both; but it is a mistake which those only can
fall into, whose souls are narrow and confined, who would say this
thing and this person you shall love, and none other; this form and
feature you shall worship and adore, and this alone; when in fact the
whole promised land of thought and life lies before us at our feet, our
nature encourages us to go in and possess it, and every step we make in
this new world of knowledge brings us to fresh prospects of beauty, and
to new pastures of delight.

Such were the gods, and such the heroes of the Norseman; who, like his
own gods, went smiling to death under the weight of an inevitable
destiny. But that fate never fell on their gods. Before this subjective
mythological dream of the Norsemen could be fulfilled, the religious
mist in which they walked was scattered by the sunbeams of
Christianity. A new state and condition of society arose, and the creed
which had satisfied a race of heathen warriors, who externally were at
war with all the world, became in time an object of horror and aversion
to the converted Christian. This is not the place to describe the long
struggle between the new and the old faith in the North; how kings and
queens became the foster-fathers and nursing-mothers of the Church; how
the great chiefs, each a little king in himself, scorned and derided
the whole scheme as altogether weak and effeminate; how the bulk of the
people were sullen and suspicious, and often broke out into heathen
mutiny; how kings rose and kings fell, just as they took one or the
other side; and how, finally, after a contest which had lasted
altogether more than three centuries, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and
Sweden—we run them over in the order of conversion—became faithful to
Christianity, as preached by the missionaries of the Church of Rome.
One fact, however, we must insist on, which might be inferred, indeed,
both from the nature of the struggle itself, and the character of Rome;
and that is, that throughout there was something in the process of
conversion of the nature of a compromise—of what we may call the great
principle of “give and take”. In all Christian churches, indeed, and in
none so much as the Church of Rome, nothing is so austere, so
elevating, and so grand, as the uncompromising tone in which the great
dogmas of the Faith are enunciated and proclaimed. Nothing is more
magnificent, in short, than the theory of Christianity; but nothing is
more mean and miserable than the time-serving way in which those dogmas
are dragged down to the dull level of daily life, and that sublime
theory reduced to ordinary practice. At Rome, it was true that the Pope
could congratulate the faithful that whole nations in the barbarous and
frozen North had been added to the true fold, and that Odin’s grim
champions now universally believed in the gospel of peace and love. It
is so easy to dispose of a doubtful struggle in a single sentence, and
so tempting to believe it when once written. But in the North, the
state of things, and the manner of proceeding, were entirely different.
There the dogma was proclaimed, indeed; but the manner of preaching it
was not in that mild spirit with which the Saviour rebuked the disciple
when he said “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that
take the sword shall perish with the sword.” There the sword was used
to bring converts to the font, and the baptism was often one rather of
blood than of water. There the new converts perpetually relapsed,
chased away the missionaries and the kings who sheltered them, and only
yielded at last to the overwhelming weight of Christian opinion in the
Western world. St Olof, king and martyr, martyred in pitched battle by
his mutinous allodial freemen, because he tried to drive rather than to
lead them to the cross; and another Olof, greater than he, Olof
Tryggvason, who fell in battle against the heathen Swedes, were men of
blood rather than peace; but to them the introduction of the new faith
into Norway is mainly owing. So also Charlemagne, at an earlier period,
had dealt with the Saxons at the Main Bridge, when his ultimatum was
“Christianity or death”. So also the first missionary to Iceland—who
met, indeed, with a sorry reception—was followed about by a stout
champion named Thangbrand, who, whenever there was what we should now
call a missionary meeting, challenged any impugner of the new doctrines
to mortal combat on the spot. No wonder that, after having killed
several opponents in the little tour which he made with his missionary
friend through the island, it became too hot to hold him, and he, and
the missionary, and the new creed, were forced to take ship and sail
back to Norway.

“Precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a
little”, was the motto of Rome in her dealings with the heathen
Norsemen, and if she suited herself at first rather to their habits and
temper than to those of more enlightened nations, she had an excuse in
St Paul’s maxim of making herself “all things to all men.” Thus, when a
second attempt to Christianize Iceland proved more successful—for in
the meantime, King Olof Tryggvason, a zealous Christian, had seized as
hostages all the Icelanders of family and fame who happened to be in
Norway, and thus worked on the feelings of the chiefs of those families
at home, who in their turn bribed the lawman who presided over the
Great Assembly to pronounce in favour of the new Faith—even then the
adherents of the old religion were allowed to perform its rites in
secret, and two old heathen practices only were expressly prohibited,
the exposure of infants and the eating of horseflesh, for horses were
sacred animals, and the heathen ate their flesh after they had been
solemnly sacrificed to the gods. As a matter of fact, it is far easier
to change a form of religion than to extirpate a faith. The first
indeed is no easy matter, as those students of history well know who
are acquainted with the tenacity with which a large proportion of the
English nation clung to the Church of Rome, long after the State had
declared for the Reformation. But to change the faith of a whole nation
in block and bulk on the instant, was a thing contrary to the ordinary
working of Providence and unknown even in the days of miracles, though
the days of miracles had long ceased when Rome advanced against the
North. There it was more politic to raise a cross in the grove where
the Sacred Tree had once stood, and to point to the sacred emblem which
had supplanted the old object of national adoration, when the populace
came at certain seasons with songs and dances to perform their heathen
rites. Near the cross soon rose a church; and both were girt by a
cemetery, the soil of which was doubly sacred as a heathen fane and a
Christian sanctuary, and where alone the bodies of the faithful could
repose in peace. But the songs and dances, and processions in the
church-yard round the cross, continued long after Christianity had
become dominant. So also the worship of wells and springs was
christianized when it was found impossible to prevent it. Great
churches arose over or near them, as at Walsingham, where an abbey, the
holiest place in England, after the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury,
threw its majestic shade over the heathen wishing-well, and the
worshippers of Odin and the Nornir were gradually converted into
votaries of the Virgin Mary. Such practices form a subject of constant
remonstrance and reproof in the treatises and penitential epistles of
medieval divines, and in some few places and churches, even in England,
such rites are still yearly celebrated.[22]

So, too, again with the ancient gods. They were cast down from honour,
but not from power. They lost their genial kindly influence as the
protectors of men and the origin of all things good; but their
existence was tolerated; they became powerful for ill, and degenerated
into malignant demons. Thus the worshippers of Odin had supposed that
at certain times and rare intervals the good powers shewed themselves
in bodily shape to mortal eye, passing through the land in divine
progress, bringing blessings in their train, and receiving in return
the offerings and homage of their grateful votaries. But these were
naturally only exceptional instances; on ordinary occasions the pious
heathen recognized his gods sweeping through the air in cloud and
storm, riding on the wings of the wind, and speaking in awful accents,
as the tempest howled and roared, and the sea shook his white mane and
crest. Nor did he fail to see them in the dust and din of battle, when
Odin appeared with his terrible helm, succouring his own, striking fear
into their foes, and turning the day in many a doubtful fight; or in
the hurry and uproar of the chase, where the mighty huntsman on his
swift steed, seen in glimpses among the trees, took up the hunt where
weary mortals laid it down, outstripped them all, and brought the noble
quarry to the ground. Looking up to the stars and heaven, they saw the
footsteps of the gods marked out in the bright path of the Milky Way;
and in the Bear they hailed the war-chariot of the warrior’s god. The
great goddesses, too, Frigga and Freyja, were thoroughly old-fashioned
domestic divinities. They help women in their greatest need, they spin
themselves, they teach the maids to spin, and punish them if the wool
remains upon their spindle. They are kind, and good, and bright, for
_Holda_, _Bertha_, are the epithets given to them. And so, too, this
mythology which, in its aspect to the stranger and the external world,
was so ruthless and terrible, when looked at from within and at home,
was genial, and kindly, and hearty, and affords another proof that men,
in all ages and climes, are not so bad as they seem; that after all,
peace and not war is the proper state for man, and that a nation may
make war on others and exist; but that unless it has peace within, and
industry at home, it must perish from the face of the earth. But when
Christianity came, the whole character of this goodly array of
divinities was soured and spoilt. Instead of the stately procession of
the God, which the intensely sensuous eye of man in that early time
connected with all the phenomena of nature, the people were led to
believe in a ghastly grisly band of ghosts, who followed an infernal
warrior or huntsman in hideous tumult through the midnight air. No
doubt, as Grimm rightly remarks,[23] the heathen had fondly fancied
that the spirits of those who had gone to Odin followed him in his
triumphant progress either visibly or invisibly; that they rode with
him in the whirlwind, just as they followed him to battle, and feasted
with him in Valhalla; but now the Christian belief, when it had
degraded the mighty god into a demon huntsman, who pursued his nightly
round in chase of human souls, saw in the train of the infernal master
of the hunt only the spectres of suicides, drunkards, and ruffians;
and, with all the uncharitableness of a dogmatic faith, the spirits of
children who died unbaptized, whose hard fate had thrown them into such
evil company. This was the way in which that wide-spread superstition
arose, which sees in the phantoms of the clouds the shapes of the Wild
Huntsman and his accursed crew, and hears, in spring and autumn nights,
when sea-fowl take the wing to fly either south or north, the strange
accents and uncouth yells with which the chase is pressed on in upper
air. Thus, in Sweden it is still Odin who passes by; in Denmark it is
King Waldemar’s Hunt; in Norway it is _Aaskereida_, that is _Asgard’s
Car_ ; in Germany, it is Wode, Woden, or Hackelberend, or Dieterich of
Bern; in France it is Hellequin, or King Hugo, or Charles the Fifth,
or, dropping a name altogether, it is _Le Grand Veneur_ who ranges at
night through the Forest of Fontainebleau. Nor was England without her
Wild Huntsman and his ghastly following. Gervase of Tilbury, in the
twelfth century, could tell it of King Arthur, round whose mighty name
the superstition settled itself, for he had heard from the foresters
how, “on alternate days, about the full of the moon, one day at noon,
the next at midnight when the moon shone bright, a mighty train of
hunters on horses was seen, with baying hounds and blast of horns; and
when those hunters were asked of whose company and household they were,
they replied ‘of Arthur’s’.” We hear of him again in _The Complaynt of
Scotland_, that curious composition attributed by some to Sir David
Lyndsay of the Mount in Fife, and of Gilmerton in East Lothian, pp. 97,
98, where he says:

Arthur knycht, he raid on nycht,
With gyldin spur and candil lycht.


Nor should we forget, when considering this legend, that story of Herne
the Hunter, who

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.


_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act. iv, sc. 4.


And even yet, in various parts of England, the story of some great man,
generally a member of one of the county families, who drives about the
country at night, is common. Thus, in Warwickshire, it is the
“One-handed Boughton”, who drives about in his coach and six, and makes
the benighted traveller hold gates open for him; or it is “Lady
Skipwith”, who passes through the country at night in the same manner.
This subject might be pursued to much greater length, for popular
tradition is full of such stories; but enough has been said to show how
the awful presence of a glorious God can be converted into a gloomy
superstition; and, at the same time, how the majesty of the old belief
strives to rescue itself by clinging, in the popular consciousness, to
some king or hero, as Arthur or Waldemar, or, failing that, to some
squire’s family, as Hackelberend, or the “one-handed Boughton”, or even
to the Keeper Herne.

