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About Google Book Search Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web at|http: //books .google .com/I I ^3 ic i)/»S Oxford University ENGLISH FACULTY LIBRARY Manor Rosd, Ozfefd. TeL: Oxf<»:d 49631 Po«tcod«: OXl 3UQ Opoliv Hoon: MtndiT to Pdda*: 9J0 m.m. Is ? p.m. In Full Tirm. (9.30 a.B. la 1 p.m., ud 1 p.o. to 4 p.m. In Vaoitloai.) SMnday: 9.S0a.m. to U.M p-blIb FnU T«n (bIt (doHd In Vacatioii^. Tb* UAm h doHd tot Ua dayi at CfadHmu (Dd at EaiMr, on nnramla Diy, aad (« rii win In Aii(iut and Sapiambtr. TKr fiooA (bdU (• nturmd on or b^on Ih* fatMf Aa* innniiii 300035926S Gooi^lc .yCOOgIC .yCOOgIC .yCOOgIC POPULAE TALES THE NORSE UigiVB-.C00l^lC FBINTEO BT E. JI K. OLAAX SDUON8TON iHD DOUQLA8, BDINBCBOH. IiONDOM . . BU1II.T0N, ASAMI. k CO, U.g.VK.yC00glc POPULAR TALES THE NOESE GEORGE WEBBE DASENT, D. C. L. t AN INTRODDCTORT BSSAT ON THE OtUOIN AKD DIFFUSION OP POPULAR TALBB. EDINBURGH : EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS. UDOCGLIZ. U.g.VK.yC00glc .yCOOgIC NOTICE. ^HESE traoslatioDS from the Nm-ake FoVeeevenfyr, coUected with such freBhueas and faithfulness by MM. Aabjonisen and Moe, have been made at various times and at long intervals during the last fifteen years ; a fact which is mentioned only to account for any variations in style or tone— of which, however, the translator is unconscious — that a critical eye may detect io this volume. One of them, The Master ThUf, has already appeared in Blackwood's Magazine for November 1851 ; from the columns of which periodical it is now reprinted, by the kind permisuon of the Proprietors. The translator is sorry that he has not been able to comply with the suggestion of some friends upon whose good-will he sets ^1 store, who wished him to change and soften some features in these tales, which they thought likely to shock English feeling. He has, however, felt it to he out of his power to meet their wishes, for the merit of an undertaking of this kind, rests entirely on its faithfulness and truth ; and the man .yCOOgIC who, in sach a work, wiUully changes or softens, is as guilty as he " who pots bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." Of this guilt, at least, the translator feels himself &ee ; and, perhaps, if any, who may be inclined to be ofifended at first, will take the trouble to read the Intro- daction which precedes and explains the Tales, they may find, not only that the softening process would have spoilt these popular traditions for all except the most childish readers, but that the things which shocked them at tJie first blush, are, after all, not so very shocking. For the rest, it ill becomes him to speak of the way in which his work has been done ; but if the reader will only bear in mind that this, too, is an enchanted garden, in which whoever dares to pliick a fiower, does it at the peril of his head ; and if he will then read the book in a merciful and tender spirit, he will prove him- self what the translator most longs to find, " a gentle reader," and both will part on the best terms. Broad SLsataiMt, Dot. 12, ISM. .yCOOgIC CONTENTS. Iktsodtctioh ix to Ixxxnii L Tede Ain> nimm 1 n. Why the Su is Salt .... 10 m. Tas Old Dams and bbb Hxn- ... 18 IT. Boots who atb a uatcb wrra the Tbou. 28 V. Hacon Qkizzlebbakd 32 VL BOOTB WHO HADE THE PSIHCEflA UY, " ThAT'B aStokt" 44 vn. The Qlamt who had ho Heabt ih his Body 47 TUL The Fox ab He&dbicaii . . . . S9 IX. The Mastbshaid 62 X. The Cat ox the Dotkefell ... 87 XI. Princebs on the Qlabs Hill ... 89 XU. How Oke we»t out to Woo ... 104 Un. The Cock and Hen 106 XIT. The Mabter-Sioth 106 SV. BuiTEECur U7 XVI. Tahino the Sbkew 123 XVII. Shortshanks 125 XVIH. QddbbanD' on the Hill-bide ... 149 XIX. The Blue Belt 166 XX. Why the Beab ib SrnuPY-TAiLED 177 .yCOOgIC XXI. xxa. One's own Childbbn aee always Prettiest ...... xxm. Thii: Three rRiNCEBSBa of Whttelamd . XXIV. The Lassie and her Godmother XXV. The Three Aunts .... XXVI. The Cock, the Cuckoo, and the Black-Cock XXVII. Rich Peter the Pedlar xxvni. GEKTKroE'a Bird XXIX. Boots and the Troll .... XXX. Goosey Grizzel XXXI. The Lad tvho went to the North Wind XXXII. The Master Thief .... XXXIII. The Best Wish XXXIV. The Thhee Billy-goats Gruff . XXXV. Well Done and III Paid XXXVI. East o' the Sun and West o' ths Moos XXXVII. The Husband who was to mikd the HOUBE XXXVIII. Dapfleorim XXXIX. Farmer WEATHERflKr . XL. The Two Step-Sisters XLI. Lord Peter . XLn. The Seven Foals . XLUI. The Widow's Son . XLIV. Bushy Bride . XLV. Boots and his Brothers XLVI. The Twelve Wild Ducks .yCOOgIC INIBODDOTION. It cannot escape the observatioD of even the most careless reader, that the groundwork of many of the Tales contained in this volume ia the flame as tihat of those with which he has been familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nuneiy Tales, in fact, of the days when there were tales in nurseries — old wives' fables, which have faded away before the light of gaa and the power of Bt«am. It is long, indeed, since English □urses told these tales to English childreD b; force of memory and word of mouth. In a written shape, ve have long had some of them at least in English vetnons of the Contea de ma Mire V O^e of Ferrault, and the Conlet de FSes of Uadame D'Aulnoy ; those tight-iaced, hlgh-heeled tales of the " teacup times " of Loais XrV. and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the English reciter was bushed — and it was hushed in En^and more than a century ago — our great-grand- mothers learnt to teU of Cinderella and Beauty and the b .yCOOgIC X INTBODUCTION. Beaat, of Little Red Riding-Hood and Bine Beard, mingled together in the Cabinet dea FSes with Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin's wondroiiB lamp ; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all qnarters of the globe at once, con- fusing the traditions md tales of sU times and countries into one incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and knotted as that famous pound of flax which the lassie in one of these Tales is expected to spin into an even woof within four-and-twenty hours. No poverty of inventioD or want of power on the part of translators coald entirely destroy the innate beauty of those popular traditions ; bat here, in England at least, they had almost dwindled out, or at any rate had been lost sight of as home-growths. We had learnt to buy our own children back disguised in foreign garb ; and as for their being anything more than the mere pastime of an idle hour — as to their having any history or science of their own — such an absurdity was never once thought of. It had, indeed, been remarked, even in the eighteenth century — tiiat dreary time of indifference and doubt — that some of the popular traditions of the nations north of the Alps contuned striking resembhuices aud parallels to stories in the classical -mythology. But those were the days when Greek and Latin lorded it over the other languages of the earth ; and when any such resemblance or analogy was observed, it was commonly Hupp<%ed that that base-born slave, the vidgar tongue, had dared to make a clumsy copy of something peculiarly belong- U.g.VK.yC00glc INTEODOCTION. XI ing to Uie twin tyrants who ruled all the dialects of tho world with a pedant's rod. At last, juBt at the close of that great war which Western Enrope waged against the genius and fortune of the first Napoleon ; jost as the eagle— Prometheus and the eagle in one shape — was fast fettered by sheer force and strength to his rock in the Atlantic, there arose a man in Central German;, on the old Thunngtau soU, to whom it was given to assert the dignity of vernacular literature, to throw off the yoke of classical tyranny, and to claim for all the dialects of Teutonic speech a right of ancient inheritance and perfect freedom bctfore unsus- pected and miknown. It is almost needless to mention this honoored name. For ihs furtherance of the good work which he began nearly fifty years ago, he still lives and stili labours. There is no q>ot on which an accent of Tentonic speech is uttered where the name of Jacob Grimm is not a " household word." His General Grammar of all the Teutonic Dialects from Iceland to Engisod has proved the equality of these tongues with th^ ancient classical oppressors. His Antiquities of Teat(«iic Law have shown that the codes of the Lom- bards, Franks, and Goths were not mere savage, brutal costomaries, based, as had been supposed, on the ab- sence of ail law and right. His nnmerons treatises on early German authors have shown that the German poets of the Middle Age, Godfrey of Strasburg, Wolf- nun von Eschenbach, Hartman von der Aue, WalttH* Ton der Vogelveide, and the rest, can hold their own U.g.VK.yC00glc Xll IMTRODUCrriOK. AgEUDBt an; contemporary writers in other lands. And lastly, what rather oonc«ms us here, his Teutonic Mythology, his Reynard the Fox, and the collection of German Popular Tales, which he and his brother Wil- liam published, have thrown a flood of Ught on the early history of all the branches of our race, and have raised what had come to be looked on as mere nursery fictions and old wives' fobles — to a study fit for the energies of grown men, and to all the dignity of a science. In these pages, where we have to run over a vast tract of space, the reader who wishes to learn and not to cavil — and for such alone this introduction is in- tended— most be content with results rather than pro- cesses and steps. To use a homely likeness, he must be satisfied with the soup that is set before him, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled. When we say, therefore, ihaA in these latter days the philology and mythology of the East and West have met and kissed each other ; that they now go hand in hand ; that they lend one another mutufd support ; that one cannot be understood without the other, — we look to be believed. We do not expect to be put to the proof, how the labours of Grimm and his disciples on this side were first rendered possible by the linguistic discoveries of Anquetil du Perron andothers in India and France, at the end of the last century ; then materially assisted and fizrthered by the researches of Sir William Jones, Colebrooke, and others, in India and Eng- land daring the early part of this century, and finally have become identical with those of Wilson, Bopp, Lassen, and IHTRODCCTII Max Miiller, at the present dayy The afiSnity which exists . in a mythological and philological point of view betweeu the Aryan or Indo-EoropeaD laoguages on the one hand, and the Saoscrit on the other, is now the first article of a literary creed, and the man vho denies it pats himself as much beyond the pale of argument as he who, in a religious discussion, should meet a grave divine of the Church of England with the strict con- tradictory of her first article, and loudly declare his conviction, that there was no God. In a general way, then, we may be permitted to dogmatise, and to lay it down as a law which is always in force, that the first authentic history of a nation is the history of its tongue. We can form no notion of the literature of a country apart from its language, and the consideration of its laii- goage necessarily involves the consideration of its history. Here is England, for instance, with a language, and there- fore a literature, composed of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Noise, and Romance elements. Is not this simple tact su^estive of, nay, does it not chaUenge us to, an inquiry into the origin and history of the races who have passed over our island, and left their mark not only on the soil, bat on omr ^ech ? Again, to take a wider view, and to rise from archeeology to science, what problem has interested the world in a greater degree than the origin of man, and what toil has not been spent in tra<;ing all races back to their common stock? The science of comparative philology — the inquiry, not into one isolated language — for now-a-days it may fairly be said of a man U.g.VK.yC00glc TIT INTBOUncnOK. who knows only one language that he knovB none — but into al) the langoages of one fomily, and thus to reduce them to one common centre, from which they spread like the rays of the sun, — if it has not solved, is in a fiur way of solving, this problem. When we have done for the various members of each family what has been done of late years for the Indo-European tongues, its solution will be complete. In such an in- quiry the history of a race is, in fact, the history of its language, and can be nothing else ; for we have to deal with times antecedent to all history, properly so called, and the stream which in later ages may be divided into many branches, now Sows in a single chaunel. From the East, then, came our ancestors, in days of immemorial antiquity, in that gray dawn of time of which all early songs and lays can tell, but of which it is as impossible as it is useless to attempt to fix ttie date. Impossible, because no means exist for ascertaining it ; useless, bacaose it is in reality a matter of utter indifference when, as this tell-tale crust of earth informs us, we have an mfinity of a^ee and periods to fall back on, whether this great movement, this mighty tust to change their seata, seized on the Aryan race one hundred or one thousand years sooner or later. But from the East we came, and from that central plain of Asia, now com- monly called Iran. Iran, the