where the King Heidrek boasts of his power to solve all riddles.
Then Odin visits him in disguise as a blind man, and propounds to
the king some hard questions. Of these there are sixty-four. We will
give a few specimens. _Ques._ What was that drink I drank yesterday,
which was neither spring water, nor wine, nor mead, nor ale?--_Ans._
The dew of heaven. _Ques._ What dead lungs did I see blowing to
war?--_Ans._ A blacksmith’s bellows whilst a sword was being forged.
_Ques._ What did I see outside a great man’s door, head downwards, feet
heavenwards?--_Ans._ An onion.
These riddles are all in verse, and the replies also in verse. The end
was that Odin asked Heidrek what he, Odin, whispered into the ear of
Baldur before he was burned on his funeral pyre. Thereupon Heidrek drew
his sword and cut at his questioner, shouting: “None can answer that
but yourself!” Odin had just time to transform himself into an eagle;
but the sword shore off his tail, and eagles ever after have had short
tails.
The Sphinx will recur to the recollection of the reader, who tore to
pieces those who could not answer its riddles. At last Creon, King of
Thebes, offered his sister, Jocasta, to anyone who could solve the
enigmas propounded by the Sphinx. Œdipus ventured, and when asked by
the monster, “What animal is four-footed in the morning, two-footed
at noon, and three-footed in the evening?” answered: “Man, who as a
babe crawls, and as an old man leans on a crutch.” The Sphinx was so
distressed at hearing its riddle solved, that it precipitated itself
from a precipice and was dashed to pieces.
The Persian hero, Sal, who was brought up by the gigantic bird Simorg,
appears before Mentuscher, Schah of Iran. The latter, forewarned that
Sal will be a danger to him, endeavours to get rid of him. However, he
first tests him with hard questions. If he answers these, he is to be
allowed to live. The first question is: “There stand twelve cypresses
in a ring, and each bears thirty boughs.” Sal replies, “These are
the twelve months, each of which has thirty days.” Another question
is--“There were two horses, one black, the other clear as crystal.”
“They are Day and Night,” replied Sal.
In English and Scottish Ballads a whole class has reference to the
importance of riddle answering.
A girl is engaged to a young man who dies. He returns from the grave
and insists on her fulfilling her engagement to him and following him
to the land of the dead. She consents on one condition, that he will
answer her riddles, or else she pleads to be spared, and the dead lover
agrees on condition that she shall answer some riddles he sets. Such
is a ballad which was formerly enacted in the farmhouses in Cornwall.
The girl sits on her bed and sighs for her dead lover. He reappears and
insists on her following him. Then she sets him tasks, and he sets her
tasks.
Those he sets her are:--
“Thou must buy me, my lady, a cambrick shirt
Whilst every grove rings with a merry antine (antienne = anthem),
And stitch it without any needle work,
O, and thou shalt be a true love of mine.
“And thou must wash it in yonder well
Where never a drop of water fell.
“And thou must hang it upon a white thorn
That never has blossomed since Adam was born.”
Those she sets him are:--
“Thou must buy for me an acre of land
Between the salt ocean and the yellow sand.
“Thou must plough it over with a horse’s horn,
And sow it all over with one pepper corn.
“Thou must reap it too with a piece of leather,
And bind the sheaf with a peacock’s feather.”
“In all stories of this kind,” says Mr. Child, in his monumental work
on English Ballads, “the person upon whom a task is imposed stands
acquitted if another of no less difficulty is desired, which must be
performed first.”
An early form of this story is preserved in the _Gesta Romanorum_. A
king resolved not to marry a wife till he could find the cleverest of
women. At length a poor maid was brought to him, and he made trial
of her sagacity. He sent her a bit of linen three inches square, and
promised to marry her, if out of it she could make him a shirt. She
stipulated in reply that he should send her a vessel in which she could
work. We have here only a mutilated fragment of the series of tasks
set. In an old English ballad in the Pepysian library, an Elfin knight
visits a pretty maid, and demands her in marriage.
“‘Thou must shape a sark to me
Without any cut or heme,’ quoth he.
‘Thou must shape it knife-and-sheerless
And also sue it needle-threadless.’”
She replies:--
“I have an aiker of good ley-land
Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand.
For thou must car it with thy horn,
So thou must sow it with thy corn,
And bigg a cart of stone and lyme.