Odin and the Aesir then were dispossessed and degraded by our Saviour
and his Apostles, just as they had of old thrown out the Frost Giants,
and the two are mingled together, in medieval Norse tradition, as
Trolls and Giants, hostile alike to Christianity and man. Christianity
had taken possession indeed, but it was beyond her power to kill. To
this half-result the swift corruption of the Church of Rome lent no
small aid. Her doctrines, as taught by Augustine and Boniface, by
Anschar and Sigfrid, were comparatively mild and pure; but she had
scarce swallowed the heathendom of the North, much in the same way as
the Wolf was to swallow Odin at the “Twilight of the Gods”, than she
fell into a deadly lethargy of faith, which put it out of her power to
digest her meal. Gregory the Seventh, elected pope in 1073, tore the
clergy from the ties of domestic life with a grasp that wounded every
fibre of natural affection, and made it bleed to the very root. With
the celibacy of the clergy he established the hierarchy of the church,
but her labours as a missionary church were over. Henceforth she worked
not by missionaries and apostles, but by crusades and bulls. Now she
raised mighty armaments to recover the barren soil of the Holy
Sepulchre, or to annihilate heretic Albigenses. Now she established
great orders, Templars and Hospitallers, whose pride and luxury, and
pomp, brought swift destruction on one at least of those fraternities.
Now she became feudal,—she owned land instead of hearts, and forgot
that the true patrimony of St Peter was the souls of men. No wonder
that, with the barbarism of the times, she soon fulfilled the Apostle’s
words, “She that liveth in luxury is dead while she liveth”, and became
filled with idle superstitions and vain beliefs. No wonder, then, that
instead of completing her conquest over the heathen, and carrying out
their conversion, she became half heathen herself; that she adopted the
tales and traditions of the old mythology, which she had never been
able to extirpate, and related them of our Lord and his Apostles. No
wonder, then, that having abandoned her mission of being the first
power of intelligence on earth, she fell like Lucifer when the mist of
medieval feudalism rolled away, and the light of learning and education
returned—fell before the indignation of enlightened men, working upon
popular opinion. Since which day, though she has changed her plans, and
remodelled her superstitions to suit the times, she has never regained
the supremacy which, if she had been wise in a true sense, she seemed
destined to hold for ever.




NORSE POPULAR TALES


The preceding observations will have given a sufficient account of the
mythology of the Norsemen, and of the way in which it fell. They came
from the East, and brought that common stock of tradition with them.
Settled in the Scandinavian peninsula, they developed themselves
through Heathenism, Romanism, and Lutheranism, in a locality little
exposed to foreign influence, so that even now the Daleman in Norway or
Sweden may be reckoned among the most primitive examples left of
peasant life. We should expect, then, that these Popular Tales, which,
for the sake of those ignorant in such matters, it may be remarked, had
never been collected or reduced to writing till within the last few
years, would present a faithful picture of the national consciousness,
or, perhaps, to speak more correctly, of that half consciousness out of
which the heart of any people speaks in its abundance. Besides those
world-old affinities and primaeval parallelisms, besides those dreamy
recollections of its old home in the East, which we have already
pointed out, we should expect to find its later history, after the
great migration, still more distinctly reflected; to discover heathen
gods masked in the garb of Christian saints; and thus to see a proof of
our assertion above, that a nation more easily changes the form than
the essence of its faith, and clings with a toughness which endures for
centuries to what it has once learned to believe.

In all mythologies, the trait of all others which most commonly occurs,
is that of the descent of the Gods to earth, where, in human form, they
mix among mortals, and occupy themselves with their affairs, either out
of a spirit of adventure, or to try the hearts of men. Such a
conception is shocking to the Christian notion of the omnipotence and
omnipresence of God, but we question if there be not times when the
most pious and perfect Christian may not find comfort and relief from a
fallacy which was a matter of faith in less enlightened creeds, and
over which the apostle, writing to the Hebrews, throws the sanction of
his authority, so far as angels are concerned.[24] Nor could he have
forgotten those words of the men of Lystra, “The Gods are come down to
us in the likeness of men”; and how they called “Barnabas Jupiter”, and
himself Mercury, “because he was the chief speaker.” Classical
mythology is full of such stories. These wanderings of the Gods are
mentioned in the Odyssey, and the sanctity of the rites of hospitality,
and the dread of turning a stranger from the door, took its origin from
a fear lest the wayfaring man should be a Divinity in disguise.
According to the Greek story, Orion owed his birth to the fact that the
childless Hyrieus, his reputed father, had once received unawares Zeus,
Poseidon, and Hermes, or, to call them by their Latin names, Jupiter,
Neptune, and Mercury. In the beautiful story of Philemon and Baucis,
Jupiter and Mercury reward the aged couple who had so hospitably
received them by warning them of the approaching deluge. The fables of
Phaedrus and Aesop represent Mercury and Demeter as wandering and
enjoying the hospitality of men. In India it is Brahma and Vishnu who
generally wander. In the Edda, Odin, Loki, and Hoenir thus roam about,
or Thor, Thialfi, and Loki. Sometimes Odin appears alone as a horseman,
who turns in at night to the smith’s house, and gets him to shoe his
horse, a legend which reminds us at once of the Master-smith.[25]
Sometimes it is Thor with his great hammer who wanders thus alone.

Now, let us turn from heathen to Christian times, and look at some of
these old legends of wandering gods in a new dress. Throughout the
Middle Age, it is our blessed Lord and St Peter that thus wander, and
here we see that half-digested heathendom to which we have alluded.
Those who may be shocked at such tales in this collection as “the
Master-Smith” and “Gertrude’s Bird”, must just remember that these are
almost purely heathen traditions, in which the names alone are
Christian; and if it be any consolation to any to know the fact, we may
as well state at once that this adaptation of new names to old beliefs
is not peculiar to the Norsemen, but is found in all the popular tales
of Europe. Germany was full of them, and there St Peter often appears
in a snappish ludicrous guise, which reminds the reader versed in Norse
mythology of the tricks and pranks of the shifty Loki. In the Norse
tales he thoroughly preserves his saintly character.

Nor was it only gods that walked among men. In the Norse mythology,
Frigga, Odin’s wife, who knew beforehand all that was to happen, and
Freyja, the goddess of love and plenty, were prominent figures, and
often trod the earth; the three Norns or Fates, who sway the wierds of
men, and spin their destinies at Mimirs’ well of knowledge, were awful
venerable powers, to whom the heathen world looked up with love and
adoration and awe. To that love and adoration and awe, throughout the
middle age, one woman, transfigured into a divine shape, succeeded by a
sort of natural right, and round the Virgin Mary’s blessed head a halo
of lovely tales of divine help, beams with soft radiance as a crown
bequeathed to her by the ancient goddesses. She appears as divine
mother, spinner, and helpful virgin (vierge sécourable). Flowers and
plants bear her name. In England one of our commonest and prettiest
insects is still called after her, but which belonged to Freyja, the
heathen “Lady”, long before the western nations had learned to adore
the name of the mother of Jesus.[26]

The reader of these Tales will meet, in that of “the Lassie and her
Godmother”, No. xxvii, with the Virgin Mary in a truly mythic
character, as the majestic guardian of sun, moon and stars, combined
with that of a helpful, kindly woman, who, while she knows how to
punish a fault, knows also how to reconcile and forgive.

The Norseman’s god was a god of battles, and victory his greatest gift
to men; but this was not the only aspect under which the Great Father
was revered. Not victory in the fight alone, but every other good gift
came down from him and the Aesir. Odin’s supreme will was that
treasure-house of bounty towards which, in one shape or the other, all
mortal desires turned, and out of its abundance showers of mercy and
streams of divine favour constantly poured down to refresh the weary
race of men. All these blessings and mercies, nay, their very source
itself, the ancient language bound up in a single word, which, however
expressive it may still be, has lost much of the fulness of its meaning
in its descent to these later times. This word was “Wish”, which
originally meant the perfect ideal, the actual fruition of all joy and
desire, and not, as now, the empty longing for the object of our
desires. From this original abstract meaning, it was but a step to pass
to the concrete, to personify the idea, to make it an immortal essence,
an attribute of the divinity, another name for the greatest of all Gods
himself. And so we find a host of passages in early writers,[27] in
every one of which “God” or “Odin” might be substituted for “Wish” with
perfect propriety. Here we read how “The Wish” has hands, feet, power,
sight, toil, and art. How he works and labours, shapes and masters,
inclines his ear, thinks, swears, curses, and rejoices, adopts
children, and takes men into his house; behaves, in short, as a being
of boundless power and infinite free-will. Still more, he rejoices in
his own works as in a child, and thus appears in a thoroughly
patriarchal point of view, as the Lord of creation, glorying in his
handiwork, as the father of a family in early times was glad at heart
when he reckoned his children as arrows in his quiver, and beheld his
house full of a long line of retainers and dependants. For this
attribute of the Great Father, for Odin as the God of Wish, the Edda
uses the word “Oski” which literally expresses the masculine
personification of “Wish”, and it passed on and added the _works_ wish,
as a prefix to a number of others, to signify that they stood in a
peculiar relation to the great giver of all good. Thus we have
_oska-steinn_, wishing-stone, i.e. a stone which plays the part of a
divining rod, and reveals secrets and hidden treasure; _oska-byrr_, a
fair wind, a wind as fair as man’s heart could wish it; _osk-barn_ and
_oska-barn_, a child after one’s own heart, an adopted child, as when
the younger Edda tells us that all those who die in battle are Odin’s
_choice-bairns_, his adopted children, those on whom he has set his
heart, an expression which, in their turn, was taken by the Icelandic
Christian writers to express the relation existing between God and the
baptized; and, though last, not least, _oska-maer_, wish-maidens,
another name for the Valkyries—Odin’s corse-choosers—who picked out the
dead for him on the field of battle, and waited on the heroes in
Valhalla. Again, the Edda is filled with “choice things”, possessing
some mysterious power of their own, some “virtue”, as our older English
would express it, which belong to this or that god, and are
occasionally lent or lost. Thus, Odin himself had a spear which gave
victory to those on whose side it was hurled; Thor, a hammer which
destroyed the Giants, hallowed vows, and returned of itself to his
hand. He had a strength-belt, too, which, when he girded it on, his
god-strength waxed one-half; Freyr had a sword which wielded itself;
Freyja a necklace which, like the cestus of Venus, inspired all hearts
with love; Freyr, again, had a ship called _Skithblathnir_.

She is so great, that all the Aesir, with their weapons and war gear,
may find room on board her; and as soon as the sail is set, she has a
fair wind whither she shall go; and when there is no need of faring on
the sea in her, she is made of so many things, and with so much craft,
that Freyr may fold her together like a cloth, and keep her in his
bag.[28]

Of this kind, too, was the ring “Dropper” which Odin had, and from
which twelve other rings dropped every night; the apples which Idun,
one of the goddesses, had, and of which, so soon as the Aesir ate, they
became young again; the helm which Oegir, the sea giant had, which
struck terror into all antagonists like the Aegis of Athene; and that
wonderful mill which the mythical Frodi owned, of which we shall
shortly speak.