habitation of the tillers and earera of the earth, as opposed to Turan, the abode of restless horse-riding nomads ; of Turks, in short, for in their name the root survives, and still diatinguishes U.g.VK.yC00glc IMTBODnCTlON. XT the great Turanian or UongoHan family, from the Aryan, Iranian, or Indo-Eoropean race. It is scarce worth while to inquire — even if inquiry could lead to any result — what cause eet them in motion from their an- cient Beats. Whether impelled by famine or intenuU strifie, starved out like other nationalities in recent times, or led on by adventurous chiefs, whose spirit chafed at the nairowness of home, certain it is that they left that borne and began a wandering westwards, which only ceased when it reached the Atlantic and the Northern Ocean. Nor was the fate of those they left behind leas strange. At some period almost as remote as, but after, that at which the wanderers for Europe started, the re- muning portion of the stock, or a considerable o&hoot from it, turned their faces eaet, and passing the Indian C«icasas, poured through the defiles of AffghaniBtan, crossed the plun of the Five Rivers, and descended ou the fruitfid plains of India. The different destiny of these stocks has been wonderful indeed. Of those who went west, we have only to enumerate the names under which they appear in history — Celts, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, SlavonianB — to see and to know at once that the stream of this migration has home on its waves all diat has become most precious to man. To use the words of Max Miiller, — " They have been the promi- nent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their tullest growth all the elements of active liie with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals, and we learn from their U.g.VK.yC00glc XVI ISTBODTJOTIOH. literature and worlra of art the elemeDte of science, Hie laws of art, and the priuciples of philosophy. In con- tinual struggle with each other, and with Semitic and Mongolian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history, aad it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion." We may add, that though by nature tough and enduring, they have not been obstinate and self-willed ; they have been dis- tingaiflhed from all other nations, and particularly Ironi their elder brothers whom they left behind, by their common sense, by their power of adapting themselves to all circnmstences, and by making the best of their pomtion ; above all, they have been teachable, ready to receive impresBions from without, and, when received, to deveh)p| them. To sbow the truth of this, we need only observe, that they adopted Christianity &om another race, the most obstinate and stiff-necked the world has ever seen, who, truned under the Old Dis- pensation to preserve the worship of the one true God, were too prond to accept the further revelation of Qtod under the New, and, rejecting their birth-right, suffered their inheritance to pass into other hands. Such, then, has been the lot of the Western branch, of the younger brother, who, like the younger brother whom we shall meet so often in these Popular Tales, went out into the world, with nothing but his good heart and God's blessing to guide him ; and now has come to all honour and fortune, and to be a king, ruling over the .yCOOgIC IHTRODDCTION. XVa woiid. He went oat and did. Let hh see dow what became of the elder brother, who stayed at home some time after hia broUier went out, and then only made a short jonmey. Having driven ont the few aboriginal inhabituita of India with little effort, and following the codTse of the great rivers, the Southern Aryans gradually established themselves all over the peninsnla ; and then, in calm possesuon of a world of their own, ondiBturbed by conquest from without, and accepting with apathy any change of dynasty among their rulers, ignorant of tlie past and careless of the future, they sat down once for all and tfotiyAt— thought not of what they had to do here, that stem lesson of every-day life from which neither men nor nations can escape if they are to live with their fellows, but how they could abstract them- selves entirely from their present existence, and immerse thenuelves wholly in dreamy speculations on the future. Whatever they may have been during their short mi- gration and subsequent settlement, it is certain that they appear in the Vedas — perhaps the earliest collection which the world possesses — as a nation of philosophers. Well may Professor MUller compare the Indian mind to a plant reared in a hot-house, gorgeous in colour, rich in perfume, precocious and abundant in fmit ; it may be all this, " but will never be like the oak, growing in wind and weather, striking ite roots into real earth, and stretching its branches into real air, beneath the stars and sun of Heaven ;" and well does he also remark, that a people of this peculiar stamp was never destined to act U.g.VK.yC00glc XTUI INTBODDCTIOH. a proiomeDt part in the history of the world ; nay, the exhausting atmosphere of transcendental ideas could not hnt exercise a detrimental inBaeoce on the active and moral character of the Hindoos.* * Ab a specimen of their thoughtful turn of miad, even in the Vedas, at a time before the monetrons avatars of the Hindoo Pantheon were imagined, and when their system of philosophy, properly bo called, had no existence, the following metrictd translation of the 139th hymn of the 10th boc^ of the Rig- Veda, may be qnoted, which Profeasor UUUer assures us is of a very early date : — " Nor aught nor noi^ht existed ; yon bright sky Was not, noT Heaven's broad woof ontstretcbed above. What covered all ? vi^t sheltered ? what concealed ? Was it the water's fathomless abyes ? There was nut death— ^yet was there nooght immortal. There was no confine betwixt day and night; The only One breathed breathlesa by itself, Other than It there nothing since has been. Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled In gloom profound — an ocean without light — The germ that still lay covered in the hoek Burat forth, one nature, from the fervent beat. Then first came love upon it, the new spring Of mind — yea, poets in their hearts discerned, Pondering, tliis bond between created things And oncreated. Comes this spark from earth. Piercing and all pervading, or fr(»Q Heaven ? Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose — Natnre below, and power and will above — Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here. Whence, whence this manifold creation sprai^ ? The Gods themselves came later into beii^ — Who knows from whence this great creation sprang ? He from whom all this great creation came, .yCOOgIC DITBODUCTTOy. ZIX Id this pasuve, abstract, unprogressiTe state, they have remained ever gince. Stiffened onto castes, and tongue-tied and hand-tied by absnrd rites and cere- mcaues, they were heard of in dim legends by Hero- dobis ; they were seen by Alexander when that bold spirit pushed his phalanx beyond the limits of the known world ; they trafficked with imperial Rome, and the later empire ; they were agun almost lost ngfat of, and becune fabulous in the Middle Age ; they were rediscovered by the Portuguese; they have been alternately peacefal subjecta and desperate rebels to us English; bnt they have been atiU the samu immovahle and unprogresdve philosophers, though akin to Europe all the while ; and though Uie High- lander, who drives his bayonet through the heart of a bigh-caste Sepoy mutineer, little knows that his pale features and sandy hair, and that dusk face with its raven locks, both come from a common ancestor away in Central Asia, many, many centuries ago. But here arises the question, what interest can we, the descendants of the practical brother, heirs to so much hietorical renown, poseibly lake in the records of a race so historically characterless, and so sunk in reveries Whether His will crested or was ninte, The Moat High Seer that is in highest heaven, He koowB it — or perchance even he knowa not." If we reflect that this hymn was composed centuries before the time of Hesiod, we Bhall be better able to appreciate the ^ecnladve character of the Indian mind in its earliest stage. U.g.VK.yC00glc XI ISTBODOCTIOH. and myBticism ? The answer ia easy. Those records are written in a language closely allied to the primaeval common tongue of those two branches before they parted, and descending from a period anterior to their separa- tion. It may, or it may not, be the very tongue itself, but it certainly is not further removed than a few steps. The speech of the emigrants to the west rapidly changed witJ) the changing circumstances and various fortune of each of its waves, and in their intercourse with the abori- ginal population they oilen adopted foreign elements into their language. One of these waves, it is probable, pasiung by way of Persia and Asia Minor, crossed the Hellespont, and following the coast, threw off a mighty rill, known in after times as Greeks ; while the main stream, striking through Macedonia, either crossed the Adriatic, or, still hug^g the coast, came down on Italy, to be known aa Latins. Another, passing between the Caspian and the Black Sea, filled the steppes round the Crimea, and, pass- ing on over the Balkan and the Carpathians towards the west, became that great Teutonic nationality which, under various names, but all closely akin, filled, when we first hear of them in historical times, the space between the Black Sea and the Baltic, and was then slowly but surely driving before them the great wave of the Celts which had preceded them in their wandering, and which had probably followed the same line of march aa the ances- tors of the Greeks and Latins. A movement which lasted until all that was left of Celtic nationality was either absorbed by the intruders, or forced aside, and .yCOOgIC INTKODDCTiON. XXI driveo to take refuge in mountaio fastnesses and outlying islands. Besides all these, there was still another wave, which is supposed to have passed between the Sea of Aral and the Caspian, and, keeping still in further to \he north and east, to have passed hetween its kindred Teutons and the Mongolian tribes, and so to have lain in the background until we find them appearing as Slavonians on the scene of history. Into bo many great stocks did the Western Aryans pass, each possesrang strongly-marked nationalities and languages, and these seemingly so distinct that each often asserted that the other spoke a barbarous tongue. But, for all that, each of those tongues bears about with it still, and in earlier times no doubt bore still more plainly about with it, infallible evidence of common origin, so that each dialect can be traced up to that primfeval form of speech still in the main preserved in the Sanscrit by the South- ern Aryan branch, who, careless of practical life, and immersed in speculation, have clung to then- ancient traditions and tongae with wonderful tenacity. It is this which has given such value to Sanscrit, a tongne of which it may be said ib&t if it had perished the sun would never have risen on the science of comparative philology. Before the discoveries in Sanscrit of Sir William Jones, Wilkins, Wilson, and others, the world had striven to find the common ancestor of European languages, some- times io the classical, and sometimes in the Semitic tongues. In the one case the result was a tyranny of Greek and Latin over the non-classical tongues, and in U.g.VK.yC00glc ZXU INTBODtlCTlON. the other the most uncritical and uiiphilosophical waste of learning. No doubt some striking analogies exist be- tween the Indo-European tamily and the Semitic stock, jost as there are remarkable analogies between the Mon- golian and Indo-European families ; but the ravings of Valiancy, in his effort to connect the Erse with Phceui- cian, are an awful warning of what unscientific inquiry, based apon casual analogy, may bring itself to believe, and even to fancy it has proved. These general observations, then, and this rapid bird's-oye view, may suffice to show the common affinity which exists between the Eastern and Western Aryans ; between the Hindoo on the one hand, and the nations of Western Europe on the other. That is the fact to keep steadily before our eyes. We all came, Greek, Latin, Celt, Teuton, Slavonian, &om the East, as kith and kin, leaving kith and kin behind us ; and after thousands of years, the language and tradi- tions of those who went East, and those who went West, bear such an aSmity to each other, as to have established, beyond discussion or dispute, the feet of their descent from a common stock. This general affinity established, we proceed to nar- row our subject to its proper limits, and to confine it to the consideration, first, of Popular Tales in general, and secondly, of those Norse Tales in particular, which form the bulk of this volume. In the first place, then, the fact which we remarked on Bettmg out, that the groundwork or plot of many U.g.VK.yC00glc INTBODnOnON. XX1I1 of these tales is conunoa to all nations of Europe, is more Importaat, and of greater scientific interest, than might at first appear. They fi»m, in foct, another link in the chain of eridence of a conmion origin between the East and West, and even the obsti- nate adherents of the old classical theory, according to which all resemblances were set down to sheer copying from Greek or Latin patterns, are now forced to