Robin Redbreast he must trail it hame,
Thou must barn it in a mouse-holl,
And thrash it into thy shoes sole.
And thou must winnow it in thy looff,
And also sech it in thy glove.
For thou must bring it over the sea,
And thou must bring it dry home to me.”
As the Elfin knight cannot fulfil these tasks, the girl is not obliged
to follow him to Elfin Land. There is another song, known in a
fragmentary condition all through England:--
“Cold blows the wind to-night, sweetheart,
Cold are the drops of rain.
The very first love that ever I had
In greenwood he was slain.”
The maiden being engaged to the dead man can obtain no release from him
till he restores to her her freedom. She goes and sits on his grave and
weeps.
“A twelvemonth and a day being up,
The ghost began to speak;
Why sit you here by my grave side
From dusk till dawning break?”
She replies:--
“O think upon the garden, love,
Where you and I did walk;
The fairest flower that blossomed there
Is withered on its stalk.”
The ghost says:--
“What is it that you want of me,
And will not let me sleep?
Your salten tears they trickle down
My winding sheet to steep.”
She replies that she has come to return his kisses to him, so as to be
off with her engagement. To this the dead man replies:--
“Cold are my lips in death, sweetheart,
My breath is earthy strong,
If you do touch my clay-cold lips,
Your time will not be long.”
Then comes a divergence in the various forms the ballad assumes. Its
most common form is for the ghost to insist on her coming into his
grave, unless she can perform certain tasks:--
“Go fetch me a light from dungeon deep,
Wring water from a stone,
And likewise milk from a maiden’s breast
Which never babe hath none.”
She strikes a spark from a flint, she squeezes an icicle, and she
compresses the stalk of a dandelion or “Johnswort.” So she accomplishes
the tasks set her.
Then the ghost exclaims:--
“Now if you had not done these things,
If you had not done all three,
I’d tear you as the withered leaves
Are torn from off the tree.”
And the maiden, released from her bond, sings:--
“Now I have mourned upon his grave
A twelvemonth and a day,
I’ll set my sail before the wind
To waft me far away.”
Another ballad of the same class is that of the knight who betrays a
maiden, and refuses to marry her unless she can answer certain riddles.
These are:--
“What is louder than a horn?
And what is sharper than a thorn?
What is broader than the way?
And what is deeper than the sea?”
The answers are:--
“Thunder is louder than a horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn,
Love is broader than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.”
Now these ballads and a crowd of folk tales that bear on the same point
show plainly enough that there was a time when quite as certainly as
there were contests of arms, so contests of wit were gone through
for great ends, sometimes with life at stake. That was a period when
there was a struggle between man and man, and the fittest survived;
but this fittest was not always the strongest animal, but the man of
keenest wit. I do not know how else to explain the universality of
these legends. The riddle is an amusement at the present day. It was
an amusement at a Greek banquet, as we learn from Plutarch. But in a
pre-historic period--in a mythic epoch--it was something very grave.
He or she who could not solve a riddle, or a succession of riddles,
forfeited life or honour.
There are two of the earliest extant rhymes of the Norse people which
hinge on the same idea, and in them the gods themselves have their
existence or honour at stake. These are the Vafthrudnis Mâl and the
Alvis Mâl, in the Elder Edda.
In the first of these Odin the god and mythical ancestor of
the Scandinavian race visits the Jute, the giant Vafthrudnir,
representative of the large-sized pre-historic race which occupied
Scandinavia, Great Britain, and Gaul. They go through a contest of
wit. He who is defeated in this trial of skill has to lose his life.
Vafthrudnir asks:--
“Tell me, Gagnrad,
Since on the floor thou wilt
Prove thy proficiency,
How is the horse called
That draws each day
Forth over mankind?”
Odin, who has called himself Gagnrad, replies:--
“Skinfaxi he is named
That the bright day draws
Forth over mankind.
Of horses is he highest esteemed
Amidst the Reid-Goths,
Light ever streams from that horse’s mane.”
Next comes the question relative to the black horse of night. Then as
to the stream that divides the Jutes from the Æsir (the Scandinavians).
Then as to the name of the plain on which the great final fight will
take place, in which the light of the gods will be quenched. And so
on. The giant is overcome. This song is interesting because it is a
poetic representation of an historic event, the conquest of the Jute by
the Scandinavian, not so much by force of arms, as by superior mental
sagacity.