Now, let us see what traces of this great god “Wish” and his
choice-bairns and wishing-things we can find in these Tales, faint
echoes of a mighty heathen voice, which once proclaimed the goodness of
the great Father in the blessings which he bestowed on his chosen sons.
We shall not have long to seek. In tale No. xx, when Shortshanks meets
those three old crookbacked hags who have only one eye, which he snaps
up, and gets first a sword “that puts a whole army to flight, be it
ever so great”, we have the “one-eyed Odin”, degenerated into an old
hag, or rather—by no uncommon process—we have an old witch fused by
popular tradition into a mixture of Odin and the three Nornir. Again,
when he gets that wondrous ship “which can sail over fresh water and
salt water, and over high hills and deep dales,” and which is so small
that he can put it into his pocket, and yet, when he came to use it,
could hold five hundred men, we have plainly the Skith-blathnir of the
Edda to the very life. So also in the Best Wish, No. xxxvi, the whole
groundwork of this story rests on this old belief; and when we meet
that pair of old scissors which cuts all manner of fine clothes out of
the air, that tablecloth which covers itself with the best dishes you
could think of, as soon as it was spread out, and that tap which, as
soon as it was turned, poured out the best of mead and wine, we have
plainly another form of Frodi’s wishing-quern—another recollection of
those things of choice about which the old mythology has so much to
tell. Of the same kind are the tablecloth, the ram, and the stick in
“the Lad who went to the North Wind”, No. xxxiv, and the rings in “the
Three Princesses of Whiteland”, No. xxvi, and in “Soria Moria Castle”,
No. lvi. In the first of those stories, too, we find those “three
brothers” who have stood on a moor “these hundred years fighting about
a hat, a cloak, and a pair of boots”, which had the virtue of making
him who wore them invisible; choice things which will again remind the
reader of the _Nibelungen Lied_, of the way in which Siegfried became
possessed of the famous hoard of gold, and how he got that “cap of
darkness” which was so useful to him in his remaining exploits. So
again in “the Blue Belt”, No. xxii, what is that belt which, when the
boy girded it on, “he felt as strong as if he could lift the whole
hill”, but Thor’s “choice-belt”; and what is the daring boy himself,
who overcomes the Troll, but Thor himself, as engaged in one of his
adventures with the Giants? So, too, in “Little Annie the Goose-girl”,
No. lix, the stone which tells the Prince all the secrets of his brides
is plainly the old Oskastein, or “wishing-stone”. These instances will
suffice to show the prolonged faith in “Wish”, and his choice things; a
belief which, though so deeply rooted in the North, we have already
traced to its home in the East, whence it stretches itself from pole to
pole, and reappears in every race. We recognize it in the wishing-cap
of Fortunatus, which is a Celtic legend; in the cornucopia of the
Romans; in the goat Amalthea among the Greeks; in the wishing-cow and
wishing-tree of the Hindoos; in the pumpkin-tree of the West Indian
Ananzi stories; in the cow of the Servian legends, who spins yarn out
of her ear; in the Sampo of the Finns; and in all those stories of
cups, and glasses, and horns, and rings, and swords, seized by some
bold spirit in the midst of a fairy revel, or earned by some kind deed
rendered by mortal hand to one of the “good folk” in her hour of need,
and with which the “_luck_”[29] of that mortal’s house was ever
afterwards bound up; stories with which the local traditions of all
lands are full, but which all pay unconscious homage to the worship of
that great God, to whom so many heathen hearts so often turned as the
divine realizer of their prayers, and the giver of all good things,
until they come at last to make an idol out of their hopes and prayers,
and to immortalize the very “Wish” itself.

Again, of all beliefs, that in which man has, at all times of his
history, been most prone to set faith, is that of a golden age of peace
and plenty, which had passed away, but which might be expected to
return. Such a period was looked for when Augustus closed the temple of
Janus, and peace, though perhaps not plenty, reigned over what the
proud Roman called the habitable world. Such a period the early
Christian expected when the Saviour was born, in the reign of that very
Augustus; and such a period some, whose thoughts are more set on earth
than heaven, have hoped for ever since, with a hope which, though
deferred for eighteen centuries, has not made their hearts sick. Such a
period of peace and plenty, such a golden time, the Norseman could tell
of in his mythic Frodi’s reign, when gold or _Frodi’s meal_, as it was
called, was so plentiful that golden armlets lay untouched from year’s
end to year’s end on the king’s highway, and the fields bore crops
unsown. Here, in England, the Anglo-Saxon Bede[30] knew how to tell the
same story of Edwin, the Northumbrian King, and when Alfred came to be
mythic, the same legend was passed on from Edwin to the West Saxon
monarch. The remembrance of “the bountiful Frodi” echoed in the songs
of German poets long after the story which made him so bountiful had
been forgotten; but the Norse Skalds could tell not only the story of
Frodi’s wealth and bounty, but also of his downfall and ruin. In
Frodi’s house were two maidens of that old giant race, Fenja and Menja.
These daughters of the giant he had bought as slaves, and he made them
grind his quern or hand-mill, Grotti, out of which he used to grind
peace and gold. Even in that golden age one sees there were slaves, and
Frodi, however bountiful to his thanes and people, was a hard
task-master to his giant hand-maidens. He kept them to the mill, nor
gave them longer rest than the cuckoo’s note lasted, or they could sing
a song. But that quern was such that it ground anything that the
grinder chose, though until then it had ground nothing but gold and
peace. So the maidens ground and ground, and one sang their piteous
tale in a strain worthy of Aeschylus as the other worked—they prayed
for rest and pity, but Frodi was deaf. Then they turned in giant mood,
and ground no longer peace and plenty, but fire and war. Then the quern
went fast and furious, and that very night came Mysing the Sea-rover,
and slew Frodi and all his men, and carried off the quern; and so
Frodi’s peace ended. The maidens the sea-rover took with him, and when
he got on the high seas he bade them grind salt. So they ground; and at
midnight they asked if he had not salt enough, but he bade them still
grind on. So they ground till the ship was full and sank, Mysing,
maids, and mill, and all, and that’s why the sea is salt.[31] Perhaps
of all the tales in this volume, none could be selected as better
proving the toughness of a traditional belief than No. ii, which tells
“Why the Sea is Salt”.

The notion of the Arch-enemy of God and man, of a fallen angel, to whom
power was permitted at certain times for an all-wise purpose by the
Great Ruler of the universe, was as foreign to the heathendom of our
ancestors as his name was outlandish and strange to their tongue. This
notion Christianity brought with it from the East; and though it is a
plant which has struck deep roots, grown distorted and awry, and borne
a bitter crop of superstition, it required all the authority of the
Church to prepare the soil at first for its reception. To the notion of
good necessarily follows that of evil. The Eastern mind, with its
Ormuzd and Ahriman, is full of such dualism, and from that hour, when a
more than mortal eye saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven,[32]
the kingdom of darkness, the abode of Satan and his bad spirits, was
established in direct opposition to the kingdom of the Saviour and his
angels. The North had its own notion on this point. Its mythology was
not without its own dark powers; but though they too were ejected and
dispossessed, they, according to that mythology, had rights of their
own. To them belonged all the universe that had not been seized and
reclaimed by the younger race of Odin and Aesir; and though this
upstart dynasty, as the Frost Giants in Promethean phrase would have
called it, well knew that Hel, one of this giant progeny, was fated to
do them all mischief, and to outlive them, they took her and made her
queen of Niflheim, and mistress over nine worlds. There, in a bitterly
cold place, she received the souls of all who died of sickness or old
age; care was her bed, hunger her dish, starvation her knife. Her walls
were high and strong, and her bolts and bars huge; “Half blue was her
skin, and half the colour of human flesh. A goddess easy to know, and
in all things very stern and grim.”[33] But though severe, she was not
an evil spirit. She only received those who died as no Norseman wished
to die. For those who fell on the gory battle-field, or sank beneath
the waves, Valhalla was prepared, and endless mirth and bliss with
Odin. Those went to Hel, who were rather unfortunate than wicked, who
died before they could be killed. But when Christianity came in and
ejected Odin and his crew of false divinities, declaring them to be
lying gods and demons, then Hel fell with the rest; but fulfilling her
fate, outlived them. From a person she became a place, and all the
Northern nations, from the Goth to the Norseman, agreed in believing
Hell to be the abode of the devil and his wicked spirits, the place
prepared from the beginning for the everlasting torments of the damned.
One curious fact connected with this explanation of Hell’s origin will
not escape the reader’s attention. The Christian notion of Hell is that
of a place of heat, for in the East, whence Christianity came, heat is
often an intolerable torment, and cold, on the other hand, everything
that is pleasant and delightful. But to the dweller in the North, heat
brings with it sensations of joy and comfort, and life without fire has
a dreary outlook; so their Hel ruled in a cold region over those who
were cowards by implication, while the mead-cup went round, and huge
logs blazed and crackled in Valhalla, for the brave and beautiful who
had dared to die on the field of battle. But under Christianity the
extremes of heat and cold have met, and Hel, the cold uncomfortable
goddess, is now our Hell, where flames and fire abound, and where the
devils abide in everlasting flame.

Still, popular tradition is tough, and even after centuries of
Christian teaching, the Norse peasant, in his popular tales, can still
tell of Hell as a place where fire-wood is wanted at Christmas, and
over which a certain air of comfort breathes, though, as in the goddess
Hel’s halls, meat is scarce. The following passage from “Why the Sea is
Salt”, No. ii, will sufficiently prove this:

“Well, here is the flitch”, said the rich brother, “and now go straight
to Hell.”

“What I have given my word to do, I must stick to” said the other; so
he took the flitch and set off. He walked the whole day, and at dusk he
came to a place where he saw a very bright light.

“Maybe this is the place” said the man to himself. So he turned aside,
and the first thing he saw was an old, old man, with a long white
beard, who stood in an outhouse, hewing wood for the Christmas fire.

“Good even,” said the man with the flitch.

“The same to you; whither are you going so late?” said the man.

“Oh! I’m going to Hell, if I only knew the right way,” answered the
poor man.

“Well, you’re not far wrong, for this is Hell,” said the old man; “When
you get inside they will be all for buying your flitch, for meat is
scarce in Hell; but mind you don’t sell it unless you get the
hand-quern which stands behind the door for it. When you come out, I’ll
teach you how to handle the quern, for it’s good to grind almost
anything.”

This, too, is the proper place to explain the conclusion of that
intensely heathen tale, “the Master-Smith”, No. xvi. We have already
seen how the Saviour and St Peter supply, in its beginning, the place
of Odin and some other heathen god. But when the Smith sets out with
the feeling that he has done a silly thing in quarrelling with the
Devil, having already lost his hope of heaven, this tale assumes a
still more heathen shape. According to the old notion, those who were
not Odin’s guests went either to Thor’s house, who had all the thralls,
or to Freyja, who even claimed a third part of the slain on every
battle-field with Odin, or to Hel, the cold comfortless goddess already
mentioned, who was still no tormentor, though she ruled over nine
worlds, and though her walls were high, and her bolts and bars huge;
traits which come out in “the Master-Smith”, No. xvi, when the Devil,
who here assumes Hel’s place, orders the watch to go back and lock up
_all the nine locks on the gates of Hell_ —a lock for each of the
goddesses _nine_ worlds—and to put a padlock on besides. In the
twilight between heathendom and Christianity, in that half Christian
half heathen consciousness, which this tale reveals, heaven is the
preferable abode, as Valhalla was of yore, but rather than be without a
house to one’s head after death, Hell was not to be despised; though,
having behaved ill to the ruler of one, and actually quarrelled with
the master of the other, the Smith was naturally anxious on the matter.
This notion of different abodes in another world, not necessarily
places of torment, comes out too in “Not a Pin to choose between them”,
No. xxiv, where Peter, the second husband of the silly Goody, goes
about begging from house to house in Paradise.

For the rest, whenever the Devil appears in these tales, it is not at
all as the Arch-enemy, as the subtle spirit of the Christian’s faith,
but rather as one of the old Giants, supernatural and hostile indeed to
man, but simple and easily deceived by a cunning reprobate, whose
superior intelligence he learns to dread, for whom he feels himself no
match, and whom, finally, he will receive in Hell at no price. We shall
have to notice some other characteristics of this race of giants a
little further on, but certainly no greater proof can be given of the
small hold which the Christian Devil has taken of the Norse mind, than
the heathen aspect under which he constantly appears, and the ludicrous
way in which he is always outwitted.

