A magnificent race of men were those war sons of the old North, whom
our popular histories, so superficial in their accounts of this age,
include in the common name of the "Danes." They replunged into
barbarism the nations over which they swept; but from that barbarism
they reproduced the noblest elements of civilisation. Swede,
Norwegian, and Dane, differing in some minor points, when closely
examined, had yet one common character viewed at a distance. They had
the same prodigious energy, the same passion for freedom, individual
and civil, the same splendid errors in the thirst for fame and the
"point of honour;" and above all, as a main cause of civilisation,
they were wonderfully pliant and malleable in their admixtures with
the peoples they overran. This is their true distinction from the
stubborn Celt, who refuses to mingle, and disdains to improve.
Frankes, the archbishop, baptised Rolf-ganger [16]: and within a
little more than a century afterwards, the descendants of those
terrible heathens who had spared neither priest nor altar, were the
most redoubtable defenders of the Christian Church; their old language
forgotten (save by a few in the town of Bayeux), their ancestral names
[17] (save among a few of the noblest) changed into French titles, and
little else but the indomitable valour of the Scandinavian remained
unaltered amongst the arts and manners of the Frankish-Norman.
In like manner their kindred tribes, who had poured into Saxon England
to ravage and lay desolate, had no sooner obtained from Alfred the
Great permanent homes, than they became perhaps the most powerful, and
in a short time not the least patriotic, part of the Anglo-Saxon
population [18]. At the time our story opens, these Northmen, under
the common name of Danes, were peaceably settled in no less than
fifteen [19] counties in England; their nobles abounded in towns and
cities beyond the boundaries of those counties which bore the distinct
appellation of Danelagh. They were numerous in London: in the
precincts of which they had their own burial-place, to the chief
municipal court of which they gave their own appellation--the Hustings
[20]. Their power in the national assembly of the Witan had decided
the choice of kings. Thus, with some differences of law and dialect,
these once turbulent invaders had amalgamated amicably with the native
race [21]. And to this day, the gentry, traders, and farmers of more
than one-third of England, and in those counties most confessed to be
in the van of improvement, descend from Saxon mothers indeed, but from
Viking fathers. There was in reality little difference in race
between the Norman knight of the time of Henry I. and the Saxon
franklin of Norfolk and York. Both on the mother's side would most
probably have been Saxon, both on the father's would have traced to
the Scandinavian.
But though this character of adaptability was general, exceptions in
some points were necessarily found, and these were obstinate in
proportion to the adherence to the old pagan faith, or the sincere
conversion to Christianity. The Norwegian chronicles, and passages in
our own history, show how false and hollow was the assumed
Christianity of many of these fierce Odin-worshippers. They willingly
enough accepted the outward sign of baptism, but the holy water
changed little of the inner man. Even Harold, the son of Canute,
scarce seventeen years before the date we have now entered, being
unable to obtain from the Archbishop of Canterbury--who had espoused
the cause of his brother Hardicanute--the consecrating benediction,
lived and reigned as one who had abjured Christianity. [22]
The priests, especially on the Scandinavian continent, were often
forced to compound with their grim converts, by indulgence to certain
habits, such as indiscriminate polygamy. To eat horse-flesh in honour
of Odin, and to marry wives ad libitum, were the main stipulations of
the neophytes. And the puzzled monks, often driven to a choice,
yielded the point of the wives, but stood firm on the graver article
of the horse-flesh.
With their new religion, very imperfectly understood, even when
genuinely received, they retained all that host of heathen
superstition which knits itself with the most obstinate instincts in
the human breast. Not many years before the reign of the Confessor,
the laws of the great Canute against witchcraft and charms, the
worship of stones, fountains, runes by ash and elm, and the
incantations that do homage to the dead, were obviously rather
intended to apply to the recent Danish converts, than to the Anglo-
Saxons, already subjugated for centuries, body and soul, to the
domination of the Christian monks.
Hilda, a daughter of the royalty of Denmark, and cousin to Githa
(niece to Canute, whom that king had bestowed in second spousals upon
Godwin), had come over to England with a fierce Jarl, her husband, a
year after Canute's accession to the throne--both converted nominally,
both secret believers in Thor and Odin.