The other song in the Edda is the prototype of all the Elfin Knight and
analogous ballads in which a being of the under world, now an elf, then
a devil, then a dead man, seeks to win to himself a maiden of the upper
world, and of the dominant race.
The dwarf Alvis, who lives under the earth and under stones, _i.e._,
in a beehive hut, a representative of the pre-historic, small,
short-headed, metal-working race, has somehow extorted a promise from
the god Thorr, that he will give him his daughter, the “fair-bright,
snow-white maiden.” Thorr shrinks from doing this, but is reminded of
his promise. We do not know the particulars, but in all probability
the dwarf Alvis had fashioned for him his hammer, and had received the
promise in return. Thorr at last yields, but only on condition that
Alvis shall solve a series of riddles, or rather answer a number of
questions as to the various names given to sun, moon, wind, sky, etc.
The last question asked is:--
“Tell me, Alvis,
How beer is called
Which the sons of men
Drink in all worlds.”
Alvis answers:--
“_Ale_ is it called by men,
By the Æsir _Beer_,
By the Vans _Veig_,
By the Jotuns _Hreina lögi_;
In Hell it is _meed_,
The sons of Sutung call it _sumbl_.”
Then the sun rises--and as it has risen before all the questions are
answered, Alvis loses his bride.
Precisely so in the Cornish version of the Elfin-Knight. Unable to
accomplish the task, the dead man is caught by the sunrise, and says:--
“The breath of the morning is raw and cold,
The wind is blowing on forest and down,
And I must return to the churchyard mould,
And the wind it shaketh the acorns down.”
It is deserving of note that in all these early accounts of
riddle-setting, the _forfeit_ is either life or honour. We have
instances of riddle-setting as a test before marriage, or what is the
same thing, the setting difficult tasks to be accomplished--something
to prove the wit of the young woman. Unless she were “up to mark” in
wit, she was held to be unfit for the marriage proposed. In one folk
tale a girl is given straw to spin into gold, grains to collect and
count. In Cupid and Psyche, the fair seeker after her divine lover is
set tasks by Venus, without the accomplishment of which she cannot win
him. In many a tale a prince is set tasks, without the accomplishment
of which he cannot be accepted as lover for the daughter and heiress of
a king.
In the saga of Ragnar Lodbrog, the King bids Aslaug come to him
clothed yet naked, accompanied yet alone, fed yet empty. She complies
by casting off her garments but covering herself with her golden hair
that flows to her feet, taking with her a dog only, and chewing a blade
of garlic. Satisfied with her wit, Ragnar marries her. She became by
him the mother of five sons, one of whom was the ancestor of Harald
Fairhair, who made Norway into one realm under his sceptre. Aslaug
was the daughter of Sigurd and Brunhild, made familiar to us through
Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen.”
The forfeits of a child’s game of the present day, to stand in the
corner on one leg, to call up the chimney, to kiss everyone in the
room--are the faintest ghostly reminiscences of the terrible forfeit,
which, in the mythic age of mankind, had to be paid by the man or woman
who became liable through lack of shrewdness in the great contest of
wit. The man who did not solve the riddle lost his life. The woman who
failed to answer the questions had to leave her race, suffer social
death, and pass over to the realm of the conquered race.
I repeat it, it is quite impossible to explain the stories of
riddle-setting which appear as a matter of most serious import as they
come to us out of a remote antiquity, and from every part of Europe
and Asia, unless we hold that there were in a pre-historic age these
contests of wit for the highest stakes, just as there were holm-gangs,
duels, like those of David and Goliath, of the Horatii and Curiatii, of
Herakles and Geryon.
But the existence of the riddle and of the forfeit attaching to
inability to answer the riddle, does not, we may be sure, begin with
such cases as the contest of Odin and Vafthrudnir, Thorr and Alvis,
Œdipus and Sphinx. As it appears thus in myth, it is a survival of a
still earlier condition of affairs.
At the present day throughout Europe, nurses ask children riddles, and
very often a forfeit attaches to inability to answer them. This points
to the riddle as a means of education of the young mind, but also as a
test of its powers. In legend and myth it does not appear as educative,
but as a test of mental power. How came it to be a test?