We have seen how our Lord and the saints succeeded to Odin and his
children in the stories which told of their wanderings on earth, to
warn the wicked, or to help the good; we have seen how the kindliness
and helpfulness of the ancient goddesses fell like a royal mantle round
the form of the Virgin Mary. We have seen, too, on the other hand, how
the procession of the Almighty God degenerated into the infernal
midnight hunt. We have now to see what became of the rest of the power
of the goddesses, of all that might which was not absorbed into the
glory of the blessed Virgin. We shall not have far to seek. No reader
of early medieval chronicles and sermons, can fail to have been struck
with many passages which ascribe majesty and power to beings of woman’s
sex. Now it is a heathen goddess as _Diana_ ; now some half-historical
character as _Bertha_ ; now a mythical being as _Holda_ ; now
_Herodias_ ; now _Satia_ ; now _Domina Abundia_, or _Dame Habonde_.[34]

A very short investigation will serve to identify the two ancient
goddesses Frigga and Freyja with all these leaders of a midnight host.
Just as Odin was banished from day to darkness, so the two great
heathen goddesses, fused into one “uncanny” shape, were supposed to
ride the air at night. Medieval chroniclers, writing in bastard Latin,
and following the example of classical authors, when they had to find a
name for this demon-goddess, chose, of course, _Diana_ the heathen
huntress, the moon-goddess, and the ruler of the night. In the same
way, when they threw Odin’s name into a Latin shape, he, the god of wit
and will, as well as power and victory, became Mercury. As for
Herodias—not the mother, but the daughter who danced—she must have made
a deep impression on the mind of the early Middle Age, for she was
supposed to have been cursed after the beheading of John the Baptist,
and to have gone on dancing for ever. When heathendom fell, she became
confounded with the ancient Goddesses, and thus we find her, sometimes
among the crew of the Wild Huntsman, sometimes, as we see in the
passages below, in company with, or in the place of _Diana, Holda,
Satia_, and _Abundia_, at the head of a bevy of women, who met at
certain places to celebrate unholy rites and mysteries. As for _Holda,
Satia_, and _Abundia_, “the kind”, “the satisfying”, and “the
abundant”, they are plainly names of good rather than evil powers; they
are ancient epithets drawn from the bounty of the “Good Lady”, and
attest the feeling of respect which still clung to them in the popular
mind. As was the case whenever Christianity was brought in, the country
folk, always averse to change, as compared with the more lively and
intelligent dwellers in towns, still remained more or less heathen,[35]
and to this day they preserve unconsciously many superstitions which
can be traced up in lineal descent to their old belief. In many ways
does the old divinity peep out under the new superstition—the long
train, the midnight feast, “the good lady” who presides, the bounty and
abundance which her votaries fancied would follow in her footsteps, all
belong to the ancient Goddess. Most curious of all is the way in which
all these traditions from different countries insist on the third part
of the earth, the third child born, the third soul as belonging to the
“good lady”, who leads the revel; for this right of a third, or even of
a half, was one which Freyja possessed. “But Freyja is most famous of
the Asynjor. She has that bower in heaven hight Fólkvángr, and
“whithersoever she rideth to the battle, there hath she one half of the
slain; but Odin the other half.” Again “when she fares abroad, she
drives two cats and sits in a car, and she lends an easy ear to the
prayers of men.”[36]

We have got then the ancient goddesses identified as evil influences,
and as the leader of a midnight band of women, who practised secret and
unholy rites. This leads us at once to witchcraft. In all ages and in
all races this belief in sorcery has existed. Men and women practised
it alike, but in all times female sorcerers have predominated.[37] This
was natural enough. In those days women were priestesses; they
collected drugs and simples; women alone knew the virtues of plants.
Those soft hands spun linen, made lint, and bound wounds. Women in the
earliest times with which we are acquainted with our forefathers, alone
knew how to read and write, they only could carve the mystic runes,
they only could chant the charms so potent to allay the wounded
warrior’s smart and pain. The men were busy out of doors with
ploughing, hunting, barter, and war. In such an age the sex which
possessed by natural right book-learning, physic, soothsaying, and
incantation, even when they used these mysteries for good purposes,
were but a step from sin. The same soft white hand that bound the wound
and scraped the lint; the same gentle voice that sung the mystic rune,
that helped the child-bearing woman, or drew the arrow-head from the
dying champion’s breast; the same bright eye that gazed up to heaven in
ecstacy through the sacred grove and read the will of the Gods when the
mystic tablets and rune-carved lots were cast—all these, if the will
were bad, if the soothsayer passed into the false prophetess, the leech
into a poisoner, and the priestess into a witch, were as potent and
terrible for ill as they had once been powerful for good. In all the
Indo-European tribes, therefore, women, and especially old women, have
practised witchcraft from the earliest times, and Christianity found
them wherever it advanced. But Christianity, as it placed mankind upon
a higher platform of civilization, increased the evil which it found,
and when it expelled the ancient goddesses, and confounded them as
demons with Diana and Herodias, it added them and their votaries to the
old class of malevolent sorcerers. There was but one step, but a simple
act of the will, between the Norn and the hag, even before Christianity
came in. As soon as it came, down went Goddess, Valkyrie, Norn,
priestess, and soothsayer, into that unholy deep where the heathen hags
and witches had their being; and, as Christianity gathered strength,
developed its dogmas, and worked out its faith; fancy, tradition,
leechcraft, poverty, and idleness, produced that unhappy class, the
medieval witch, the persecution of which is one of the darkest pages in
religious history.

It is curious indeed to trace the belief in witches through the Middle
Age, and to mark how it increases in intensity and absurdity. At first,
as we have seen in the passages quoted, the superstition seemed
comparatively harmless, and though the witches themselves may have
believed in their unholy power, there were not wanting divines who took
a common-sense view of the matter, and put the absurdity of their
pretensions to a practical proof. Such was that good parish priest who
asked, when an old woman of his flock insisted that she had been in his
house with the company of “the Good Lady”, and had seen him naked and
covered him up, “How, then, did you get in when all the doors were
locked?” “We can get in,” she said, “even if the doors are locked.”
Then the priest took her into the chancel of the church, locked the
door, and gave her a sound thrashing with the pastoral staff, calling
out “Out with you, lady witch.” But as she could not, he sent her home,
saying “See now how foolish you are to believe in such empty
dreams”.[38] But as the Church increased in strength, as heresies
arose, and consequent persecution, then the secret meetings of these
sectarians, as we should now call them, were identified by the
hierarchy with the rites of sorcery and magic, and with the relics of
the worship of the old gods. By the time, too, that the hierarchy was
established, that belief in the fallen angel, the Arch-Fiend, the
Devil, originally so foreign to the nations of the West, had become
thoroughly ingrafted on the popular mind, and a new element of
wickedness and superstition was introduced at those unholy festivals.
About the middle of the thirteenth century, we find the mania for
persecuting heretics invading the tribes of Teutonic race from France
and Italy, backed by all the power of the Pope. Like jealousy,
persecution too often makes the meat it feeds on, and many silly, if
not harmless, superstitions were rapidly put under the ban of the
Church. Now the “Good Lady” and her train begin to recede, they only
fill up the background while the Prince of Darkness steps, dark and
terrible, in front, and soon draws after him the following of the
ancient goddess. Now we hear stories of demoniac possession; now the
witches adore a demon of the other sex. With the male element, and its
harsher, sterner nature, the sinfulness of these unholy assemblies is
infinitely increased; folly becomes guilt, and guilt crime.[39]

From the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth
century the history of Europe teems with processes against witches and
sorcerers. Before the Reformation it reached its height, in the
Catholic world, with the famous bull of Innocent the Eighth in 1484,
the infamous _Malleus Maleficarum_, the first of the long list of
witch-finding books, and the zeal with which the State lent all the
terrors of the law to assist the ecclesiastical inquisitors. Before the
tribunals of those inquisitors, in the fifteenth century, innumerable
victims were arraigned on the double charge of heresy and sorcery—for
the crimes ran in couples, both being children and sworn servants of
the Devil. Would that the historian could say that with the era of the
Reformation these abominations ceased. The Roman Hierarchy, with her
bulls and inquisitors, had sown a bitter crop, which both she and the
Protestant Churches were destined to reap; but in no part of the world
were the labourers more eager and willing, when the fields were “black”
to harvest, than in those very reformed communities which had just
shaken off the yoke of Rome, and which had sprung in many cases from
the very heretics whom she had persecuted and burnt, accusing them at
the same time, of the most malignant sorceries.[40] Their excuse is,
that no one is before his age. The intense personality given to the
Devil in the Middle Age had possessed the whole mind of Europe. We must
take them as we find them, with their bright fancy, their earnest
faith, their stern fanaticism, their revolting superstition, just as
when we look upon a picture we know that those brilliant hues and
tones, that spirit which informs the whole, could never be, were it not
for the vulgar earths and oil out of which the glorious work of art is
mixed and made. Strangely monotonous are all the witch trials of which
Europe has so many to show. At first the accused denies, then under
torture she confesses, then relapses and denies; tortured again she
confesses again, amplifies her story, and accuses others. When given to
the stake, she not seldom asserts all her confessions to be false,
which is ascribed to the power which the fiend still has over her. Then
she is burnt and her ashes given to the winds. Those who wish to read
one unexampled, perhaps for barbarity and superstition, and more
curious than the rest from the prominence given in it to a man, may
find it in the trial of Dr. Fian, the Scotch wizard, “which doctor was
register to the Devil, that sundry times preached at North Baricke
(North Berwick, in East Lothian) Kirke, to a number of notorious
witches.”[41] But we advise no one to venture on a perusal of this
tract who is not prepared to meet with the most unutterable accusations
and crimes, the most cruel tortures, and the most absurd confessions,
followed as usual by the stoutest denial of all that had been
confessed; when torture had done her worst on poor human nature, and
the soul re-asserted at the last her supremacy over the body.[42] One
characteristic of all these witch trials, is the fact, that in spite of
their unholy connection and intrigues with the Evil One, no witch ever
attained to wealth and station by the aid of the Prince of Darkness.
The pleasure to do ill, is all the pleasure they feel. This fact alone
might have opened the eyes of their persecutors, for if the Devil had
the worldly power which they represented him to have, he might at least
have raised some of his votaries to temporal rank, and to the pomps and
the vanities of this world. An old German proverb expresses this
notorious fact, by saying, that “every seven years, a witch is three
halfpence richer”; and so with all the unholy means of Hell at their
command, they dragged out their lives, along with their black cats, in
poverty and wretchedness. To this fate at last, came the worshippers of
the great goddess Freyja, whom our forefathers adored as the goddess of
love and plenty; and whose car was drawn by those animals which popular
superstition has ever since assigned to the “old witch” of our English
villages.

The North was not free, any more than the rest of the Protestant world,
from this direful superstition, which ran over Europe like a pestilence
in the sixteenth century. In Sweden especially, the witches and their
midnight ridings to _Blokulla_, the black hill, gave occasion to
processes as absurd and abominable as the trial of Dr. Fian and the
witch-findings of Hopkins. In Denmark, the sorceresses were supposed to
meet at Tromsoe high up in Finmark, or even on Heckla in Iceland. The
Norse witches met at a Blokolle of their own, or on the Dovrefell, or
at other places in Norway or Finmark. As might be expected, we find
many traces of witchcraft in these Tales, but it may be doubted whether
these may not be referred rather to the old heathen belief in such arts
still lingering in the popular mind than to the processes of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were far more a craze and
mania of the educated classes acting under a mistaken religious
fanaticism against popular superstitions than a movement arising from
the mass of the community. Still, in “the Mastermaid”, No. xi, the
witch of a sister-in-law, who had rolled the apple over to the Prince,
and so charmed him, was torn to pieces between twenty-four horses. The
old queen in “The Lassie and her Godmother”, No. xxvii, tries to
persuade her son to have the young queen burnt alive for a wicked
witch, who was dumb, and had eaten her own babes. In “East o’ the Sun
and West o’ the Moon”, No. iv, it is a wicked stepmother who has
bewitched the prince. In “Bushy Bride”, No. xlv, the ugly bride charms
the king to sleep, and is at last thrown, with her wicked mother, into
a pit full of snakes. In the “Twelve Wild Ducks”, No. viii, the wicked
stepmother persuades the king that Snow-white and Rosy-red is a witch,
and almost persuades him to burn her alive. In “Tatterhood”, No. xlvii,
a whole troop of witches come to keep their revels on Christmas eve in
the Queen’s Palace, and snap off the young Princess’s head. It is hard,
indeed, in tales where Trolls play so great a part, to keep witch and
Troll separate; but the above instances will show that the belief in
the one, as distinct from the other, exists in the popular
superstitions of the North.