Hilda's husband had fallen in one of the actions in the Northern seas,
between Canute and St. Olave, King of Norway (that saint himself, by
the bye, a most ruthless persecutor of his forefathers' faith, and a
most unqualified assertor of his heathen privilege to extend his
domestic affections beyond the severe pale which should have confined
them to a single wife. His natural son Magnus then sat on the Danish
throne). The Jarl died as he had wished to die, the last man on board
his ship, with the soothing conviction that the Valkyrs would bear him
to Valhalla.
Hilda was left with an only daughter, whom Canute bestowed on
Ethelwolf, a Saxon Earl of large domains, and tracing his descent from
Penda, that old King of Mercia who refused to be converted, but said
so discreetly, that he had no objection to his neighbours being
Christians, if they would practise that peace and forgiveness which
the monks told him were the elements of the faith.
Ethelwolf fell under the displeasure of Hardicanute, perhaps because
he was more Saxon than Danish; and though that savage king did not
dare openly to arraign him before the Witan, he gave secret orders by
which he was butchered on his own hearthstone, in the arms of his
wife, who died shortly afterwards of grief and terror. The only
orphan of this unhappy pair, Edith, was thus consigned to the charge
of Hilda.
It was a necessary and invaluable characteristic of that
"adaptability" which distinguished the Danes, that they transferred to
the land in which they settled all the love they had borne to that of
their ancestors; and so far as attachment to soil was concerned, Hilda
had grown no less in heart an Englishwoman than if she had been born
and reared amidst the glades and knolls from which the smoke of her
hearth rose through the old Roman compluvium.
But in all else she was a Dane. Dane in her creed and her habits--
Dane in her intense and brooding imagination--in the poetry that
filled her soul, peopled the air with spectres, and covered the leaves
of the trees with charms. Living in austere seclusion after the death
of her lord, to whom she had borne a Scandinavian woman's devoted but
heroic love,--sorrowing, indeed, for his death, but rejoicing that he
fell amidst the feast of ravens,--her mind settled more and more year
by year, and day by day, upon those visions of the unknown world,
which in every faith conjure up the companions of solitude and grief.
Witchcraft in the Scandinavian North assumed many forms, and was
connected by many degrees. There was the old and withered hag, on
whom, in our later mediaeval ages the character was mainly bestowed;
there was the terrific witch-wife, or wolf-witch, who seems wholly
apart from human birth and attributes, like the weird sisters of
Macbeth--creatures who entered the house at night and seized warriors
to devour them, who might be seen gliding over the sea, with the
carcase of the wolf dripping blood from their giant jaws; and there
was the more serene, classical, and awful vala, or sibyl, who,
honoured by chiefs and revered by nations, foretold the future, and
advised the deeds of heroes. Of these last, the Norse chronicles tell
us much. They were often of rank and wealth, they were accompanied by
trains of handmaids and servants--kings led them (when their counsel
was sought) to the place of honour in the hall, and their heads were
sacred, as those of ministers to the gods.
This last state in the grisly realm of the Wig-laer (wizard-lore) was
the one naturally appertaining to the high rank, and the soul, lofty
though blind and perverted, of the daughter of warrior-kings. All
practice of the art to which now for long years she had devoted
herself, that touched upon the humble destinies of the vulgar, the
child of Odin [23] haughtily disdained. Her reveries were upon the
fate of kings and kingdoms; she aspired to save or to rear the
dynasties which should rule the races yet unborn. In youth proud and
ambitious,--common faults with her countrywomen,--on her entrance into
the darker world, she carried with her the prejudices and passions
that she had known in that coloured by the external sun.
All her human affections were centred in her grandchild Edith, the
last of a race royal on either side. Her researches into the future
had assured her, that the life and death of this fair child were
entwined with the fates of a king, and the same oracles had intimated
a mysterious and inseparable connection between her own shattered
house and the flourishing one of Earl Godwin, the spouse of her
kinswoman Githa: so that with this great family she was as intimately
bound by the links of superstition as by the ties of blood. The
eldest born of Godwin, Sweyn, had been at first especially her care
and her favourite; and he, of more poetic temperament than his
brothers, had willingly submitted to her influence. But of all the
brethren, as will be seen hereafter, the career of Sweyn had been most
noxious and ill-omened; and at that moment, while the rest of the
house carried with it into exile the deep and indignant sympathy of
England, no man said of Sweyn, "God bless him!"