confess not only that there was no such wholesale copying at all, bat that, in many cases, the despised vemacatar tongues have preserved the eommon traditions for more £uth- fiilly than the writers of Greece and Rome. The sooner, in short, Uiat this theory of copying, which some, even besides the classicists, have maintained, is abandoned, the better, not only for the truth, but for the lit«raiy reputation of those who put it forth. No one con, of course, imagine that during that long sncceesiou of ages when this mighty wedge of Aryan migration was driving its way through that prehistoric race, that nameless nationality, the traces of which we everywhere find onderlying the intruders in their monuments and implements of bone and stone — a race akin, in all pro- bability, to the Mongolian family, and whose miserable remnants we sec poshed aside, and huddled up in the holes and comers of Europe, as Lapps, and Finns, and Basques — No one, we say, can suppose for a moment, that in that long process of contact and absorption, some traditions of either race should not have been caoght up and adopted by tie other. We know it to be U.g.VK.yC00glc TOaV IKTBODUCTIOS. a fact with regard to their language, &om the evidence of philology which cannot lie ; and the witness home by which such a word as the Qothic Atta (oi Jiither, where a Mongolian has been adopted in preference to an Aryan word, is irresistible on this point ; but that, apart from such natural assimilation, all the thousand ehadea of re- semblance and affinity which gleam and flicker throagh the whole body of popular traditioii in the Aryan race, as the Aurora plays and flashes in coontleBS raya athwart the Northern heaven, should be the result of mere servile copying of one tribe's traditiooa by an- other, is a suppositiou as absurd as that of those good country-folk, who, when they see an Aurora, fancy it must be a great fire, the work of some incendiary, and send ofiF the parish engine to put it out. No ! when we find in such a story as the Master-thief traits which are to be found in the Sanscrit Hitopadesa, and which are also to be found in the story of Khampsinitus in Herodotus; which are also to be found in German, Italian, and Flemish popular tales, but told in aD with such variations of character and detiul, fmd such adftp- tations to time and place, as evidently show the original working of the national coosciousnesa upon a stock cf[ tradition common to all the race, but belonging to no tribe of that race in particular ; and when we find this occurring not in one tale but in twenty, we are fcnred to abandon the theory of such universal copying, for fear lest we should fell into a greater difficnlty than that for which we were striving to accoimt U.g.VK.yC00glc MTBODUCTIOH. XXV To set thifl qnesUon in a plainer light, let vs take a well-known inatance ; let m take the story of Wil- liam Tell and his daring shot, which i^ B«d to have beeD made in the year 1307. It is jnst possible that tlie feat might be historical, and, no doubt, thon- sands believe it for the sake of the Swiss patriot, as firmly as they believe in anything ; but, trnfortunately, this story of the bold archer who saves his life by shooting an apple from the head of his child at the com- mand of a tyrant, is common to the whole Aryan race. It appears in Sazo Gmmmatieus, who flourished in the twelfth centmy, where it is told of Palnatoki, KiLg Harold Gormson's thane and assassin. In the tiiirteentb century the Wilkina Saga relates it of Egill, Volondr's — our Wayland Smith's — ^younger brother. So also in the Norse Saga of Sunt Olof, king and martyr ; the kuig, who died in 1030, eager for the conversion of one of his heathen chiefs Eindridi, competes with bim in various athletic exercises, first in swimming and then in archery. After several famous shots on either side, the king challenges Eindridi to shoot a tablet off his son's bead without hurting the child. Eindridi is ready, but declares he will revenge himself if the child is hurt. The king has the first shot, and his arrow strikes close to the tablet. Then Eindridi is to shoot, but at the prayers of his mother and sister, refuses the shot, and has to yield and be converted.* So, also, Kmg Harold • Fomm. sag., 2, 272. b2 U.g.VK.yC00glc XXV) IHTBODTJCTION. SigurdarsoD, who died 1066, backed himself against a famouB marksman, Hemingr, and ordered him to Bhoot a hazel nut off the -head of his brother Bjdm, and Hemingr performed the feat.* In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Malleus MaleScorum refers it to Puncher, a magician of the Upper Rhine. Here in England, we have it in ihe old English ballad of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudsle, where William performs the feat. It is not told at all of Tell in Switzerland before the year 1499, and the earlier Swiss chronicIeB omit it altogether. It is common to the Turks and Mongolians ; and a legend of the wild Samoyeds, who never heard of Tell or saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their famous marksmen. What shall we say then, bnt that the story of this bold master-shot was primteva) amongst many tribes and races, and that it only cry8~ tallized itaelf round the great name of Tell by thai process of attraction which invariably leads a grateful people to throw such mythic wreaths, such garlands of bold deeds of precious memory, round the brow of its darling champion.t • MUUer'a Saga Bibl, 3, 359. f The following are IranElationB from 8axo, the Wilkina Saga, and the Mulletis Maleficontm, The question is com- pletely set at rest by Grimm, T). U. P. 353 fol. and P. 1214. " Not is the followii^ story to be wrapped in silence. A certuQ Polnatoki, for some time among King Harold's body- guard, had made his bravery odious to very many of bis .yCOOgIC IHTRODDCTION. XXVll Nor let any pioos Welchman be shocked if we venture to assert that Grelleit, that famous hound upon fellow-soldiers by the zeal with whic& he sarpasaed them in the diEcbvge of his dnty. This man once, when talking tipmly over his cnpe, had boasted that he wu bo skilled an archer, that he conld hit the smallest apple placed a long way (tf on a wand at the first shot ; which t^k, caught up at first bjr the eara of backbitem, eoon came to the hearing of the king. Now, mark how the wickedness of the king turned the coofideace of the sure to the peril of the son, by command- ing that this dearest pledge of his life should he placed instead of the wand, with a threat that, nnlesa the author of this promise conld strike off the apple at the first flight of the arrow, he shoold pay the penalty of his empty boasting by the loss of bifl bead. The king's command forced the soldier to perform more than he had promised, and what he had said, reported by the tongues of slanderers, boand him to accomplish what he had not said." . . . . " Nor did his st«r1ing conrage, though caoght iu the snare of slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of heart; nay, be accepted the trial the more readily beoaase it was hard. So Falnatoki warned the boy urgently when he took his stand to awfut the coming of the hurtling arrow with calm ears and unbent bead, lest by a slight turn of his body he should defeat the practised skill of the bowman; and, taking lurtber counsel to prevent his fear, he tamed away his face, lest he should be soared at the nght of the weapon. Then taking three arrows from the quiver, be struck the mark ^ven him with the first he fitted to the string. But, if chance had brought the head of the hoy before the shaft, no donbt the penalty of the son would have recoiled to the peril of the father, and the swerving d the shaft that struck the boy would have linked them both .yCOOgIC IXVUl IKTBODCCTIOH. whose last reating-place the traveller comes as be passes down the lovely vale of Gwynant, le a mythical in common min, I am in doubt, then, whether to admira moat th« CQOnge of the father or the temper of the son, of whom the one by skill in his art avoided being the slayer of his child, while the other by patience of mind and qnietnea of body saved himself alive, and spared the natnra] ofiectaon of hii) father. Nay, the youthful frame strengthened tiie aged heart, and showed as much courage in awuting the arrow as the father skill in launching it. But Folnatoki, when asked by the king why he had taken more arrows from the quiver, when it had been settled that he should only try the fortune of the bow once, mode answer, ' That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first by the points of the rest, lest perchance my innocence might have been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.'" — Saxo Oram. Book X., p. 166, Ed. Frankf. " About that time the young Egill, Wayland's brother, oame to the court of King Nidung, because Wayland (Smith) had sent him word. Eg^U was the fairest of men, and ODe thing he had before all other men — he shot better with the bow than any other man. The king took to him well, and Egill was there a long time. Xow, the king wisbbd to try whether Egill shot so well as was satd or not, so he let Egill'a ■on, a boy of three years old, be taken, and mads them put an apple on his head, and bade Egill shoot so that the shaft ■truck neither above the head nor to the left nor to the right ; the apple only was he to split. But it was not forbidden him to shoot the boy, for the king thought it certain that he would do that on no account, if be could at all help it And he was to shoot one arrow only, no more. So Egill takes three, and strokes their feathers smooth, and fits one to his string, and U.g.VK.yC00glc IHTBODUOTIOK. XXIZ dog, and never sonSed the fresh breeze in the forest of Snowdon, nor saved his master's child from r&Teoiag wolf. This, too, is a primseval story, told with many variations. Sometimes the foe is a wolf, sometimes a bear, sometimeB a snake. It, too, came from the East. BhootB and hita the apple in the middle, so that the arrow took •long with it half the &|>ple, aod then fell to the ground. This nM3tei^4hot has long beea talked about, and the king made much of him, luod he was the most famous of men. Kow, King N idling asked EgiW why he took oat three arrows, when it was settled that one only was to be shot with. Then E^l answered, 'Lord,' Bud he, 'I will not lie to yon; had I stricken the lad with diat one arrow, then I had meant these two for yon.' But the king took that well from him, and all thought it was boldly spoken." — Wilkiiux Saga, ch. 27, Ed. Petisg. " It is related of him (Pnncher) that a certiun lord, who wished to obtain a enre trial of his skill, set ap his little son as a batt, and for a mark a shilling on the boy's cap, com- manding him to carry off the shilling without the cap with his arrow. But when the wizard said be could do it, though he would rather abstain, lest the Devil should decoy him to destruction : still, being led on by the words of the chie^ be thrust one arrow through his collar, and, fitting the other to his crossbow, struck off the coin from the boy's cap without doing him any harm ; seeing which, when the lord asked the wizard why he had placed the arrow in bis collar ? he answered, ' If by the Devil's deceit I bad etain the boy, when I needs most die, I would have transfixed you suddenly with the other arrow, that even so I might have avenged my death.' "—MaOeut Makf.^ P. II., oh. 16. .yCOOgIc" XZX IHTBODUCTION. It is fonnd in the Hitopadesa, Id Filpay's Fables, in the Arabic original of the Seven Wise Uasters, — that famous collection of storiea which illostrate & Biap- dame's c&lumnj and hate — and in many mediseTal versions of those originals. Thence it passed into the Latin Cfesta Bomanorum, where, as well as in the Old English version published b; Sir Frederick Madden, it may be read as a service rendered by a iatthful honnd against a snake; This, too, like Tell's master-shot, is as the lightning which shineth over the whole heaven at once, and can be clfumed by no one tribe of the Aryan race, to the exclusion of the rest. " The Dog of Montargis " is in like manner mythic, though perhaps not so widely spread. It first occurs in France, as told of Sybilla, a fabulous wife of Charlemagne ; but it is at any rate as old as the time of Plutarch, who relates it as an anecdote of brute sagacity in the days of Fyrrhus. There can be no doubt, then, with regard to the question of the origin of these tales, that they were common in germ at least to the Aryan tribes before their migration. We find traces of them in the tradi- tions of the Eastern Aryans, and we find them de- veloped in a hundred forms and shapes in every one of the nations into which the Western Aryans have shaped themselves in the course of ages. We are led, there- fore, irresistibly to the conclusion, that these traditionB are as mnch a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors, ae their language unquestionably is ; and that they form, along with that language, a double chain of .yCOOgIC INTBODCCTION. XXX evidence, which prOTes their Eastern origin. If we are to seek for a simile, or an analogy, as to the relative poeitioDB of these tales and traditions, and to the mutual resemblanceB which exist between them as the several bnuches of our race have developed them from the com- mon stock, we may find it in one which will come home to every reader as he looks round the domestic hearth, if he should be so happy as to have one. The; are like as sisters of