We know that among certain races in a primitive, even in a cultivated
condition, the feeble and halt children are cast forth to perish. It
was so with the Greeks and Romans, it was so with the Norse, it has
been so in every ancient race. I cannot but suspect, from the many
indications given by tradition, that the riddle was employed at one
time as a brain test. That not only were the physically weak cast out,
but also the mentally incapable.
The most startling reminiscence of the old ordeal of brains is that of
the Wartburg Contest in 1206 or 1207, under the Landgrave Hermann. The
poem of the “Kriec von Wartburg” was not indeed composed till a century
later, but that only makes it the more astonishing. It represents the
minnesingers under the Landgrave contesting in song and riddle, and
those who are defeated forfeit _life_. Christian knights and ladies
could look on at a tourney in the lists with life at stake, and
Christian knights and ladies in the fourteenth century thought it by no
means a monstrous thing that he who could not answer a riddle should
submit his neck to the executioner’s sword. Such a condition of ideas
is only conceivable as a heritage from a past when men had to show that
they had an intellectual as well as a physical qualification to live
among their fellow-men.
The riddle has gone into an infinity of forms. A German writer[39] sets
to work to analyse its various manifestations. There is the numerical
riddle, the conundrum, the logogryph, the charade, the rebus, the
picture puzzle, the epigram, and so forth. Its last transformation is
the novel of the type of Wilkie Collins’ “Moonstone,” in which the
brain of the reader is kept in tension throughout, and the imagination
at work to discover the solution of the question--Who stole the
moonstone? A German poet, who cannot have thought much on the matter,
says:--
“The riddle, charade, and all of that ilk,
Are the bacon and beans of small brains.”
But the riddle and the forfeit have had to do with the development
of mankind, the killing out of the witless, and the survival of the
intelligent. As the young were tested whether strong enough to live and
by brute force to hold their own, so, apparently, at a remote period in
man’s history the brains of the young were passed through ordeal, and
those who lacked readiness were also cast out as profitless.
That was the first stage--and that is one which we conjecture that man
passed through; we have no direct evidence that it was so. Then came
the second, in which a trial of strength or of wit determined great
issues. Lastly, the riddle degenerated into a mere pastime. But as a
pastime it remains to us a monument of great interest and of great
antiquity. In every railway station in Germany is a measure. He who
is below that mark is unprofitable for Fatherland and rejected from
military service. The riddle was this mark before history dawned.
Only such as were mentally capable of solving a simple question were
considered worthy to be enrolled in the family or tribe. As in Germany
at the present day, the lad who cannot pass the examination loses
all chance of the short military service to which the man of culture
is entitled, and is subjected to the long service of a common country
lout, and the fact of his failure closes to him all professions, so was
it in the primeval world. He who could not pass through his examination
in riddles was condemned, if not to lose his life, at least to lose
caste, and the consciousness that each lad must pass through this
mental test served to sharpen intelligences, and so conduced to the
advancement of mankind.
XI.
The Gallows.
Among our national institutions there is one--the gallows--to the
roots of which, in a remote past, antiquarians have, to the best of my
knowledge, not dug, and which they have not laid bare. Possibly this
omission is due to the fact that it is not an institution of which we
are proud; possibly also to the fact that it is an institution which we
keep as clear from touching as we well can.
Nevertheless, the origin and original signification of the gallows are
too curious to be neglected. The origin is, moreover, so remote that
unless it were pointed out it would be wholly unsuspected.
In France and in Germany the wheel has occupied the place in the
history of crime which the gibbet has taken with us; and the wheel, as
I shall presently show, has as old and significant an origin.
We know pretty exactly the date of the introduction of this institution
into our island; we owe it, along with our ale and our constitutional
government, to the Anglo-Saxon invaders.
There were no gallows in Britain under the Celts. The kingdom of Kent
was founded in 449, and it was then that the gallows first made their
appearance among us; and from the Isle of Thanet spread over the whole
land.
The great god of the conquering races, who invaded Britain and subdued
the Britons, was Woden, who has given his name to Wednesday; and this
god with one eye had a double aspect. He was god of the air, the wind,
and he was also god of the sun. According to the etymology of his name,
he was the god of the gale, and the source of all breath; but his one
fiery eye was most certainly the sun; and he was represented holding
a wheel of gold, and that golden wheel symbolised the sun. The Gauls
also had a sun god, representations of whom holding a wheel have been
discovered in France in considerable numbers; and, unquestionably, when
Goths, Burgundians, and Franks invaded Gaul, or swept over it, their
sun god and the Gallic wheel-bearing god were identified.