The frequent transformation of men into beasts, in these tales, is
another striking feature. This power the gods of the Norseman possessed
in common with those of all other mythologies. Europa and her Bull,
Leda and her Swan, will occur at once to the reader’s mind; and to come
to closer resemblances, just as Athene appears in the Odyssey as an
eagle or a swallow perched on the roof of the hall,[43] so Odin flies
off as a falcon, and Loki takes the form of a horse or bird. This was
only part of that omnipotence which all gods enjoy. But the belief that
men, under certain conditions, could also take the shape of animals, is
primaeval, and the traditions of every race can tell of such
transformations. Herodotus had heard how the Neurians, a Slavonic race,
passed for wizards amongst the Scythians and the Greeks settled round
the Black Sea, because each of them, once in the year, became a wolf
for a few days, and then returned to his natural shape. Pliny,
Pomponius Mela, and St. Augustin, in his great treatise, _De Civitate
Dei_, tell the same story, and Virgil, in his Eclogues, has sung the
same belief.[44] The Latins called such a man, a
_turnskin—versipellis_, an expression which exactly agrees with the
Icelandic expression for the same thing, and which is probably the true
original of our _turncoat_. In Petronius the superstition appears in
its full shape, and is worth repeating. At the banquet of Trimalchion,
Nicoros gives the following account of the turn-skins of Nero’s time:

“It happened that my master was gone to Capua to dispose of some
second-hand goods. I took the opportunity and persuaded our guest to
walk with me to the fifth milestone. He was a valiant soldier, and a
sort of grim water-drinking Pluto. About cock-crow, when the moon was
shining as bright as mid-day, we came among the monuments. My friend
began addressing himself to the stars, but I was rather in a mood to
sing or to count them; and when I turned to look at him, lo! he had
already stripped himself and laid down his clothes near him. My heart
was in my nostrils, and I stood like a dead man; but he “_circumminxit
vestimenta_”, and on a sudden became a wolf. Do not think I jest; I
would not lie for any man’s estate. But to return to what I was saying.
When he became a wolf, he began howling, and fled into the woods. At
first I hardly knew where I was, and afterwards, when I went to take up
his clothes, they were turned into stone. Who then died with fear but
I? Yet I drew my sword, and went cutting the air right and left, till I
reached the villa of my sweetheart. I entered the court-yard. I almost
breathed my last, the sweat ran down my neck, my eyes were dim, and I
thought I should never recover myself. My Melissa wondered why I was
out so late, and said to me: “Had you come sooner you might at least
have helped us, for a wolf has entered the farm, and worried all our
cattle; but he had not the best of the joke, for all he escaped, for
our slave ran a lance through his neck.” When I heard this, I could not
doubt how it was, and, as it was clear daylight, ran home as fast as a
robbed innkeeper. When I came to the spot where the clothes had been
turned into stone, I could find nothing except blood. But when I got
home, I found my friend the soldier in bed, bleeding at the neck like
an ox, and a doctor dressing his wound. I then knew he was a turn-skin,
nor would I ever have broke bread with him again; No, not if you had
killed me.”[45]

A man who had such a gift or greed was also called lycanthropus, a
man-wolf or wolf-man, which term the Anglo-Saxons translated literally
in Canute’s Laws _verevulf_, and the early English _werewolf_. In old
French he was _loupgarou_, which means the same thing; except that
_garou_ means man-wolf in itself without the antecedent _loup_, so
that, as Madden observes, the whole word is one of those reduplications
of which we have an example in _lukewarm_. In Brittany he was
_bleizgarou_ and _denvleiz_, formed respectively from _bleiz_, wolf,
and _den_, man; _garou_ is merely a distorted form of _wer_ or _vere_,
man and _loup_. In later French the word became _waroul_, whence the
Scotch _wrout_, _wurl_, and _worlin_.[46]

It was not likely that a belief so widely spread should not have
extended itself to the North; and the grave assertions of Olaus Magnus
in the sixteenth century, in his Treatise _De Gentibus
Septentrionalibus_, show how common the belief in were-wolves was in
Sweden so late as the time of Gustavus Vasa. In mythical times the
_Volsunga Saga_[47] expressly states of Sigmund and Sinfjötli that they
became were-wolves—which, we may remark, were Odin’s sacred beasts—just
in the same way as Brynhildr and the Valkyries, or corse-choosers, who
followed the god of battles to the field, and chose the dead for
Valhalla when the fight was done, became swan-maidens, and took the
shape of swans. In either case, the wolf’s skin or the swan’s feathery
covering was assumed and laid aside at pleasure, though the _Völundr
Quidr_, in the _Edda_, and the stories of “The Fair Melusina”, and
other medieval swan-maidens, show that any one who seized that shape
while thus laid aside, had power over its wearer. In later times, when
this old heroic belief degenerated into the notion of sorcery, it was
supposed that a girdle of wolfskin thrown over the body, or even a slap
on the face with a wolfskin glove, would transform the person upon whom
the sorcerer practised into the shape of a ravening wolf, which fled at
once to the woods, where he remained in that shape for a period which
varied in popular belief for nine days, three, seven, or nine years.
While in this state he was especially ravenous after young children,
whom he carried off as the were-wolf carried off William in the old
romance, though all were-wolves did not treat their prey with the same
tenderness as that were-wolf treated William.

But the favourite beast for Norse transformations in historic times, if
we may judge from the evidence afforded by the Sagas, was the bear, the
king of all their beasts, whose strength and sagacity made him an
object of great respect.[48]

This old belief, then, might be expected to be found in these Norse
Tales, and accordingly we find men transformed in them into various
beasts. Of old these transformations, as we have already stated, were
active, if we may use the expression, as well as passive. A man who
possessed the gift, frequently assumed the shape of a beast at his own
will and pleasure, like the soldier in Petronius. Even now in Norway,
it is matter of popular belief that Finns and Lapps, who from time
immemorial have passed for the most skilful witches and wizards in the
world, can at will assume the shape of bears; and it is a common thing
to say of one of those beasts, when he gets unusually savage and
daring, “that can be no Christian bear”. On such a bear, in the parish
of Oföden, after he had worried to death more than sixty horses and six
men, it is said that a girdle of bearskin, the infallible mark of a man
thus transformed, was found when he was at last tracked and slain. The
tale called “Farmer Weathersky”, No. xli in this collection, shows that
the belief of these spontaneous transformations still exists in popular
tradition, where it is easy to see that Farmer Weathersky is only one
of the ancient gods degraded into a demon’s shape. His sudden departure
through the air, horse, sledge, and lad, and all, and his answer “I’m
at home, alike north, and south, and east, and west”; his name itself,
and his distant abode, surrounded with the corpses of the slain,
sufficiently betray the divinity in disguise. His transformation, too,
into a hawk answers exactly to that of Odin when he flew away from the
Frost Giant in the shape of that bird. But in these tales such
transformations are for the most part passive; they occur not at the
will of the person transformed, but through sorcery practised on them
by some one else. Thus the White Bear in the beautiful story of “East
o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”, No. iv, is a Prince transformed by
his stepmother, just as it is the stepmother who plays the same part in
the romance of William and the Were-wolf. So the horse in “the Widow’s
Son”, No. xliv, is a Prince over whom a king has cast that shape.[49]
So also in “Lord Peter”, No. xlii, which is the full story of what we
have only hitherto known in part as “Puss in Boots”, the cat is a
princess bewitched by the Troll who had robbed her of her lands; so
also in “The Seven Foals”, No. xliii, and “The Twelve Wild Ducks”, No.
viii, the Foals and the Ducks are Princes over whom that fate has come
by the power of a witch or a Troll, to whom an unwary promise had been
given. Thoroughly mythic is the trait in “The Twelve Wild Ducks”, where
the youngest brother reappears with a wild duck’s wing instead of his
left arm, because his sister had no time to finish that portion of the
shirt, upon the completion of which his retransformation depended.

But we should ill understand the spirit of the Norsemen, if we supposed
that these transformations into beasts were all that the national heart
has to tell of beasts and their doings, or that, when they appear, they
do so merely as men-beasts, without any power or virtue of their own.
From the earliest times, side by side with those productions of the
human mind which speak of the dealings of men with men, there has grown
up a stock of traditions about animals and their relations with one
another, which forms a true Beast Epic, and is full of the liveliest
traits of nature. Here, too, it was reserved for Grimm to restore these
traditions to their true place in the history of the human mind, and
show that the poetry which treats of them is neither satirical nor
didactic, though it may contain touches of both these artificial kinds
of composition, but, on the contrary, purely and intensely natural. It
is Epic, in short, springing out of that deep love of nature and close
observation of the habits of animals which is only possible in an early
and simple stage of society. It used to be the fashion, when these
Beast traditions were noticed, to point to Aesop as their original, but
Grimm has sufficiently proved[50] that what we see in Aesop is only the
remains of a great world-old cycle of such traditions which had
already, in Aesop’s day, been subjected by the Greek mind to that
critical process which a late state of society brings to bear on
popular traditions; that they were then already worn and washed out and
moralized. He had also shown how the same process went on till in
Phaedrus nothing but the dry bones of the traditions, with a drier
moral, are served up to the reader; and he has done justice on La
Fontaine, who wrote with all the wanton licentiousness of his day, and
frittered away the whole nature of his fables by the frivolity of his
allusions to the artificial society of his time. Nor has he spared
Lessing, who, though he saw through the poverty of Phaedrus as compared
with Aesop, and was alive to the weakness of La Fontaine, still
wandered about in the classical mist which hung heavy over the learning
of the eighteenth century, and saw in the Greek form the perfection of
all fable, when in Aesop it really appears in a state of degeneracy and
decay. Here too, as in so many other things, we have a proof that the
world is older than we think it. The Beast-Fables in the _Pantcha
Tantra_ and the _Hitopadesa_, the Indian parallels to Aesop, reveal, in
the connection in which they occur, and in the moral use to which they
are put, a state of society long past that simple early time in which
such fictions arise. They must have sprung up in the East in the very
dawn of time; and thence travelling in all directions, we find them
after many centuries in various shapes, which admit of no mistake as to
their first origin, at the very ends of the earth, in countries as
opposite as the Poles to each other; in New Zealand and Norway, in
Central Africa and Servia, in the West Indies and in Mongolia; all
separated by immense tracts of land or sea from their common centre. To
the earnest inquirer, to one who believes that many dark things may yet
be solved, it is very satisfactory to see that even Grimm, in his
_Reynard the Fox_, is at a loss to understand why the North, properly
so called, had none of the traditions which the Middle Age moulded into
that famous Beast-Epic. But since then the North, as the Great Master
himself confesses in his later works, has amply avenged herself for the
slight thus cast upon her by mistake. In the year 1834, when Grimm thus
expressed his surprise on this point, the North had no such traditions
to show in books indeed, but she kept them stored up in her heart in an
abundance with which no other land perhaps can vie. This book at least
shows how natural it seems to the Norse mind now, and how much more
natural of course it seemed in earlier times, when sense went for as
much and reflection for so little, that beasts should talk; and how
truly and faithfully it has listened and looked for the accents and
character of each. The Bear is still the King of Beasts, in which
character he appears in “True and Untrue”, No. i, but here, as in
Germany, he is no match for the Fox in wit. Thus Reynard plays him a
trick which condemns him for ever to a stumpy tail in No. xxiii. He
cheats him out of his share of a firkin of butter in No. lvii. He is
preferred as Herdsman, in No. x, before either Bear or Wolf, by the old
wife who wants some one to tend her flock. Yet all the while he
professes immense respect for the Bear, and calls him “Lord”, even when
in the very act of outwitting him. In the tale called “Well Done and
Ill Paid”, No. xxxviii, the crafty fox puts a finish to his
misbehaviour to his “Lord Bruin”, by handing him over, bound hand and
foot, to the peasant, and by causing his death outright. Here, too, we
have an example, which we shall see repeated in the case of the giants,
that strength and stature are not always wise, and that wit and wisdom
never fail to carry the day against mere brute force. Another tale,
however, restores the bear to his true place as the king of beasts,
endowed not only with strength, but with something divine and terrible
about him which the Trolls cannot withstand. This is “The Cat on the
Dovrefell”, No. xii. In connection with which, it should be remembered
that the same tradition existed in the thirteenth century in
Germany,[51] that the bear is called familiarly grandfather in the
North, and that the Lapps reckon him rather as akin to men than beasts;
that they say he has the strength of ten and the wit of twelve men. If
they slay him, they formally beg his pardon, as do also the Ostjaks, a
tribe akin to the Lapps, and bring him to their huts with great
formalities and mystic songs. To the Wolf, whose nickname is
“Graylegs”,[52] these tales are more complimentary. He is not the
spiteful, stupid, greedy Isengrim of Germany and France. Not that
Isengrim, of whom old English fables of the thirteenth century tell us
that he became a monk, but when the brethren wished to teach him his
letters that he might learn the paternoster, all they could get out of
him was _lamb, lamb_ ; nor could they ever get him to look to the
cross, for his eyes, with his thoughts, “were ever to the
woodward”.[53] He appears, on the contrary, in “The Giant who had no
Heart in his body”, No. ix, as a kindly grateful beast, who repays
tenfold out of the hidden store of his supernatural sagacity the gift
of the old jade, which Boots had made over to him.