one house are like. They have what wodld be called a strong family likeness ; but besides this likeness, which they owe to father or mother, as the case may be, they have each their peculiarities of form, and eye, and face, and still more, their differences of intellect and mind. This may be dark, that fair ; this may have gray eyes, that black ; this may be open and gracefiil, that reserved and close ; this you may love, that yon can take no interest in. One may be bash- ful, anotherwinning,athird worth knowing and yet hard to know. They are so like and so unlike. At first it may be, as an old English writer beautifully expresses it, " their father hath writ them as his own little story," but as they grow up they throw off the copy, educate themselves for good or ill, and finally assimie new forms of feeling and feature imder an original development of their own. And now, in the second pUce, for that particular branch of the Aryan race, in which this peculiar de- velopment of the common tradition has arisen, which we are to consider as " Norse Popular Tales." .yCOOgIC ZXXU INTRODnCTlON. Whatever disputes may have existed as to the mythology of other braachee of the TeutoBic subdivi- sion of the Aryan race — whatever diactuaions may have arisen as to the position of this or that divinity among the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Goths — about the Norsemen there can be no dispute or doubt. From a variety of circumstances, but two before all the rest — the one their settlement in Iceland, which preserved their language and its literary treasures incorrupt ; the other their late conversion to Christianity — their cos- mogony and mythology stands before us in full flower, and we have not, as elsewhere, to pick up uid piece together the wretched fragments of a faith, the articles of which itB own priests had forgotten to commit to writing, and which those of another creed had dashed to pieces and destroyed, wherever their zealous hands could reach. In the two Eddas therefore, in the early Sagas, in Saxo's stilted Latin, which barely conceals the popular songs and legends from which the historian drew hiB materials, we are enabled to form a perfect conception of the creed of the heathen Norsemen. We are enabled -to trace, as has been traced by the same hand in an- other place,* the natural and rational development of that creed from a simple worship of nature and her powers, first to monotheism, and then to a polytheistic system. The tertiary system of Polytheism is the soil out of which the mythology of the Eddas sprang, though * Oxford Essays for 1858. " The Norsemen in Icelaod." U.g.VK.yC00glc IHTBODnCnOK. XXZUl throngh it each of the oldei formatioDB irropa out in huge masses which admit of no mistake as to its origin. In the Eddae the natural powere have been partly subdued, partly thrust; on one side, for a time, by Odin and the Mm, by the Great Father and his children, by One Supreme and twelve subordinate gods, who rule for an appointed time, and over whom hangs an impend- ing &te, which imparte a charm of melancholy to this creed, which has clung to the race who once believed in it long after the creed itself has vanished before the light of Christianity, According to this creed, the ^sir and Odin had their abode in Asgard, a lofty hill in the centre of the habitable earth, in the midst of Midgard, that middle earth which we hear of in early English poetry, the abode of gods and men. Round that earth, which was fenced in against the attacks of ancient and inveterate foes by a natural fortification of hills, flowed the great sea in a ring, and beyond that sea was Utgard, the outlying world, the abode of Frost Giants, and (fonsters, those old natural powers who had been dispossessed by Odin and the Mbu when the new order of the universe arose, and between whom and the new gods a feud as inveterate as that cherished by the Titans agiunst Jupiter was neces- sarily kept alive. It is true indeed that this feud was broken by intervals of truce during which the ^sir and the Giants visit each other, and appear on more or less fiiendly terms, bat the true relation between them was war ; pretty much as the Norseman was at war with all U.g.VK.yC00glc XIXIT INTKODUOTION. the rest of the world. Xor was this struggle between two riyal races or powers confined to the gods in Asgard \ alone. Just ae their ancient foes were the Giants of , Frost and Snow, so between the race of men and the ' race of Trolls was there a perpetual feud. As the gods were men magnified and exaggerated, so were the Trolls diminished Frost Giants ; far superior to man in strength Mid stature, but ioferior to man in wit and in- vention. Like the Frost Giants, they inhabit the rough and ru^ed places of the earth, and, historically speaking, in all probability represent the old aboriginal races who retired into the raountainous fastnesses of the land, and whose strength was exaggerated, because the intercourse between the races was small. In almost every respect they stand in the same relations to men as the Frost Giants stand to the Gods. There is nothing, perhaps, which so much charac- terises a true, as compared with a false religion, thap the restlessness of the one against the quiet dignity and majesty of the other. Under the Christian dispensation, oiu- blessed Lord, his awful sacrifice once performed, "as- cended up on high, having " led captivity captive," and expects the hour that shall make his foes "his footstool;" but false gods, Jupiter, Vishnu, Odin, Thor, must con- stantly keup themselves, as it were, before the eyes of men, lest they should lose respect. Such gods being invari- ably what the philosophers call subjective, that is to say, having no existence except in the minds of those who believe in them ; having been created by man in his .yCOOgIC IHTBODOCTION. X.XXV own image, with his own desires and pasnons, stand in constant seed-of being recreated. They change as the habits and temper of the race which adores them alter ; they are ever bound to do something fresh, lest man shonld forget them and new diTioities usurp their place. Hence came endless avatars in Hindoo mythology, repro- ducing all the dreamy monstrosities of that |>asBiTe Indian mind. Hence came Jove's adventures, tinged with all the lust and guile which the wickedness of the natural roan planted on a hot-bed of iniquity is capable of conceiv- ing. Hence bloody Moloch, and the foul abominations of Chemosh and Milcom. Hence, too, Odin's countlese adventures, his journeys into all parts of the world, his constant trials of wit and strength with his fmcient foes the Frost Giants, his hair-breadth escapes. Hence Tbor's labours and toils, hia passages beyond the sea, girt with his strength-belt, wearing his iron gloves, and grasping his hammer which eplit the skulls of so many of the Giant's kith and kin. In the Norse gods, then, we see the Norseman himself, sublimed and ele- vated beyond man's nature, but bearing about with him all his bravery and endurance, all his dash and spirit of adventure, all his fortitude and resolution to struggle agfunst a certainty of doom which, sooner or later, must overtake him on that dread day, the " twilight of the gods," when the wolf was to break loose, when the great snake that lay coiled round the world should lash him- self into' wrath, and the whole race of the ^sirs and their antagonists were to perish in internecine stnfe. U.g.VK.yC00glc XZXVl ISTBODOCTION. Such were the gods on whom the Norsemen be- lieved,^— exaggeratioDB of himself, of all his good and all his bad qualities. Their might and their adventures, their domestic quarrels and certain doom, were sung in venerable lays, now collected in what we call the Elder, or Poetic Edda; simple majestic songs, whose mellow accents go straight to the heart through the ear, and whose simple severity never suffers us to mistake their meaning. Bat, besides these gods, there were heroes of the race whose fame and glory were in every man's memory, and whose mighty deeds were in every min- strel's mouth. Helgi, Sinfjotli, Sigurdr, Brynhildr, Gnd- run; champions and shield-maidens, henchmen and corse- chosers, now dead tmd gone, who sat round Odin's board in Valhalla. Women whose beauty, woes, and sufferings were beyond those of all women ; men whose prowess bad never found an equal Between these, love and hate ; all that can foster passion or beget revenge. HI assorted marriages ; the right man to the wrong woman, and the wrong man to the right woman ; envyings, jealousies, hatred, murders, all the works of the natural man, combine together to form that wondrous story which begins with a ciurse — the curse of ill-gotten gold ; — and ends with a curse, a widow's curse, which drags down all on whom it falls, and even her own flesh and blood, to swifl destruction. Such is a sketch of the wondrons Niflung Tale, the far older, simpler, and grander ori^nal of that Nibelungen Need of the thirteenth century, a tale which begins with the slaughter of Fa&iir by Sigurdr, and enda U.g.VK.yC00glc INTKODUCTION. XXXVll with Hermanaric, " that fierce faith-breaker," as the Anglo-Saxon minstrel calls him, when he is describing, in rapid toaches, the mythic glories of the Teutonic race. Such were the gods, and such the heroes of the Xorwrnan ; who, like his own gods, went smiling to death under the weight of an inevitable destiny. But that fate never fell on their gods. Before this subjective mytho- lo^cal dream of the Norsemen could be fulfilled, the religioufi mist in which they walked was scattered by the sunbeams of Christianity, A new state and condi- tion of society arose, and the creed which had satisfied a race of heathen warriors, who externally were at war with all the world, became in time an object of horror and aversion to the converted Christian. This is not the place to describe the long struggle between the new and the old faith in the Korth ; how kings and queens became the foster-fathem and nursing- mothers of the Church ; how the great chiefs, each a little king in himself, scorned and derided the whole scheme as altogether weak and efleminate ; how the bulk of the people were sullen and suspicious, and often broke out into heathen mutiny ; how kings rose and kings fell, just as they took one or the other side ; and how, finally, after a contest which had lasted alto- gether more than three centuries, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden — we ran them over in the order of conversion — became faithful to Christianity, as preached by the missionaries of the Churcli of Home. One fact, however, we must insist on, which might be .yCOOgIC xxznii ntTRODncnoN. mfened, iodeed, boUi &om the nature of the struggle itself, and the character of Kome ; and that \b, that thronghoat there was sometluDg in the process of ccoi- Tersion of the nature of a compromise — of what we may call the great principle of " give and take." In all Christian churches, indeed, and in none so much as the Church of Rome, nothing is so austere, so eleTating, and so ^«Qd, as the uncompromising tone in which the great dogmas of the Faith are enunciated and proclaimed. Nothing is more magnificent, in short, than the theory of Christianity ; but nothing is more mean and miser- able than the time-serviDg way in which those dogmas are dragged down to the dull level of daily life, and that sublime theory reduced to ordinary practice. At Rome, it was true, the Pope could congratulate the faithful that whole nations in the barbarous and frozen North had been added to the true fold, and that Odin's grim champions now universally believed in the gospel of peace and love. It is so easy to dispose of a doubt- ful struggle in a single sentence, and so tempting to be- lieve it when once written. But in the North, the state of things, and the manner of proceeding, were entu^ly difTerent. There the dogma was proclaimed, indeed ; but the manner of preaching it was not in that mild spirit with which tho Saviour rebuked the disciple when he said, " Put up again thy sword into his place : for ali they that take the sword shall perish with the aword," There the sword was used to bring converts to the font, and the baptism was often one rather of .yCOOgIC INTBODUCTIOM. ZXXIX fire than of water. There the new couverta perpe- tually relapsed, chased away the miseioDaries and th« kings who sheltered them, and only yielded at last to the overwhelming weight of Christian opinion in the Western world. St. Olof, kiag and martyr, martyred in pitched battle by his mutinoaB allodial freemen, be- cause he tried to drive rather than to lead them to the cross ; and another Olof, greater than he, Olof Trygg- vasoQ, who fell in battle against tlie heathen Swedes, were men of blood rather than peace ; but to them the introduction of the new Mth into Norway ia munly owing. So also Charlemagne, at an earUer period, had dealt with the Saxons at the Main Bridge, when his ultimatum was, " Christianity or death." So alao the first missionary to Iceland — who met, indeed, with a sorry reception — was followed about by a stout cham- pion named Thangbrand, who, whenever there was what we should cow call a missionary meeting, chal- lenged any tmpugner of the new doctrines to mortal combat on the spot. No wonder that, after having killed several opponents in the little tour which he made, with his missionary friend through the island, it became too hot to hold him, and he, and the