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]