The horse was a sacred animal among the Teutonic tribes from the first
moment of their appearance in history, and Tacitus[54] has related, how
in the shade of those woods and groves which served them for temples,
white horses were fed at the public cost, whose backs no mortal man
crossed, whose neighings and snortings were carefully watched as
auguries and omens, and who were thought to be conscious of divine
mysteries. In Persia, too, the classical reader will remember how the
neighing of a horse decided the choice for the crown. Here, in England,
at any rate, we have only to think of Hengist and Horsa, the
twin-heroes of the Anglo-Saxon migration, as the legend ran—heroes
whose name meant “horse”—and of the vale of the White Horse in Berks.,
where the sacred form still gleams along the down, to be reminded of
the sacredness of the horse to our forefathers. The Eddas are filled
with the names of famous horses, and the Sagas contain many stories of
good steeds, in whom their owners trusted and believed as sacred to
this or that particular god. Such a horse is Dapplegrim in No. xl, of
these tales, who saves his master out of all his perils, and brings him
to all fortune, and is another example of that mysterious connection
with the higher powers which animals in all ages have been supposed to
possess.

Such a friend, too, to the helpless lassie is the Dun Bull in “Katie
Woodencloak”, No. 1, out of whose ear comes the “Wishing Cloth”, which
serves up the choicest dishes. The story is probably imperfect, as we
should expect to see him again in human shape after his head was cut
off, and his skin flayed; but, after being the chief character up to
that point, he remains from that time forth in the background, and we
only see him darkly in the man who comes out of the face of the rock
and supplies the lassie’s wants when she knocks on it. Dun, or blue, or
mouse-colour, is the favourite colour for fairy kine. Thus the cow
which Guy of Warwick killed was _dun_. The _Huldror_ in Norway have
large flocks of blue kine. In Scotland runs the story of the
mouse-coloured Elfin Bull. In Iceland the colour of such kine is
_apalgrár_, dapple grey. This animal has been an object of adoration
and respect from the earliest times, and we need only remind our
readers of the sanctity of cows and bulls among the Indians and
Egyptians, of “the Golden Calf” in the Bible; of Io and her wanderings
from land to land; and, though last, not least, of Audhumla, the Mythic
Cow in the Edda, who had so large a part in the creation of the first
Giant in human form.[55]

The dog, to which, with all his sagacity and faithfulness something
unclean and impure clings, as Grimm well observes, plays no very
prominent part in these Tales.[56] We find him, however, in “Not a Pin
to choose between them”, No. xxiv, where his sagacity fails to detect
his mistress; and, as “the foe of his own house”, the half-bred foxy
hound, who chases away the cunning Fox in “Well Done and Ill Paid”, No.
xxxviii. Still he, too, in popular superstition, is gifted with a sense
of the supernatural; he howls when death impends, and in “Buttercup”,
No. xviii, it is Goldtooth, their dog, who warns Buttercup and his
mother of the approach of the old hag. In “Bushy Bride”, No. xlv, he
appears only as the lassie’s lap-dog, is thrown away as one of her
sacrifices, and at last goes to the wedding in her coach; yet in that
tale he has something weird about him, and he is sent out by his
mistress three times to see if the dawn is coming.

In one Tale, No. xxxvii, the Goat appears in full force, and dashes out
the brains of the Troll, who lived under the bridge over the burn. In
another, “Tatterhood”, No. xlviii, he helps the lassie in her onslaught
on the witches. He, too, was sacred to Thor in the old mythology, and
drew his thundering car. Here something of the divine nature of his
former lord, who was the great foe of all Trolls, seems to have been
passed on in popular tradition to the animal who had seen so many
adventures with the great God who swayed the thunder. This feud between
the Goat and the Trolls comes out curiously in “The Old Dame and her
Hen”, No. iii, where a goat falls down the trapdoor to the Troll’s
house, “Who sent for you, I should like to know, you long-bearded
beast” said the Man o’ the Hill, who was in an awful rage; and with
that he whipped up the Goat, wrung his head off, and threw him down
into the cellar. Still he belonged to one of the heathen gods, and so
in later Middle-Age superstition he is assigned to the Devil, who even
takes his shape when he presides at the Witches’ Sabbath.

Nor in this list must the little birds be forgotten which taught the
man’s daughter, in the tale of “The Two Stepsisters”, No. xvii, how to
act in her trials. So, too, in “Katie Woodencloak”, No. l, the little
bird tells the Prince, “who understood the song of birds very well,”
that blood is gushing out of the golden shoe. The belief that some
persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said, is
primaeval. We pay homage to it in our proverbial expression, “a little
bird told me”. Popular traditions and rhymes protect their nests, as in
the case of the wren, the robin, and the swallow. Occasionally this
gift seems to have been acquired by eating or tasting the flesh of a
snake or dragon, as Sigurd, in the Volsung tale, first became aware of
Regin’s designs against his life, when he accidentally tasted the
heart-blood of Fafnir, whom he had slain in dragon shape, and then all
at once the swallow’s song, perched above him, became as intelligible
as human speech.

We now come to a class of beings which plays a large part, and always
for ill, in these Tales. These are the Giants or Trolls. In modern
Norse tradition there is little difference between the names, but
originally Troll was a more general expression for a supernatural being
than Giant,[57] which was rather confined to a race more dull than
wicked. In the Giants we have the wantonness of boundless bodily
strength and size, which, trusting entirely to these qualities, falls
at last by its own weight. At first, it is true that proverbial wisdom,
all the stores of traditional lore, all that could be learnt by what
may be called rule of thumb, was ascribed to them. One sympathises too
with them, and almost pities them as the representatives of a simple
primitive race, whose day is past and gone, but who still possessed
something of the innocence and virtue of ancient times, together with a
stock of old experience, which, however useful it might be as an
example to others, was quite useless to help themselves. They are the
old Tories of mythology, as opposed to the Aesir, the advanced
liberals. They can look back and say what has been, but to look forward
to say what will be and shall be, and to mould the future, is beyond
their ken. True as gold to the traditional and received, and worthless
as dross for the new and progressive. Such a nature, when unprovoked,
is easy and simple; but rouse it, and its exuberant strength rises in a
paroxysm of rage, though its clumsy awkward blows, guided by mere
cunning, fail to strike the slight and lissom foe who waits for and
eludes the stroke, until his reason gives him the mastery over sheer
brute force which has wearied itself out by its own exertions.[58]

This race, and that of the upstart Aesir, though almost always at feud,
still had their intervals of common intercourse, and even social
enjoyment. Marriages take place between them, visits are paid, feasts
are given, ale is breached, and mirth is fast and furious. Thor was the
worst foe the giants ever had, and yet he met them sometimes on good
terms. They were destined to meet once for all on that awful day, “the
twilight of the gods”, but till then, they entertained for each other
some sense of mutual respect.

The Trolls, on the other hand, with whom mankind had more to do, were
supposed to be less easy tempered, and more systematically malignant,
than the Giants, and with the term were bound up notions of sorcery and
unholy power. But mythology is a woof of many colours, in which the
hues are shot and blended, so that the various races of supernatural
beings are shaded off, and fade away almost imperceptibly into each
other; and thus, even in heathen times, it must have been hard to say
exactly where the Giant ended and the Troll began. But when
Christianity came in, and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the
Aesir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the
objects of the old popular belief, whether Aesir, Giants, or Trolls,
were mingled together in one superstition, as “no canny”. They were all
Trolls, all malignant; and thus it is that, in these tales, the
traditions about Odin and his underlings, about the Frost Giants, and
about sorcerers and wizards, are confused and garbled; and all
supernatural agency that plots man’s ill is the work of Trolls, whether
the agent be the arch enemy himself, or giant, or witch, or wizard.

In tales such as “The Old Dame and her Hen”, No. iii, “The Giant who
had no Heart in his Body”, No. ix, “Shortshanks”, No. xx, “Boots and
the Troll”, No. xxxii, “Boots who ate a match with the Troll”, No. v,
the easy temper of the old Frost Giants predominates, and we almost
pity them as we read. In another, “The Big Bird Dan”, No. lv, we have a
Troll Prince, who appears as a generous benefactor to the young Prince,
and lends him a sword by help of which he slays the King of the Trolls,
just as we sometimes find in the Edda friendly meetings between the
Aesir and this or the Frost Giant. In “Tatterhood”, No. xlviii, the
Trolls are very near akin to the witches of the Middle Age. In other
tales, as “The Mastermaid”, No. xi, “The Blue Belt”, No. xxii, “Farmer
Weathersky”, No. xli, a sort of settled malignity against man appears
as the direct working and result of a bad and evil spirit. In
“Buttercup”, No. xviii, and “The Cat on the Dovrefell”, we have the
Troll proper,—the supernatural dwellers of the woods and hills, who go
to church, and eat men, and porridge, and sausages indifferently, not
from malignity, but because they know no better, because it is their
nature, and because they have always done so. In one point they all
agree—in their place of abode. The wild pine forest that clothes the
spurs of the fells, but more than all, the interior recesses of the
rocky fell itself, is where the Trolls live. Thither they carry off the
children of men, and to them belongs all the untold riches of the
mineral world. There, in caves and clefts in the steep face of the
rock, sits the Troll, as the representative of the old giants, among
heaps of gold and silver and precious things. They stride off into the
dark forest by day, whither no rays of the sun can pierce; they return
home at nightfall, feast themselves full, and snore out the night. One
thing was fatal to them—the sight of the sun. If they looked him full
in the face, his glory was too great for them, and they burst, as in
“Lord Peter”, No. xlii, and in “The Old Dame and her Hen”, No. iii.
This, too, is a deeply mythic trait. The old religion of the North was
a bright and lively faith; it lived in the light of joy and gladness;
its gods were the “blithe powers”; opposed to them were the dark powers
of mist and gloom, who could not bear the glorious face of the Sun, of
Baldr’s beaming visage, or the bright flash of Thor’s levin bolt.