missionary, and the new creed, were forced to take ship and mil back to Norway. " Precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little," was the motto of Rome in her deal- ings with the heathen Norsemen, and if she suited her- self at Erst rather to their habits and temper than to .yCOOgIC II INTBODCCTIOS. those of more enlightened nationB, she had an excuse in St. Paal'e maxim of making herself " all things to all men." Thus, when a second attempt to ChriBtianize Iceland proved more successfiil — for in the meantime, King Olof Tryggrason, a zealous Christian, had seized as hostages all the Icelanders of family and fame who happened to he in Norway, and thus worked on the feelings of the chiefs of those families at home, who in their turn bribed t^e lawman who presided over the Great Assembly to pronomice in favour of the new Fmth — even then the adherents of the old religion were allowed to perform its rites in secret, and two old heathen practices only were expressly prohibited, tJbe exposure of infants and the eating of horseflesh, for horses were sacred animals, and the heathen ate their flesh alter they had been solemnly sacrificed to the god& As a matter of fact, it is far easier to change a form of religion than to extirpate a faith. The first indeed ia no easy matter, as those students of history well know, who are acquainted with the tenacity with which a large proportion of the English nation clang to the Church of Rome, long after the State had declared for tlie Reformation. But to change the faith of a whole nation in block and bulk on the instant, was a thing contrary to tlie ordinary working of Providence, and unknown even in the days of miracles, though the days of miracles had long ceased when Rome advanced against the North. There it was more politic to raise a cross in the grove where the Sacred Tree had once U.g.VK.yC00glc IKTBODTJOTION. xU stood, and to poiot to the sacred embleio which had supplanted the old object of natioQal adoration, when the populace came at certaia seaeoos with BODge and danceg to perform their heathen rites. Near the cross soon rose a church ; and both were ^rt by a cemetery, the soil of which was doubly sacred as a heathen fane and a ChriHtian sanctnary, and where alone the bodies of the &ithiu] could repose in peace. But the songs and dances, and processions in the church-yard round the (70BS, continued long alter Christianity had become dominant. So also the worship of wells and springs woB christiauised when it was found impossible to pre- vent it. Great churches arose over or near them, as at Walsingham, where an abbey, the holiest place in England, after the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, threw its majestic shade over the heathen wishing-well, and the worshippers of Odin and the Nomir were gradu- ally converted into votaries of the Virgin Mary. Such practices form a subject of constant remonstrance and re- proof in the treatises and penitential epistles of medieval divines, and in some few places and churches, even in England, such ritea are still yearly celebrated.* So, too, again with the ancient gods. They were cast down from honour, but not from power. They lost their genial kindly influence as the protectors of men and the * See Anecd. and Trad. Camd. Soc. 1839. Pp. 9? fol. See also the passages from Anglo-Saxon laws Bgainat " well- waking," which Grimm has collected. D. M. P. 550. .yCOOgIC xlii INTEODDOTION. origin of all things good; but their exiBtencewaatolemted; they became powerful for ill, and degenerated into malig- nant demons. Thus the worshippers of Odin had sup- posed that at cert«n times and rare intervals the good powers shewed themselves in bodily shape to mortal eye, passing through the land in divine progress, bringing blessings in their train, and receiving in return the offer- ings and homage of their grateful votaries. But theBe were naturally only exceptional instances ; on ordinary occa- sions the pious heathen recognized his gods sweeping through the air in cloud and storm, riding on the winga of the wind, and speaking in awful accents, as the tempest howled and roared, and the sea shook his white mane and crest. Nor did he fail to see them in the dust and dm of battle, when Odin appeared with his terrible helm, succouring his own, striking fear into their foes, and turning the day in many a doubtful fight ; or in the hurry and uproar of the chase, where the mighty huntsman on bis swift 8t«ed, seen in glimpses among the trees, took up the hunt where weary mortals gave it up, outstripped them all, and brought the noble quarry to the ground. Looking up to the stars and heaven, they saw the foot- steps of the gods marked out in the bright path of the Milky Way ; and in the Bear they hailed the war- chariot of the warrior's god. The great goddesses, too, Frigga and Freyja were thoroughly old-fashioned domes- tic divinities. They help women in their greatest need, they spin themseiveB, they teach the mfuds to spin, and punish them if the wool remains upon their spindle. .yCOOgIC iNTROoncnoK. xliii They are kind, and good, and bright, for Holda, Bertha, are the epithets given to them, And bo, too, this mythology which, iu its aspect to the Btranger and the external world, was so ruthless and terrible, when looked at Irom within and at home, was gonial, and kindly, and hearty, and affords another proof that men, in all ages and climes, are not so bad as they seem ; that after all, peace and not war is the proper state for man, and that a nation may make war on others and exist ; bat that unless it has peace within, and industry at home, it mnst perish from the face of the earth. But when Christianity came the whole character oFthis goodly array of divinities was soured and spoilt. Instead of the stately procession of the God, which the intensely sen- suous eye of man in that early time connected with all the phenomena of nature, the people were led to believe in a ghastly grisly band of ghosts, who followed an infernal warrior or huntsman in hideous tumult through the midnight air. No doubt, as Grimm rightly remarks,* the heathen had fondly fancied that the spirits of thosp who bad gone to Odin followed him in his triumphant prepress either visibly or invisibly ; that they rode with him m the whirlwind, just as they followed him to battle, and feasted with him in Valhalla ; but now the Chris- tian belief, when it had degraded the mighty god into a demon huntsman, who pursued his nightly round in chase of human souls, saw in the train of the infernal master • D. M., p. 900. Wutendes beer. .yCOOgIC zliy INTRODDCnON. of the hunt only the spectres of suicides, drunkards, and rufiSans ; and, with all the uncharitableness of a dog- matic faiUi, the spirits of chUdren who died unbaptized, whose hard fate had thrown them into such evil company. This was the way in which that wide-spread superstition arose, which sees in the phantoms of the clouds the shapes of the Wild Huntsman and his accursed crew, and bears, in spring and autumn nights, when sea-fowl take the wing to fly either south or north, the strange accents and micouth yelb with which the chase is pressed on in upper air. Thus, in Sweden it is still Odin who passes by ; in Denmark it is King Waldemar's Hunt ; in Nor- way it is Aaskereida, that is, Aagard^s Car; in Germany it is Wode, Woden, or Hackelberend,or Dieterich of Bern; in France it is Hellequin, or King Hugo, or Charles the Fifth, or, dropping a name altogether, it is Le Grand VeneuT who ranges at night through the Forest of Fontainebleau. Nor was England without her Wild Huntsman and his ghastly following. Gervase of Til- hury, in the twelfth century, could tell it of King Arthur, round whose mighty name the superstition settled itself, for he had heard from the foresters how, " on alternate days, about the full of the moon, one day at noon, the next at midnight when the moon shone bright, a mighty train of hunters on horses was seen, with haying hounds and blast of horns ; and when those hunters were asked of whose company and household they were, they re- plied, ' of Arthur's.' " We hear of him again in " the Complaynt of Scotland," that curious composition attri- U.g.VK.yC00glc INTBODDCTION. xlv buted by some to Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, and of Gilmerton in East Lotliian, pp. 97, 98, where he says — " Arlfanr knycht, he raid on nycht. With gyldin spar and candil lycht" Nor should we forget, when consideriDg this legend, that atory of Heme the Hunter, who, " Sometime a keeper here in Wiodsor Forest, Doth all the winter time, at still midniglit, Walk rannd about an oak, with great ragg'd horns ; And there he blaets the trees, and takes the cattle, Aiid makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain In a most hideous and dreadiul manner,"* And even yet, in various parts of England, the atory of some great man, generally a member of one of the county families, who drives about the country at night, ie common. Thus, in Warwickshire, it is the " One. handed Bonghton," who drives about in his coach and six, and makes the benighted traveller hold gates open for bim ; or it is " Lady Shipwith," who passes through the country at night in the same manner. This sub- ject might be pureued to much greater length, for po- pular tradition is full of such stories ; but enough has been said to show how the awful presence of a glorious God can be converted into a gloomy superstition ; and, at the same time, bow the majesty of the old beUef strives to rescue itself by clinging, in the popular con- Bcionsness, to some king or hero, as Arthur or Walde- mar, or, ffuling that, to some squire's family, as Hackel- • Merry Wives of Windsor, act. iv. sc. 4. Gooi^lc xlvi INTEODDCnON. berend, or the " oae-handed Boughton," or even to the Keeper Heme. OdiD and tbe Ms\t then were dispossessed and de- graded by our Saviour and his Apostles, just as they had of old thrown oat the Frost Giants, and the two are mingled together, in medieval Norse tradition, as Trolls and Giants, hostile alike to ChriBtianity and man. Christianity had taken poBsession indeed, but it was beyond her power to kill. To this half-result the swift corruption of the Church of Rome lent no small aid. Her doctrines, as taught by Augustine and Boniface, by Anschar and Sigfrid, were comparatively mild and pure ; but she had scarce swallowed the heathendom of the North, much in the same way as the Wolf was to swallow Odin at the " Twilight of the Gods," than she fell into a deadly lethargy of foith, which put it out of ber power to digest her meal. Gregory the Seventh, elected pope in 1073, tore the clergy from the ties of domestic life with a grasp that wounded every fibre of natural afiection, and made it bleed to the very root. With the celibacy of the clergy he established the hierarchy of the church, hut her labours as a mis- sionary church were over. Henceforth she worked not by missionaries and apostles, but by crusades and bulls. Now she raised mighty armaments to recover the barren soil of the Holy Sepulchre, or to annihilate heretic Albigenses. Now she established great orders, Templais and Hospitallers, whose pride, and luxury, and pomp, brought swift destruction on one at least of those fraternities. Now she became feudal, — she U.g.VK.yC00glc IHTRODUCTION. xlvii owned luid instead of hearts, oad forgot that the true patnmooy of St. Peter was the souls of men. No wonder that, with the barbarism of the times, she soon fulfilled the Apostle's words, " She that liveth in luxury IB dead while she liveth," and became filled with idle Huperstitions aud Tain beliefe. No wonder, then, that Instead of completing her conquest over the heathen, and carryiDg out their conversioii, she became half heathen herself ^ that Bhe adopted the tales and traditions of the old mythology, which she had never been able to extirpate, and related them of our Lord and his Apostles. No wonder, then that, having abandoned her mission of being the first power of intelligence on earth, she fell like Lucifer when the mist of medieval feudalism rolled away, and the light of learning and education re- turned— fell before the indignation of enlightened men, woridng upon popular opinion. Since which day, though she has changed her plans and remodelled her superstitions to suit the times, she has never regained the supremacy which, if she had been wise in a true sense, she seemed destined to hold for ever. The preceding observattona will have given a suf- ficient 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 Luther- anism, in a locally little exposed to foreign influence, no that even now the Daleman in Norway or Sweden may be reckoned among the most primitive exiunples Gooi^lc Xlviii INTBODCCTIOH. 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 col- lected or reduced to writing till within the last few years, would present a ^thfiil picture of the natural conscious- ness, or, perhaps, to speak more correctly, of that half consciousness out of which the heart of any people speaks in its abmidance. We should expect to find heathen gods in Christian dresses, 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 tough- ness 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 bumau 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 queetion 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 enlightttned creeds, and over wliich the apostle, wriliDg to the Hebrews, throws the sanction of his authority, so lar aa angels are concerned.