Part 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

We have now only to consider the men and women of these Tales, and then our task is done. It will be sooner done, because they may be left to speak for themselves, and must stand or fall by their own words and

## actions. The tales of all races have a character and manner of their

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

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

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

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

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

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