In one aspect, the whole race of Giants and Trolls stands out in strong
historical light. There can be little doubt that, in their continued
existence amongst the woods, and rocks, and hills, we have a memory of
the gradual suppression and extinction of some hostile race, who
gradually retired into the natural fastnesses of the land, and speedily
became mythic. Nor, if we bear in mind their natural position, and
remember how constantly the infamy of sorcery has clung to the Finns
and Lapps, shall we have far to go to seek this ancient race, even at
the present day. Between this outcast nomad race, which wandered from
forest to forest, and from fell to fell, without a fixed place of
abode, and the old natural powers and Frost Giants, the minds of the
race which adored Odin and the Aesir soon engendered a monstrous
man-eating cross-breed of supernatural beings, who fled from contact
with the intruders as soon as the first great struggle was over,
abhorred the light of day, and looked upon agriculture and tillage as a
dangerous innovation which destroyed their hunting fields, and was
destined finally to root them out from off the face of the earth. This
fact appears in countless stories all over the globe, for man is true
to himself in all climes, and the savage in Africa or across the Rocky
Mountains, dreads tillage and detests the plough as much as any Lapp or
Samoyed. “See what pretty playthings, mother!” cries the Giants’
daughter as she unties her apron, and shows her a plough, and horses,
and peasants. “Back with them this instant”, cries the mother in wrath,
“and put them down as carefully as you can, for these playthings can do
our race great harm, and when these come we must budge.” “What sort of
an earthworm is this?” said one Giant to another, when they met a man
as they walked. “These are the earthworms that will one day eat us up,
brother,” answered the other; and soon both Giants left that part of
Germany. Nor does this trait appear less strongly in these Norse Tales.
The Giants or Trolls can neither brew nor wash properly, as we see in
Shortshanks, No. xx, where the Ogre has to get Shortshanks to brew his
ale for him; and in “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”, No. iv,
where none of the Trolls are able to wash out the spot of tallow. So
also in the “Two Step-sisters”, No. xvii, the old witch is forced to
get human maids to do her household-work; and, lastly, the best example
of all, in “Lord Peter”, No. xlii, where agriculture is plainly a
secret of mankind, which the Giants were eager to learn, but which was
a branch of knowledge beyond their power to attain.

“Stop a bit”, said the Cat, “and I’ll tell you how the farmer sets to
work to get in his winter rye.”

And so she told him such a long story about the winter rye.

“First of all, you see, he ploughs the field, and then he dungs it, and
then he ploughs it again, and then he harrows it,” and so she went on
till the sun rose.

Before we leave these gigantic natural powers, let us linger a moment
to point out how heartily the Winds are sketched in these Tales as four
brothers; of whom, of course, the North wind is the oldest, and
strongest, and roughest. But though rough in form and tongue, he is a
genial, kind-hearted fellow after all. He carries the lassie to the
castle, “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”, whither none of his
brothers had strength to blow. All he asks is that she won’t be afraid,
and then he takes a good rest, and puffs himself up with as much breath
as ever he can hold, begins to blow a storm, and off they go. So, too,
in “The Lad who went to the North Wind”, No. xxxiv, though he can’t
restore the meal he carried off, he gives the lad three things which
make his fortune, and amply repay him. He, too, like the Grecian
Boreas, is divine, and lineally descended from Hraesvelgr, that great
giant in the Edda, who sits “at the end of the world in eagle’s shape,
and when he flaps his wings, all the winds come that blow upon men.”

Enough surely has now been said to shew that the old religion and
mythology of the Norseman still lives disguised in these popular tales.
Besides this internal evidence, we find here and there, in the written
literature of earlier days, hints that the same stories were even then
current, and current then as now, among the lower classes. Thus, in
_King Sverri’s Saga_ we read: “And so it was just like what is said to
have happened in old stories of what the king’s children suffered from
their stepmother’s ill-will.” And again, in _Olof Tryggvason’s Saga_ by
the monk Odd: “And better is it to hear such things with mirth than
stepmother’s stories which shepherds tell, where no one can tell
whether anything is true, and where the king is always made the least
in their narrative.” But, in truth, no such positive evidence is
needed. Any one who has read the Volsung tale as we have given it, will
be at no loss to see where the “little birds” who speak to the Prince
and the lassie, in these tales, come from; nor when they read in the
“Big Bird Dan”, No. lv, about “the naked sword” which the Princess lays
by her side every night, will they fail to recognize Sigurd’s sword
_Gram_, which he laid between himself and Brynhildr when he rode
through the flame and won her for Gunnar. These mythical deep-rooted
groves, throwing out fresh shoots from age to age in the popular
literature of the race, are far more convincing proofs of the early
existence of these traditions than any mere external evidence”.[59]




CONCLUSION


We have now only to consider the men and women of these Tales, and then
our task is done. It will be sooner done, because they may be left to
speak for themselves, and must stand or fall by their own words and
actions. The tales of all races have a character and manner of their
own. Among the Hindoos the straight stem of the story is overhung with
a network of imagery which reminds one of the parasitic growth of a
tropical forest. Among the Arabs the tale is more elegant, pointed with
a moral, and adorned with tropes and episodes. Among the Italians it is
bright, light, dazzling, and swift. Among the French we have passed
from the woods, and fields, and hills, to my lady’s _boudoir_—rose-pink
is the prevailing colour, and the air is loaded with patchouli and
_mille fleurs_. We miss the song of birds, the modest odour of
wild-flowers, and the balmy fragrance of the pine forest. The Swedes
are more stiff, and their style is more like that of a chronicle than a
tale. The Germans are simple, hearty, and rather comic than humorous;
and M. Moe[60] has well said, that as we read them it is as if we sat
and listened to some elderly woman of the middle class, who recites
them with a clear, full, deep voice. In Scotland the few that have been
collected by Mr Robert Chambers[61] are as good in tone and keeping as
anything of the kind in the whole range of such popular
collections.[62] The wonderful likeness which is shown between such
tales as the “Red Bull of Norway” in Mr Chambers’ collection, and Katie
Woodencloak in these Norse Tales, is to be accounted for by no theory
of the importation of this or that particular tale in later times from
Norway, but by the fact that the Lowland Scots, among whom these tales
were told, were lineal descendants of Norsemen, who had either seized
the country in the Viking times, or had been driven into it across the
Border after the Norman Conquest.

These Norse Tales we may characterize as bold, out-spoken, and
humorous, in the true sense of humour. In the midst of every difficulty
and danger arises that old Norse feeling of making the best of
everything, and keeping a good face to the foe. The language and tone
are perhaps rather lower than in some other collections, but it must be
remembered that these are the tales of “hempen homespuns”, of Norse
yeomen, of _Norske Bonder_, who call a spade a spade, and who burn
tallow, not wax; and yet in no collection of tales is the general tone
so chaste, are the great principles of morality better worked out, and
right and wrong kept so steadily in sight. The general view of human
nature is good and kindly. The happiness of married life was never more
prettily told than in “Gudbrand on the Hillside”, No. xxi, where the
tenderness of the wife for her husband weighs down all other
considerations; and we all agree with M. Moe that it would be well if
there were many wives like Gudbrand’s. The balance too, is very evenly
kept between the sexes; for if any wife should point with indignation
at such a tale as “Not a Pin to choose between them”, No. xxiv, where
wives suffer; she will be amply avenged when she reads “The Husband who
was to mind the House”, No. xxxix, where the husband has decidedly the
worst of the bargain, and is punished as he deserves.

Of particular characters, one occurs repeatedly. This is that which we
have ventured, for want of a better word, to call “Boots”, from that
widely-spread tradition in English families, that the youngest brother
is bound to do all the hard work his brothers set him, and which has
also dignified him with the term here used. In Norse he is called
“_Askefis_”, or “_Espen Askefjis_”. By M. Moe he is called
“_Askepot_”,[63] a word which the Danes got from Germany, and which the
readers of Grimm’s Tales will see at once is own brother to
_Aschenpüttel_. The meaning of the word is “one who pokes about the
ashes and blows up the fire”; one who does dirty work in short; and in
Norway, according to M. Moe, the term is almost universally applied to
the youngest son of the family. He is Cinderella’s brother in fact; and
just as she had all the dirty work put upon her by her sisters, he
meets with the same fate from his brothers. He is generally the
youngest of three, whose names are often Peter and Paul, as in No.
xlii, and who despise, cry down, and mock him. But he has in him that
deep strength of character and natural power upon which the good powers
always smile. He is the man whom Heaven helps, because he can help
himself; and so, after his brothers try and fail, he alone can watch in
the barn, and tame the steed, and ride up the glass hill, and gain the
Princess and half the kingdom. The Norse “Boots” shares these qualities
in common with the “Pinkel” of the Swedes, and the _Dummling_ of the
Germans, as well as with our “Jack the Giant Killer”, but he starts
lower than these—he starts from the dust-bin and the coal-hole. There
he sits idle whilst all work; there he lies with that deep irony of
conscious power, which knows its time must one day come, and meantime
can afford to wait. When that time comes, he girds himself to the feat,
amidst the scoffs and scorn of his flesh and blood; but even then,
after he has done some great deed, he conceals it, returns to his
ashes, and again sits idly by the kitchen-fire, dirty, lazy, and
despised, until the time for final recognition comes, and then his dirt
and rags fall off—he stands out in all the majesty of his royal robes,
and is acknowledged once for all, a king. In this way does the
consciousness of a nation, and the mirror of its thought, reflect the
image and personification of a great moral truth, that modesty,
endurance, and ability will sooner or later reap their reward, however
much they maybe degraded, scoffed at, and despised by the proud, the
worthless, and the overbearing.[64]

As a general rule, the women are less strongly marked than the men; for
these tales, as is well said, are uttered “with a manly mouth”;[65] and
none of the female characters, except perhaps “The Mastermaid”, and
“Tatterhood”, can compare in strength with “The Master-Smith”, “The
Master-Thief,” “Shortshanks” or “Boots”. Still the true womanly type
comes out in full play in such tales as “The Two Step-Sisters”, No.
xvii; “East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon”, No. iv; “Bushy Bride”,
No. xlv, and “The Twelve Wild Ducks”, No. viii. In all these the lassie
is bright, and good, and helpful; she forgets herself in her eagerness
to help others. When she goes down the well after the unequal match
against her step-sister in spinning bristles against flax; she steps
tenderly over the hedge, milks the cow, shears the sheep, relieves the
boughs of the apple-tree—all out of the natural goodness of her heart.
When she is sent to fetch water from the well, she washes and brushes,
and even kisses, the loathsome head; she believes what her enemies say,
even to her own wrong and injury; she sacrifices all that she holds
most dear, and at last even herself, because she is made to believe
that it is her brother’s wish. And so on her, too, the good powers
smile. She can understand and profit by what the little birds say; she
knows how to choose the right casket. And at last, after many trials,
all at once the scene changes, and she receives a glorious reward,
while the wicked stepmother and her ugly daughter meet with a just
fate. Nor is another female character less tenderly drawn in Hacon
Grizzlebeard, No. vi, where we see the proud, haughty princess subdued
and tamed by natural affection into a faithful, loving wife. We
sympathise with her more than with the “Patient Grizzel” of the poets,
who is in reality too good, for her story has no relief; while in Hacon
Grizzlebeard we begin by being angry at the princess’s pride; we are
glad at the retribution which overtakes her, but we are gradually
melted at her sufferings and hardships when she gives up all for the
Beggar and follows him; we burst into tears with her when she exclaims
“Oh! the Beggar, and the babe, and the cabin!”—and we rejoice with her
when the Prince says “Here is the Beggar, and there is the babe, and so
let the cabin burn away.”