* Classical mythology is full of such stories. These wanderings of the' (rods are mentioned in the * Heb. xiiL 1 : " Let brotherly love conlione. Be oot forgetful to entartEiiu strangers : for thereby some have en- terttuned augels unawares." L)in;« ...Google IHTBODQCTION. xli:i Odyssey, and the sanctity of the rites of hospitality, and the dread of tumiog a stranger from Uie door, took its origin from a fear lest the wayfaring man should be a Divinity in disguise. According to the Greek story, Orion offed his birth to the fact that the childless Hyrieus, his repnted father, had once received unawares Zens, Poseidon, and Hermes, or, to call them by their Latin names, Jnpiter, Neptune, and Mercury. In the beau- tiful 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 Pkedrus and ^sop represent Mercury' and Demeteraswanderingand enjoying the hospitality of men. In India it is Brahm and Vishnu who generally wander. Iq the Edda, Odin, Loki, and Ecenir thus wander about, or Thorr, Tbialfi, and Loki. Sometimes Odin appears alone as a horseman, who turns in at night to the smith's house and gels him to shoe his horse, — a legend which reminds us at once of the Master-smith.* Some- times it ia Thorr with his great hammer who wanders thos alone. Now, let us turn from heathen to Christian times, and look at some of these old legends of wandering gods in a new Arem. Throughout die middle age, it is our blessed Lord and St. Peter that thus wander, and * One of Odin's names, when on thene adventures, vraa ' Qangradr, or Qangleri. Both mean " the Ganger, or way- fiircr." We have the latter epilbet in the " Qangrd carle," and " Gangret loon," of the early Scotch ballads. c2 U.g.VK.yC00glc 1 IMTBODOCTIOH. here we see that hulf-digested heathendom to which we have altitded. Those who may be shocked at such tales ID this collection as " the Ma«ter-Smith " and " Giertrude'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 ae well state at once that this adaptation of new names to old beliefs is not pecu- liar to the Norsemen, bnt is found in all the popular tales of Europe. Gennany was full of them, and them St. Peter often appears in a snappish ludicrous guise, which reminds the reader versed in Norse mythology with the tricks and pranks of the shifty Loki. In the Norse tales be thoroughly preserves his saintly character. Nor was it only gods that walked among men. In the Norse mythology, Frigga, Odin'e wife, who knew beforehand all that was to happen, and Freyja, the goddess of love and plenty, were prominent figures, and often trode the earth j the three Noms 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 crovm bequeathed to her by the ancient goddesses. She appears as divine mother, spinner, and helpful virgin (vierge .yCOOgIC INTBODUOTION. 11 secoarable). Flowers and plants bear her name. In England one of our commoneat and prettiest insecte is BtiU called after her, but which belonged to Freyja, the heathen " Lad;," long before the western nations had learned to adore the name of the mother of Jesus. The reader of these Tales will meet, in that of " the LaBBie and her Godmother," No. sxiT., with the Virgin Mary in a truly mythic character, as the majestic guar- dian of snn, 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. Ag^n, of all beliefs, that in which mun has, at all times of his history, been most prone to stst 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 Jeuius, and peace, though perhaps not plenty, reigned over what the proud Koman called the habitable world. Soch a period the early Christian expected when the Saviour was bom, 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 tiieir hearts sick. Such a period of peace and plenty, such a golden ^e, the Norseman could tell of in his mythic Frodi's reign, when gold, or FrodCa meal, as it was called, was so plentiful that golden armlets lay untouched &om year's end to year's end on the king's highway, and the fields bore crops unsown. Here, in .yCOOgIC lii INTRODtlCTION. England, the Anglo-Saxon Bede* knew how to tell the same story of King Edwin, the Northumbrian king, and when Alfred came to be mythic, the same legend was pasBed 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, hut also of his downfall and ruin. In Frodi's house were two maidens of that old giant race, Penja and Menja. These daughters of the giant he had bought as slaves, and he made them grind his quein or hand-mill, Grotti, ont of which he used to grind peace and gold. Even in that golden age one sees there were Blaves, and Frodi, however bountiful to his thanes and people, was a bard 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 gronnd anythmg that the grinder chose, though until then it had ground nottung but gold and peace. So Uie mfudens ground and ground, and one sang their piteous tale in a strain worthy of ^schylus as t^e other rested — 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 * HiflL ii. 16. .yCOOgIC IHTBODCCTION. liii that very night came Mysing the Sea-rover, and elew Frodi and aU his men, and carried off the qnem ; and HO Frodi's peace ended. The maidens the sea-rover took with him, and when be got on the high seas he bade them grind salt So they ground ; and at mid- night they asked if he had not salt enough, bat he bade them still grind on. So they ground till the ship was fall and sank, Mysing, maids, and mill, and all, and that's why the sea is salt* Perhaps of all the tales in this Tolome, none could be selected as better proving the toaghneas of a traditional belief than No. n., which tells " Why tihe Sea is Salt." The notion of the Arch-enemy of God and Man, of a fallen angel, to whom power was permitted at cer- tain times for an all- wise purpose by the Great Ruler of the universe, was as foreign to the heathendom of oar ancestors as his name was outlandish and strange to their tongue. This notion Christianity brought with it &om 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 fall of such dualism, and &om that hom*, when a more than mortal eye saw Satan filling like lightning from heaven,t the kingdom of darkness, the abode of Satan * Snor. Ed. Skaldek. cfa. 43. f St. Luke, z. 18. U.g.VK.yC00glc Ut intboddotion. and his bad Bpirita, yraa established in direct opposi- tion to the kingdom of the Saviour and his angels. The North bad its own notion on thia point. Its mythology was not without its own dark powers ; but though tbey 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 Mbit ; and though this upstart dynasty, as the Frost Giants in j^Bchytean 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 Kiflheim, 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 hig^ 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 stem and grim." * 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 eudless 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, " Saor. Edda. ch. 34, Eugl Traosl. U.g.VK.yC00glc IHTKODDCnON. Iv declaring them to be lying gods and demonB, then Hel fell with the rest ; but fulfilling her fate, oatlived them. From a person she became a place, and all the Northern nations, from the Goth to the Noraeman, agreed in believing Hell to be the abode of the devil and bis wicked Eipirits, the place prepared from the beginning for the everlasting torments of the damned. One curious fact connected with this explaDation 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, beat is often an intolerable torment, and cold, on the other hand, everything that is pleasant and deligbtfiiL 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 rei^ou over those who were cowards by implica- tion, while the mead-cup went ronad, and huge logs blazed and crackled in Valhalla, for the brave and beauti- fid who bad 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 toogh, and even after cen- turies 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 &om .yCOOgIC Jvi INTEODDCTION. " Why the Sea is Salt," No. ii., will sufficiently prove this: — " Well, here is the flitch," said the rich brother, " and nov go etrught to Hell." " What I have given m; word to do, I mast stick to," B(ud the other ; so he took the flitch and set ofl*. He valked the whole daf, and at dusk he came to a place where be saw a very blight light. " Maybe this is the place," said the man to himselil So he tnrned 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 GhnBtmas fire. " Good even," said the man with the flitch. " The same to you ; whither are yon going so late," said the man. " Oh 1 I'm going to Hell, if I only knew the right way," answered the poor man. " Well, yoa're not far wrong, for tliis b Hell," sud tb« old man ; " When yon get inside they will be all for buying yonr flitch, for meat is scarce in Hell; bat mind you doa't sell it unless you get the hand-qnem which stands behind the door for it. When yon come oat, I'll teach yon how to handle the quern, for it's good to grind almost anything." This, too, is the proper place to ezplain the coucla- uOD of that intensely heathen tale, " the Master Smith," No. XIV. We have already seen how the Saviour and St. Peter supply, in its be^nning, the place of Odin and some other heathen god. But when the Smith sets out with the feeling that he has done a silly Uiing in quarrelliDg with the Devil, having aheady loErti his hope of heaven, this tale assumes a still more heathen .yCOOgIC IHTEODCCTION. Ivii shape. According to the old notion, those who were not Odin's giiests went either to Thor'e 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 comfortlesa goddess already mentioned, who was still no tonnentor, though she ruled over nine worlds, and though her walb were high, and her bolts and bars huge ; traits which come out in " the Master-Smith," No. irv,, when the Devil, who here assumes Hel's place, orders the watch to go back &ad lock up all the nine locks on tha gates of Ilell — a lock for each of the god- desses nine worlds — and to put a padlock on besides. In the twilight between heathendom and Christianity, in that half Christian half heathen conscionsnesa, which this tale reveab, heaven is the preferable abode, as Val- halla was of yore, but rather than be without a bouse 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 tonnent, comes out too in " Not a Pin to choose between them," No. xxi., where Peter, the second hushaud 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 Griants, sapematural and hostile indeed to man, but d U.g.VK.yC00glc Iviii INTBODUCTIOS. umple and easily deceived by s cunning reprobate, whose superior intelligence he learns to dread, for whom be feels himself no match, and whom, finally, he will receive in Hell at no price. We shall have to notice some other characteristice of this race of i^antfi a little further on, bnt certainly no greater proof can be given of the snalt hold which the Christian Devil has taken of the Morse mind, than the heathen aspect under which he constantly appears, and the ludlcroos way in which he is always outwitted. 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. Enropa 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 swal- low perched on the roof of the ball,* so Odiu fliee off as a falcon, and Loki takes the form of a horse or bird. This was only part of that onmipotence which all gods enjoy. But the belief that men, under certain conditjons, could also take the shape of animals, is prinueval, 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 bis natural shape. Pliny, Pom- ■ Od. iii. 372 ; and zxii. 239. U.g.VK.yC00glc rSTBODUCTlON. lix poniuB Mela, and St Augustin, in his great treatise, De dvitate Dei, tell the same story, and Virgil, in his Eclogues, has sung the same belief.* The Latins called such a man, a tumaJein, — veraipellts, an expression which exactly agrees with the Icelandic expression for the same thing, and which is prohably the ti*ue original of our turncoat. In Fetronius the superstition appears in its fall shape, and is worth repeating. At the ban- quet of Trimalchion, Niceros pves the following account of the tnnishins of Nero's time : — " It happened that my master was gone to Capua to dia- pose of Bome second-h&iid goods, I took the opportanity, aod persaaded our guest to walk with me to the fifth mile- sbme^ He was a valiant soldier, and a sort of grim water- drinkiag Flutu. About cock-crow, when the moon wau Hbiomg as bright as mid-day, we came among the monument. Uy fnend began addresaiog himself to the stars, but I was rather in a mood to sing or to count tbem ; and when I turned to look at him, lo I 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 "drcumminxil vtB^menta," 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, be began howling, and fled into the woods. At first I hardly knew where I was, and afterwards, when I went to take np his clothes, tbey were turned into stone. Who then died with fear bnt I ? Tet I drew my sword, and went catting the air • Eel. Tiii 97.— ■< His ego seepe Inpum fieri et m condere nlTin Hsrin TJdi." .yCOOgIC Is IMTBODDCTION. riglit and left, till I reached the villa of 1117 sweetheart I entered the court-jaH. I almost breathed mj 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 yon come sooner you might at least have helped us, for a wolf has entered the farm and worried all our cattle ; hut 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 conld not doubt how it was, and, e.s it was clear daylight, ran home as fast u 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 Iny 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."