But those who thought of and adored Woden as god of the wind thought
nothing of the wheel. Woden was a cruel deity, who demanded sacrifices;
and the sacrifices he required were human.
In the Elder Edda, a collection of very ancient songs relating to the
Norse gods and heroes, who were the same as the gods and heroes of our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers, is one mysterious poem, supposed to be sung by
Odin (Woden) himself as he hangs in the world-tree, a self-immolated
victim, between heaven and earth for nine nights.
“I knew that I hung
In the wind-rocked tree
Nine whole nights,
Wounded with a spear;
And to Odin offered
Myself to myself,
On that tree,
Of which no one knows
From what root it springs.”
As he thus hangs, himself the sacrifice offered to himself as god, he
composes a song of twice nine runes, and the result of the twelfth is:--
“If on a tree I see
A corpse swinging by a halter,
I can so grave runes
And them write
That that man shall with me
Walk and converse.”
That is to say, every victim hung on a tree becomes one of Odin’s band,
with whom he rides in the storm blast over the earth.
Unfortunately, the myth connected with this curious poem is not
preserved; but we can gather so much from it, that Odin was said to
have immolated himself to himself by hanging in the world-tree, and
that thenceforth he claimed all men who had been hung as members of his
band.
In one of the early Norse sagas we have a story about a king called
Vikarr, who desired to dedicate himself to the god, and so he had a
gallows erected before his palace, and got a friend to fasten a halter
round his neck and hang him on the gallows. Another tells of a woman
who, to gain her husband’s love, hung her son to the god to obtain his
assistance so as to brew a good vat of ale. At Lethra, in Denmark,
every nine years ninety-nine men, and as many horses, were hung in
honour of the god; and at Upsala numerous human victims swung by the
neck about the image of Odin. After their great victory over the Romans
the Cymbri and Teutons hung all their captives as a thank-offering to
their gods; and after the slaughter of the legions of Varus the horses
of the Romans were found hung on the trees on the scene of defeat.
Indeed, one of the names of Odin was the Hanging God, either because he
hung himself, or because he had victims hung to him.
The world-tree, the great tree in which he hung, the tree which
supports heaven and earth, was called Yggdrasil, which means Ogre’s
horse, for one of the names of Odin was Yggr or Ogre, to express his
love of human sacrifices; and all the old nursery tales and rhymes
concerning ogres have reference to this great god of the English
people. Jack mounts the beanstalk, and above the clouds enters the land
of the Ogre, with his one eye, who devours men. Jack the Giant Killer,
who lives in Cornwall, represents the British Christian fighting
against the Pagan Saxon, impersonated as the great man-eating ogre.
“Fee-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Whether he be alive, or whether he be dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
In this again we have a reference to Woden or Odin, who was also called
the Miller; for the mutter or roll of the thunder was supposed to be
the working of his quern, grinding up his human victims for his meal.
Originally, victims were either freewill offerings, or were chosen from
among the best in the land. So we hear of a Norse king every ten years
sacrificing one of his sons, and of the Swedes, in time of famine,
sacrificing their king, but it became general to offer the prisoners
taken in war, and when these lacked, to sacrifice those who lay in
prison condemned for crimes.
In one of the Norse sagas, we are told of a king’s daughter that, on
hearing of the death of her father in battle, she went to the valley
dedicated to the gods and there hung herself. Her father, having died
in battle, went to Walhalla to Odin, and her only chance of being with
him in the spirit world was to hang herself to the honour of Odin, who
would then receive her among his elect, and so associate her with her
father. If she were to die in her bed, she would go down to the nether
world of Hela.
It is curious that in the West of England there are fields, generally
situated in lonely spots, that go by the name of gallows’-traps, and
the popular saying concerning them is that whoever sets foot in them
is predestined to die on the gibbet. The probable origin of this
superstition is that these were actual traps for the unwary, in which
to catch victims for sacrifice.
In certain districts a parcel of land was set apart to the god, and it
was agreed that whosoever set foot on it should be sacrificed. Usually
this was a stranger, unaware of the sacredness of the ground he
trod. He was seized and hung to Woden. We cannot say for certain that
this is the origin of the gallows-traps, but it is the most probable
explanation of their origin, and of the superstitious dread of them
still existing among the people.