But as the second son, Harold, had grown from childhood into youth,
Hilda had singled him out with a preference even more marked than that
she had bestowed upon Sweyn. The stars and the runes assured her of
his future greatness, and the qualities and talents of the young Earl
had, at the very onset of his career, confirmed the accuracy of their
predictions. Her interest in Harold became the more intense, partly
because whenever she consulted the future for the lot of her
grandchild Edith, she invariably found it associated with the fate of
Harold--partly because all her arts had failed to penetrate beyond a
certain point in their joint destinies, and left her mind agitated and
perplexed between hope and terror. As yet, however, she had wholly
failed in gaining any ascendancy over the young Earl's vigorous and
healthful mind: and though, before his exile, he came more often than
any of Godwin's sons to the old Roman house, he had smiled with proud
incredulity at her vague prophecies, and rejected all her offers of
aid from invisible agencies with the calm reply--"The brave man wants
no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all
warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it."
Indeed, though Hilda's magic was not of the malevolent kind, and
sought the source of its oracles not in fiends but gods, (at least the
gods in whom she believed,) it was noticeable that all over whom her
influence had prevailed had come to miserable and untimely ends;--not
alone her husband and her son-in-law, (both of whom had been as wax to
her counsel,) but such other chiefs as rank or ambition permitted to
appeal to her lore. Nevertheless, such was the ascendancy she had
gained over the popular mind, that it would have been dangerous in the
highest degree to put into execution against her the laws condemnatory
of witch craft. In her, all the more powerful Danish families
reverenced, and would have protected, the blood of their ancient
kings, and the widow of one of their most renowned heroes.
Hospitable, liberal, and beneficent to the poor; and an easy mistress
over numerous ceorls, while the vulgar dreaded, they would yet have
defended her. Proofs of her art it would have been hard to establish;
hosts of compurgators to attest her innocence would have sprung up.
Even if subjected to the ordeal, her gold could easily have bribed the
priests with whom the power of evading its dangers rested. And with
that worldly wisdom which persons of genius in their wildest chimeras
rarely lack, she had already freed herself from the chance of active
persecution from the Church, by ample donations to all the
neighbouring monasteries.
Hilda, in fine, was a woman of sublime desires and extraordinary
gifts; terrible, indeed, but as the passive agent of the Fates she
invoked, and rather commanding for herself a certain troubled
admiration and mysterious pity; no fiend-hag, beyond humanity in
malice and in power, but essentially human, even when aspiring most to
the secrets of a god. Assuming, for the moment, that by the aid of
intense imagination, persons of a peculiar idiosyncrasy of nerves and
temperament might attain to such dim affinities with a world beyond
our ordinary senses, as forbid entire rejection of the magnetism and
magic of old times--it was on no foul and mephitic pool, overhung with
the poisonous nightshade, and excluded from the beams of heaven, but
on the living stream on which the star trembled, and beside whose
banks the green herbage waved, that the demon shadows fell dark and
dread.
Thus safe and thus awful, lived Hilda; and under her care, a rose
beneath the funeral cedar, bloomed her grandchild Edith, goddaughter
of the Lady of England.
It was the anxious wish, both of Edward and his virgin wife, pious as
himself, to save this orphan from the contamination of a house more
than suspected of heathen faith, and give to her youth the refuge of
the convent. But this, without her guardian's consent or her own
expressed will, could not be legally done; and Edith as yet had
expressed no desire to disobey her grandmother, who treated the idea
of the convent with lofty scorn.
This beautiful child grew up under the influence, as it were, of two
contending creeds; all her notions on both were necessarily confused
and vague. But her heart was so genuinely mild, simple, tender, and
devoted,--there was in her so much of the inborn excellence of the
sex, that in every impulse of that heart struggled for clearer light
and for purer air the unquiet soul. In manner, in thought, and in
person as yet almost an infant, deep in her heart lay yet one woman's
secret, known scarcely to herself, but which taught her, more
powerfully than Hilda's proud and scoffing tongue, to shudder at the
thought of the barren cloister and the eternal vow.