* A maD who had such a gift or greed was also called lycanthropua, a man-wolf or wolf-man, wbicb term the Anglo-Saxons translated literally in Canute's Laws veremilf, and the early English werewolf. In old French he was loupgarou, which means the same thing ; except that garou means man-wolf in iteelf without • See Grimm's D. M., 1047, fol. ; and for this translation from t'etrouiuB, a very interesting letter prefixed to Madden's Ed. of the old English Eomance of " William and the Were- wolf," 1832, one of the Roxburgh Club Publications. This letter, which was by the hand of Mr. Herbert of Petworth, contains all that was known on this subject before Grimm ; hut when Grimm came he was, compared with all who had treated the subject, as a sober man amongst drunkards. .yCoogIc IHTHODDCnON. Ixi the Antecedent laup, so that, as Madden observes, the whole -word is one of those reduplications of which we have an example in lukewarm. In Brittany lie was tleizgartm and denvletz, formed respectively from b/eiz wolf, and den man ; garou is merely a distorted form of wer or vere, man and loop. In lat<>r French the wortl be- came waroul, whence the Scotch teroul, vmrl, and worlin* It was not likely that a belief so widely spread should not have extended itself to the North ; and the grave assertions of OlausMagnus in the sixteenth century, in his Treatise de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, show how commonthe belief in were-wolves was in Sweden so late att the time of GustavuB Vasa. In mythical times the Vol- songa Sagat expressly states of Sigmund vid Sinfiotii that they became were-wolves, — which, we may remark, were Odin's sacred beasts, — joat in tfae same way as Brynhildr and the Valkyries, or corse-clioosers, who followed the god of battles to the field, and chose tiie dead for Valhalla when the fight was done, became swan-maidens, and took the shape of swans. In either case, the wolfs skin or the swan's feathery covering was assumed and laid aside at pleasure, though the V'olundr Qutdr, in the Edda, and the storicK of " the Fair Melusina," and other medieval swan- maidens, show that any one who seized that shape while * ^Mclaixiret in tbe Lais of Marie de France, 1, lT8,8eeniti to be a corruption of Bleizgarou, as the Norman ganeal is of guanoolf. See also Jaraieson Diet under warwolf. f Fornald S«^. i., 130, 131. U.g.VK.yC00glc Ixii ISTBODUCTION. thuB laid aside, had power over its wearer. Id later timeB, when thia old heroic belief degenerated into tbe notion of sorcer;, it was supposed that a girdle of wolf- skin thrown over the body, or even a sl&p on the face widi A wolfskin glove, would transform the pereoii upon whom the sorcerer practised into the 8h^>e of a ravening wol£ which fled at once to the woods, where he remained is that shape for a period which varied in popular belief for nine days, three, seven, or nine years. While in tiiis state he was especially ravenous after young children, whom he carried off as the were-wolf carried off Wiltiam in the old romance, though all were-wolves did not treat their prey with the same tenderness as that were-wdf treated William. But the favourite beast for Norse transfonnations in historic times, if we may judge from the evidence afforded by the Sagas, was the bear, the king of all their beasts, whose strengl^ and sagacity made him an olject of great respect.* This old belief, then, might be expected to be found in these Norse Tales, and accordingly we find men trans- formed in them into various beasts. Of old these trans- formations, as we have already stated, were active, if we may use the expression, as well as pasuve. A man who possessed the gift, frequently assumed the shape of a beast at bis own will and pleasure, like the soldier in Petroniue, Even now in Norway, it is matter of popu- • See Landnama in many places. Egil'B Sag. Hrolf Erak. Sag. U.g.VK.yC00glc TNTRODDCTION. Ixui lar belief that Fidiib aad Lapps, who from time immemo- rial have passed for iks most skilful witcheB and wizards to the world, can at will assume the shape of bears; aod it is a common thing to say of one of those beasts, when he gets unusually savage and daring, " that can be no CbrlBtian bear." On such a bear, in the parish of Oibden, after he had worried to death more than sixty horses and six men, it is said that a girdle of bear- skin, the iniallible mark of a man thus transformed, was found when be was at last tracked and eiain. The tale called " Farmer Weathersky," Ko. xxxix. in this collec- tion, shows that Uie belief of these spontaneous transfor- mations still exists in popular tradition, where it is easy to see that Fanner Weathersky is only one of the ancient gods degraded into a demon's shape. His sudden depar- ture through the air, horse, sledge, and lad, and all, and bis answer, "I'm at home, alike north, and south, and east, aod west;" his name itself, and his distant abode, sur- rounded with the corpses of the slain, isafficiently 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. Bnt 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 Beat in the beaatiliil story of " East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon," No. XXX7I., is a Prince transformed by his stepmother, just as it is the stepmother who plays the same part in the .yCOOgIC Ixiv INTEODCCTION. romance of William and the Were-wolt So the horse in " the Widow's Sod," No. SLin,, ia a Prince over whom a king has cast that ahape.* So aleo in " Lord Peter," No. XLi., which ie the fiill story of what we have only hitherto known in part as " Pnas iu Boots," the cat is a princess bewitched by the Troll who had robbed her of her lands ; so also in " The Seven Foals," No. XLii., and " The Twebe Wild Dncks," No. XLVi., the Foak and the Ducks are Prince 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 ^ster had no time to finish that portion of the shirt, upon the comple- tion 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 teU of beasts and their doings, or that, when they appear, they do so merely as men-beasta, without any power or virtue of their own. From the earliest times, aide 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 ' Troldham, at kaite ham paa. Comp. the old Norse hamr, kamfor, hammadr, hamrammr, which occqt repeatedly in the same sense. .yCOOgIC INTRODTICTION. Ixv Beaat Epic, and is fall of the liveliest traits of nature. Here, too, it was reserved for Gritmn to restore these traditions to their tme place in the history of the human mind, and to 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, hut, on the contrary, porely 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 .lEsop as their original, but Grimm has sufficiently proved • that what we see in .£sop is only the remains of a great cycle of such traditions which had already, in .^op's day, been subjected by the Greek mind to that critical process which a Ute state of society brings to bear on popular traditions ; that they were then already worn and washed out and moralized. He has also shewn how the same process went on till in PLsdrns nothing but the dry bones of the traditions, vitb a drier moral, are served up to the reader ; and he has done justice on La Fontaine, who wrote his fobles with all the wanton licentiousness of his day, and frit- tered away the whole nature of his fables by the frivo- lity of his allusions to the artificial society of his time. Nor has he spared Lessing, who, though he saw through the poverty of Phtedrus as compared with ^sop, and * Beinhart Fachs, Introdnction. U.g.VK.yC00glc Ixvi INTRODUCTION. vaa alive to the weakness of La Fontaine, still wan- dered about in the classical mist which hung heavy over the learning of the eighteenth century, und saw in the Greek form the perfecUon of all fable, when in ^sop it really appears in a state of degeneracy and decay. To the earnest inquirer, to one who believes that many dark things may yet be solved, it is very satis- foctory to see that even Grimm, in his " Reynard the Fox," is at a loss to understand why the North, pro- perly 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 con- fesses in his later works, has amply avenged herself for the slight thus cast npon 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, hot she kept them stored up in her heart in ao 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 so much and reflection for so little, that beasts shoold talk ; and how truly and faithfully it has listened and looked for the accents and character of each. The Bear is stilt the King of Beasts, in which character be appears m " True and Untrue," No. i., but here, as in Germany, be is no matoh for the Fox in wit Thna Reynard plays bim a trick which condemns him for ever to a stumpy tail in No. xz. He cheats him out of U.g.VK.yC00glc IHTEODUCTIOIT. IxTH his Bhare of a firkiQ of batter in another Tale, which I have Dot tranalated because it eeemed too coarse. He is preferred as HerdsmiiD, in No. Tin,, before either Bear or Wolf, by the old wife who wants some one to tend her flock. Yet all the while he profeBses immense respect for the Bear, and calls him *' Lord," even when in the very act of outwitting him. Id the tale called " Well Done and 111 Paid," No. xsxv., the craft; fox puts a fiuiah to his miabehavionr 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, whicli 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 tiie day against mere brute force. Another tale, however, restores the bear to hie tme 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 Bovrefell," No. z. In connection with which, it should be remembered that the same tradition existed in the thirteenth century in Germany,* that the bear ia 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 Os^aks, a tribe akin to the Lapps, and bring him to their hnts with great formali- • QnmvD, IriHch. Elfenm. lU-19, aud D. M. 447. U.g.VK.yC00glc Ixviii IHTBODCCTION. ties and mystic sooga. To the Wolf, whose Dickname U "Graylegs,"* 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 tiiat he became a monk, bnt when the brethren wished to teach him his letters that he might learn the paternoster, all they could get out of him waa lami, lamb; Dor could they ever get him to look to the cross, for bis eyes, with his thoughts, "were ever to the woodward."t He appefu^ on the contrary, in "The Giant who had no Heart in his body," N0.VBI., as a kindly grateful beast, who repays tenfold out of the hidden store of his supematural 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^ has related, how in the shade of those woods and groves which served them for temples, white horses were fed at the public coat, whose backs no mortal man crossed, whose neighings and snortings were carefully watched as auguries and omens, and who were thought to be coDBciaus of divine mysteries. In • Comp. Vict. Hog, N6tre-Dame de Paris, where be tells us that the gTpeiee called the vo\i pledgrit. Bee also Grimm, D. H. 633, and Beinhart, Iv. ccvii. and 446. -}- Douce, niust. to Shatupeore, ii. 33, 314, quoted in Beiubart Fuchs, coxxi. X German. 9, 10. U.g.VK.yC00glc INTBODUCnOK. Ixix Persia, too, the claesical reader vill remember how the neighing of a horse decided t^e 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 migradoQ, as the legend ran, — heroes whose name meant " horse," — and of the vale of the White Horse in Berks,' where the sacred fonn still gleams along the down, to be reminded of the sacredness of the horse to our fore- fathers. 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 saured to this or that particular god. Such a horse is Dapplegrim in No. xxxviii. of these tales, who saves his master out of all his perilfi, and brings him to all for- tune, and is another example of that mysterious connec- tion with the higher powers which animals in all ages have been supposed to possess. The dog, to which, with all his sagacity and faithful- ness, something unclean and impure clmge,as Grimm well observes, plays no very prominent part in these Tales.* " Thns from the earliest timoa " dog," " hound," has been a term of reproacli. Great instances of fidelity, such as " Gellert " or the " Dog of Montargis," both of which are East- era and primeval, have scarcely redeemed the cringing cur- rish nature of the race in general from di^race. H. Fran- cisque Michel, in his Bittoire det Raeei Mcuidita de la France el de PE$pagne, thinks it probable that Cagol, the nickname by which the heretical Gkiths who fled into Aqnitune in the time of Charies Harlel, and received protection from that king U.g.VK.yC00glc Ux INTRODDCTIOK. We find him, liowe'ver, in " Not a Pin to cboose be- tween them," No. iii., where his sagacity fails to detect hie mistreee ; and, as " the foe of his own house," the half-hred foxy hound, who chases away the canning and his succesears, were called by the Franks, was derived from the term Canit Oothicus or Ones Qolhi, In modern French the wmd means hypocrite, and this would come from the notion of the outward conformity to the Catholic formala- ries imposed on the Ariaa Gothi by their orthodox protectors. Etymologicslly, the derivation is good enough, according to Dlez, Romaniackei Worterbuch ; Provencal ea, iog', Oot, Qotbic. Before quittiag Oigot, we may observe that the derivation of bigot, our bigot, another word of the same kiod, is not so clear. Michel says it comes from Viitgothut, Bixi- goVtiu- Diez says this is too far-fetched, especially as " Bigot," " Bigod," was a term applied to the N'ormans, and not to the population of the South of France. There is, bemdes, another derivation given by Ducange from a Latin chronicle of the twelfth century. In speaking of the homage done by Rollo, the first Duke of Normandy, to the King of France, he says, — " Hie non dignatas pedem Coioli oscnlari nisi ad os sumn levaret, cumque siii comites iUmn admonercnt ut pedem Regis in scceptione tanti mnneris Neustrice provincite OHcnlaretur, Angticfi lingoft respon- dit ')!