Nor is it unprofitable here to remark how the professions fare when
they appear in these tales. The Church cannot be said to be treated
with respect, for “Father Lawrence” is ludicrously deceived and
scurvily treated by the Master-Thief, No. xxxv; nor does the priest
come off any better in Goosey Grizzel, No. xxxiii, where he is thrown
by the Farmer into the wet moss. Indeed, it seems as if the popular
mind were determined to revenge itself when left to itself, for the
superstition of Rome on the one hand, and the severity of strict
Lutheranism on the other. It has little to say of either of them, but
when it does speak, its accents are not those of reverence and love.
The Law, too, as represented by those awful personages the Constable,
the Attorney, and the Sheriff in “The Mastermaid”, No. xi, is held up
to ridicule, and treated with anything but tenderness. But there is one
profession for which a good word is said, a single word, but enough to
show the feeling of the people. In the “Twelve Wild Ducks” No. viii,
the king is “as soft and kind” to Snow-white and Rosy-red “as a
doctor”—a doctor, alas! not of laws, but of medicine; and thus this
profession, so often despised, but in reality the noblest, has homage
paid to it in that single sentence, which neither the Church with all
its dignity, nor the Law with all its cunning, have been able to extort
from the popular mind. Yet even this profession has a hard word uttered
against it in “Katie Woodencloak”, No. l, where the doctor takes a
great fee from the wicked queen to say she will never be well unless
she has some of the Dun Bull’s flesh to eat.

And now it is time to bring this introduction to an end, lest it should
play the Wolf’s part to Odin, and swallow up the Tales themselves.
Enough has been said, at least, to prove that even nursery tales may
have a science of their own, and to show how the old Nornir and divine
spinners can revenge themselves if their old wives’ tales are insulted
and attacked. The inquiry itself might be almost indefinitely
prolonged, for this is a journey where each turn of the road brings out
a new point of view, and the longer we linger on our path, the longer
we find something fresh to see. Popular mythology is a virgin mine, and
its ore, so far from being exhausted or worked out, has here, in
England at least, been scarcely touched. It may, indeed, be dreaded
lest the time for collecting such English traditions is not past and
gone; whether the steam-engine and printing-press have not played their
great work of enlightenment too well; and whether the popular tales, of
which, no doubt, the land was once full, have not faded away before
those great inventions, as the race of Giants waned before the might of
Odin and the Aesir. Still the example of this very Norway, which at one
time was thought, even by her own sons, to have few tales of her own,
and now has been found to have them so fresh and full, may serve as a
warning not to abandon a search, which, indeed, can scarcely be said to
have been ever begun; and to suggest a doubt whether the ill success
which may have attended this or that particular attempt, may not have
been from the fault rather of the seekers after traditions, than from
the want of the traditions themselves. In point of fact, it is a matter
of the utmost difficulty to gather such tales in any country, as those
who have collected them most successfully will be the first to confess.
It is hard to make old and feeble women, who generally are the
depositaries of these national treasures, believe that the inquirer can
have any real interest in the matter. They fear that the question is
only put to turn them into ridicule; for the popular mind is a
sensitive plant; it becomes coy, and closes its leaves at the first
rude touch; and when once shut, it is hard to make these aged lips
reveal the secrets of the memory. There they remain, however, forming
part of an under-current of tradition, of which the educated classes,
through whose minds flows the bright upper-current of faith, are apt to
forget the very existence. Things out of sight, and therefore out of
mind. Now and then a wave of chance tosses them to the surface from
those hidden depths, and all Her Majesty’s inspectors of schools are
shocked at the wild shapes which still haunt the minds of the great
mass of the community. It cannot be said that the English are not a
superstitious people. Here we have gone on for more than a hundred
years proclaiming our opinion that the belief in witches, and wizards,
and ghosts, and fetches, was extinct throughout the land. Ministers of
all denominations have preached them down, and philosophers convinced
all the world of the absurdity of such vain superstitions; and yet it
has been reserved for another learned profession, the Law, to produce
in one trial at the Staffordshire assizes, a year or two ago, such a
host of witnesses, who firmly believed in witchcraft, and swore to
their belief in spectre dogs and wizards, as to show that, in the
Midland counties at least, such traditions are anything but extinct. If
so much of the bad has been spared by steam, by natural philosophy, and
by the Church, let us hope that some of the good may still linger along
with it, and that an English Grimm may yet arise who may carry out what
Mr. Chambers has so well begun in Scotland, and discover in the mouth
of an Anglo-Saxon Gammer Grethel, some, at least, of those popular
tales which England once had in common with all the Aryan race.

For these Norse Tales one may say that nothing can equal the tenderness
and skill with which MM. Asbjörnsen and Moe have collected them. Some
of that tenderness and beauty may, it is hoped, be found in this
English translation; but to those who have never been in the country
where they are current, and who are not familiar with that hearty
simple people, no words can tell the freshness and truth of the
originals. It is not that the idioms of the two languages are
different, for they are more nearly allied, both in vocabulary and
construction, than any other two tongues, but it is the face of nature
herself, and the character of the race that looks up to her, that fail
to the mind’s eye. The West Coast of Scotland is something like that
nature in a general way, except that it is infinitely smaller and less
grand; but that constant, bright blue sky, those deeply-indented,
sinuous, gleaming friths, those headstrong rivers and headlong falls,
those steep hillsides, those long ridges of fells, those peaks and
needles rising sharp above them, those hanging glaciers and wreaths of
everlasting snow, those towering endless pine forests, relieved by
slender stems of silver birch, those green spots in the midst of the
forest, those winding dales and upland lakes, those various shapes of
birds and beasts, the mighty crashing elk, the fleet reindeer, the
fearless bear, the nimble lynx, the shy wolf, those eagles and swans,
and seabirds, those many tones and notes of Nature’s voice making
distant music through the twilight summer night, those brilliant,
flashing, northern lights when days grow short, those dazzling,
blinding storms of autumn snow, that cheerful winter frost and cold,
that joy of sledging over the smooth ice, when the sharp-shod horse
careers at full speed with the light sledge, or rushes down the steep
pitches over the crackling snow through the green spruce wood—all these
form a Nature of their own. These particular features belong in their
fulness and combination to no other land. When in the midst of all this
natural scenery, we find an honest manly race, not the race of the
towns and cities, but of the dales and fells, free and unsubdued,
holding its own in a country where there are neither lords nor ladies,
but simple men and women. Brave men and fair women, who cling to the
traditions of their forefathers, and whose memory reflects as from the
faithful mirror of their native steel the whole history and progress of
their race—when all these natural features, and such a manly race meet;
then we have the stuff out of which these tales are made, the living
rocks out of which these sharp-cut national forms are hewn. Then, too,
our task of introducing them is over, we may lay aside our pen, and
leave the reader and the tales to themselves.




TALES FROM THE NORSE




TRUE AND UNTRUE


Once on a time there were two brothers; one was called True, and the
other Untrue. True was always upright and good towards all, but Untrue
was bad and full of lies, so that no one could believe what he said.
Their mother was a widow, and hadn’t much to live on; so when her sons
had grown up, she was forced to send them away, that they might earn
their bread in the world. Each got a little scrip with some food in it,
and then they went their way.

Now, when they had walked till evening, they sat down on a windfall in
the wood, and took out their scraps, for they were hungry after walking
the whole day, and thought a morsel of food would be sweet enough.

“If you’re of my mind”, said Untrue, “I think we had better eat out of
your scrip, so long as there is anything in it, and after that we can
take to mine.”

Yes! True was well pleased with this, so they fell to eating, but
Untrue got all the best bits, and stuffed himself with them, while True
got only the burnt crusts and scraps.

Next morning they broke their fast off True’s food, and they dined off
it too, and then there was nothing left in his scrip. So when they had
walked till late at night, and were ready to eats again, True wanted to
eat out of his brother’s scrip, but Untrue said “No”, the food was his,
and he had only enough for himself.

“Nay! but you know you ate out of my scrip so long as there was
anything in it”, said True.

“All very fine, I daresay”, answered Untrue; “but if you are such a
fool as to let others eat up your food before your face, you must make
the best of it; for now all you have to do is to sit here and starve.”

“Very well!” said True, “you’re Untrue by name and untrue by nature; so
you have been, and so you will be all your life long.”

Now when Untrue heard this, he flew into a rage, and rushed at his
brother, and plucked out both his eyes. “Now, try if you can see
whether folk are untrue or not, you blind buzzard!” and so saying, he
ran away and left him.

Poor True! there he went walking along and feeling his way through the
thick wood. Blind and alone, he scarce knew which way to turn, when all
at once he caught hold of the trunk of a great bushy lime-tree, so he
thought he would climb up into it, and sit there till the night was
over for fear of the wild beasts.

“When the birds begin to sing”, he said to himself, “then I shall know
it is day, and I can try to grope my way farther on.” So he climbed up
into the lime-tree. After he had sat there a little time, he heard how
some one came and began to make a stir and clatter under the tree, and
soon after others came; and when they began to greet one another, he
found out it was Bruin the bear, and Greylegs the wolf, and Slyboots
the fox, and Longears the hare who had come to keep St. John’s eve
under the tree. So they began to eat and drink, and be merry; and when
they had done eating, they fell to gossipping together. At last the Fox
said:

“Shan’t we, each of us, tell a little story while we sit here?” Well!
the others had nothing against that. It would be good fun, they said,
and the Bear began; for you may fancy he was king of the company.

“The king of England”, said Bruin, “has such bad eyesight, he can
scarce see a yard before him; but if he only came to this lime-tree in
the morning, while the dew is still on the leaves, and took and rubbed
his eyes with the dew, he would get back his sight as good as ever.”

“Very true!” said Greylegs. “The king of England has a deaf and dumb
daughter too; but if he only knew what I know, he would soon cure her.
Last year she went to the communion. She let a crumb of the bread fall
out of her mouth, and a great toad came and swallowed it down; but if
they only dug up the chancel floor, they would find the toad sitting
right under the altar rails, with the bread still sticking in his
throat. If they were to cut the toad open and take and give the bread
to the princess, she would be like other folk again as to her speech
and hearing.”

“That’s all very well”, said the Fox; “but if the king of England knew
what I know, he would not be so badly off for water in his palace; for
under the great stone, in his palace-yard, is a spring of the clearest
water one could wish for, if he only knew to dig for it there.”

“Ah!” said the Hare in a small voice; “the king of England has the
finest orchard in the whole land, but it does not bear so much as a
crab, for there lies a heavy gold chain in three turns round the
orchard. If he got that dug up, there would not be a garden like it for
bearing in all his kingdom.”

“Very true, I dare say”, said the Fox; “but now it’s getting very late,
and we may as well go home.”

So they all went away together.

After they were gone, True fell asleep as he sat up in the tree; but
when the birds began to sing at dawn, he woke up, and took the dew from
the leaves, and rubbed his eyes with it, and so got his sight back as
good as it was before Untrue plucked his eyes out.

Then he went straight to the king of England’s palace, and begged for
work, and got it on the spot. So one day the king came out into the
palace-yard, and when he had walked about a bit, he wanted to drink out
of his pump; for you must know the day was hot, and the king very
thirsty; but when they poured him out a glass, it was so muddy, and
nasty, and foul, that the king got quite vexed.

“I don’t think there’s ever a man in my whole kingdom who has such bad
water in his yard as I, and yet I bring it in pipes from far, over hill
and dale”, cried out the king. “Like enough, your Majesty”, said True;
“but if you would let me have some men to help me to dig up this great
stone which lies here in the middle of your yard, you would soon see
good water, and plenty of it.”

Well! the king was willing enough; and they had scarcely got the stone
well out, and dug under it a while, before a jet of water sprang out
high up into the air, as clear and full as if it came out of a conduit,
and clearer water was not to be found in all England.

A little while after the king was out in his palace-yard again, and
there came a great hawk flying after his chicken, and

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