« «e &>pof,'qaod intsrpretatur 'ne per deum.' Res vero et ani illnm deridentes, et Bermonem ejus cormpt^ referentes, iUum voca- verunt Bigottum ; nnde Nonnanni adhuo Bigotbi vooiiitur," Wace, too, says, in the Roman de Rou, that the French had abused the Normans in many ways, calling them Bigoa. It is also termed, id a French record of the year 142S, " vn mot tret tTywieux." Diez aaye it was not used io its present sense before the nzteenth century. U.g.VK.yC00glc iNTEODtronoK. Ixxi Fox in " Well Done and III Paid," No. mxt. Still, be too, in popular saperEtition, is gifted with a sense of the soperaattiral ; he howls when death impends, and in " Buttercup," No. xv., it is Goldtoolh, their dog, who warns Buttercup and his mother of the approach of the old hag. In " Bushy Bride," No, xr.iv., he appears only as tie 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 wierd about him, and he is sent out by his mistress three times to see if the dawn is coming. In one tale, No. xxxiv,, the Goat appears in full force, and dashes out the brains of the Troll, who lived under the bridge over the bum. He, too, was sacred to Thor in the old mythology, and drew his thundering car. Here something of the divine nature of bis former lord, who was the great foe of all Trolls, seems to have been passed on in popular tradition to the animal who bad seen so many adventures with the great God who swayed the thunder. Nor in this list must the little birds be forgotten which taught the man's daughter, in the tale of " The Two Stepsisters," No. xl., how to act in her trials. The belief that some persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said, is primeval. 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. Occa- sionally this gift Beems to have been acquired by eating .yCOOgIC Ixxii IHTEODDCTIOK. or tasting the fleeb of a Biisbe or dragon, as Signrdr, in the Niflung tale, first became aware of Regins' designB agtunst his life, when be accidentally taeted tbe beart- blood of F^nir, whom he bad slain in dragon shape, and tbcD all at once the swallow's song, perched above him, b^ame as ioteltigible as human speech. We now come to a class of beings which plays a large part, and always for ill, in these Tales. Theae are the Giants or Trolls. In modem Norse tradition there is little difference between the names, but origi- nally TroU was a more general expression for a super- natural being than Giant,* which was rather confined to a race more dull than wicked. In the Giants we have tbe wantonness of boundless bodily strength and size, which, trusting entirely to these quolitJes, falls at last by its own weight. At first, it is tme, 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 tbe representatives of a simple primitive race, whose day is past and gone, bat who still possessed something of the innocence and virtoe of ancient times, together with a stock of old expe- * The most common word for a ^aut io the Eddas was Jdtunn (A. Sax. eoten), which, etrange to say, survives in the Scotch £tJD. In one or tno places the word Ogre has been nsed, which is properly a Bomance word, aod comes from the French Ogre, Itat. orco, Lat. orcna Here, too, we have an old Boman god of the nether world degraded. .yCOOgIC IHTBODtJCTIOK. Uxiii rience, which, however oaefnl, it might be as «ti example to others, was quite useless to help them- selves. They are the old Tories of mythology, ati opposed to the ^sir, the advanced Liberals. They can look back aud say what has been, but to look for- ward to say what will be and shall be, and to ^nould 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, thon^ its clumsy awkward blows, guided by mere canning, fail to strike the slight and lissom foe who wuts 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.* This race, and that of the upstart ^sir, though almost always at feud, still had their intervals of com- mon intercourse, and even social enjoyment. Mar- riages take place between them, visits are paid, feasts are given, ale is broached, and mirth is fast and furious. Tbor was the worst foe the giants ever had, and yet he met them sometimes on good terms. They were des- tined to meet once for all on that awful day, " the twi- light of the gods," but till then, they entertained for each other some sense of mutual respect. * These paroxysms were called in Old Norse Jiitunmodr, Ute Etm mood, as opposed to Atmodr, the mood of the .<£>tr, that diviner wrath which, though buruing hot, was Still nnder the control of reason. d2 U.g.VK.yC00glc IXliv INTROUUCTIOS. The TtoUb, on the other hand, with whom mankiDd had more to do, were supposed to be lesa easy tempered, and morij B^stematically malignant, than the Giants, and with the term were bound up notions of Borcei; and unholy power. But mythology is a woof of many colours, in which the hues nre shot and blended, so that the varioas rac^a of SDpematural beings are shaded off, and fade away almost imperceptibly into eadi other; and thus, even in heathen times, it muBt have been hard to say «>xactly where ^e Giant ended and the Troll begtm. Bift when Christianity came in, and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the j^sir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief, whether Mbit, 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 tradi- tions 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. ni., " Tlie Giant who had no Heart in his Body," No. vii., " Shortshanks," No. ivii,, " Boots and the Troll," Na xxix.,"BootB who ate a match with theTroll,"No.iv.,the easy temper of the old Frost Giants predominates, and we almost pity them as we read. In others, as " The Mastermaid," No. ix., " The Blue Belt," No. six, " Far- .yCoOglc IBTRODUOTION. Ixxr mer Weatliereky," No. ixin., a sort of settled malignity against mao appears as the direct workiDg and result of a bad and evil spirit. In " Buttercup," No. xv., and " The Cat on the Dovrefell," we have the Troll proper, — the aupeniatnntl dwellers of the woods and hills, who go to dnirch, and oat men, and porridge, and sausages indif- iereotl;, not from malignity, bat because they know no better, because it is their nature, and because they have always done so. la 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, tiie 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 minera] world. There, in caves and clefts in the steep face of the rock, sits the Troll, as the repre- sentative of the old giants, among heaps of gold and ulver 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. XLi., 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 fwth ; 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, .yCOOgIC btxvi IHTEODCCnON. who could Dot bear the glorious foce of the Son, of Baldr's beaming Tisage, or the bright flash of Tiunr's levin boU. la one aspect, the whole race of G-isnts and TtoIIb 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 myl^c Nor, if we bear iu mind their natural position, and remember how constantly the infamy of sorcery has clung to the Fimis and Lapps, ^all we have far to go to seek this ancient race, even at ihe 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 .^sir 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 dangeroiui innovation whicji destroyed their bunting fields, and was destined finally to root them out from off the taae of the earth. This fact appears in countless stories all over the globe, for man is true to himself in all dimes, and the savage in Africa or across the Bocl^ Mountains, dreads tillage and detests the plough as much as any Lapp or Sa- .yCOOgIC iNTBODUcnos. Uxvii moyed. " See what pretty playtbJBgs, mother!" cries the Giant's daughter, aa she uuties her apron, and shows her a plough, and borees, and peasant " Back with them this iostant," 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 mnat badge." " What sort of an earthworm is this ? " said one Giant to anotJier, when they met a man aa they walked. " These are the earthworms that will one day eat us ap, brother," answered the other ; and soon boUi 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. xvii,, 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. zxxvi., where none of the Trolls are able to wash out the spot of tallow. So also Ui the " Two Stepsisters," No. sl., the old witch is forced to get human maids to do her houaebold work ; and, lastly, the best example of all, in "Lord Peter," No. XLi., 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. " ' Swip a bit,' said ihe Cat, ' and I '11 tell you bow the fkrmer sets to work to get in his winter rye.' " And BO she told him such a hmg story about tbe winter rye. " ' First of all, you see, he ploughs the field, and then fae U.g.VK.yC00glc IxlTlll INTRODDOTION. duQgs it, and then he ploughs it again, and then he lunowB it,' and so she went on till the sun rose." Before we leave these gigantic natural powers, ]et OS lioger 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 roaghest But though rough in form and tongue, he is a genial, kind-hearted fellow alter 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 be asks is that she won't be a&aid, and tJien he tftkes a good rest, and pufis himself up with as mncii 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. XXXI., though he can't restore Hie 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 Hnesvelgr, that great giant in the Edda, who site " at the end of the world in eagle's shape, and when he flaps his wings, all the winds come that blow upon men." We have now only to consider the men and women of these Tales, and then our task is done. It will be sooner done, because they may be left to speak for them- selves, and must stand or fall by their own words and actions. The tales of all races have a character and manner of their own. Among the Hindoos the straight stem of the story is overhung with a network of imagery which reminds one of the parasitic growth of a tropical .yCOOgIC IHTRODTICTIOS. Ixxix forest. Among the Arabs the tale is more elegant, pointed with a moral, and adorned with tropi'B and episodes. Among the Italians it is bright, light, dazzling, fuid swifL Among the French we have passed from the woods, and fields, and hills, to my lady's bou- doir,— rose-pink is the prevailing colour, and the air is loaded with patchouli and mille fimn. We miss the song of birds, the modest odour of wild-flowers, and the balmy fragrance of the pine forest. The Swedes are more stiff, and their style is more like that of a chronicle than a tale. The Germans are simple, hearty, and rather comic than hamorons ; and M. Moe* has well said, that as wo read them it is as if we sat and listened to some elderly woman of the middle class, who recites them with a dear, Ml, deep voice. lu Scotland the few that have been collected by Mr. Robert Cbambersf are as good in tone and keeping as anything of the kuid in the whole range of such popular collections. These Norse Tales we may characterise as bold, out- spoken, and humorous, in the true sense of humour. In the midst of every difficulty and danger arises that old Norse feeling of making the best of everything, and keeping a good face to the foe. The language and tone are perhaps rather lower than in some other collec- tions, but it must be remembered that these are the tales of "hempen homespuns," of Norse yeomen, of * M. Koe, iDtrod, Norsk. Event., Christiania, 1851, 2i) Ed., to which ths writer is largely indebted. f Popular BhymeB of Scotland. Ed. 1847. .yCOOgIC bczx INTBODDCTIOtl. Nonke Binder, who call a spade a spade, and who bum tallow, not wax ; aad yet Id no collection of tales is the general tone so chaste, are the great principlee of morality better worked out, and right and wrong kept BO steadily in sight. The general view of human nature is good and kindly. The happiness of mar- ried life was never more prettily told than in " Gud- brand on the Hilletde," No. xvui., where the tender* ness of the wife for her husband weighs down all oUier conuderations ; and we all agree with M. Moe that it would be well if there were many wives like Gadbrand's. Tbe balance, loo, is very evenly kept between the sexes ; for if any wife should point with indignation at such a tale as " Not a Pin to choose between them," No. xxi., where wives suffer ; she will be amply avenged when she reads " The Husband who was to mind the House," No. xxzvii, where the husband has decidedly the worst of the bargmn, and is punished as he deserves. Of particular characters, one occurs repeatedly. This is that which we have ventured, for want of a better word, to call " Boots," from that widely-sprtrad tradition in English families, that the yoangest brother is bound to do all tbe hard work his brothers set him, and which has also dignified him with the term here used. In Norse he is called " Askeju" or " E»pen Aahefjia'^ By M. Moe he is called " Aak^