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Popular Tales from the Norse

S >> Sir George Webbe Dasent >> Popular Tales from the Norse




Gudrun, the weary widow, wandered away. After a while, she accepts
atonement from her brothers for her husband's loss, and marries Atli,
the Hun King, Brynhildr's brother. He cherished a grudge against
Giuki's sons for the guile they had practised against their brother-
in-law, which had broken his sister's heart, and besides he claimed,
in right of Gudrun, all the gold which Sigurd won from the Dragon,
but which the Niflung Princes had seized when he was slain. It was in
vain to attack them in fair fight, so he sent them a friendly
message, and invited them to a banquet; they go, and are overpowered.
Hogni's heart is cut out of him alive, but he still smiles; Gunnar is
cast into a pit full of snakes, but even then charms them to sleep
with his harp, all but one, that flies at his heart and stings him to
death. With them perished the secret of the Dragon's hoard, which
they had thrown into the Rhine as they crossed it on the way to
Hunland. Now comes horror on horror. Revenge for her brothers now
belongs to Gudrun; she slays with her own hand her two sons by Atli,
makes him eat their flesh, and drink their blood out of their skulls,
and, while the king slept sound, slew him in his bed by the help of
her brother Hogni's son. Then she set the hall a-blaze, and burnt all
that were in it. After that she went to the sea-shore, and threw
herself in to drown. But the deep will not have her, the billows bear
her over to King Jonakr's land. He marries her, and has three sons by
her, Saurli, Hamdir, and Erp, black-haired as ravens, like all the
Niflungs. Svanhild, her daughter by Sigurd, who had her father's
bright and terrible eyes, she has still with her, now grown up to be
the fairest of women. So when Hermanaric the mighty, the great Gothic
king, heard of Svanhild's beauty, he sent his son Randver to woo her
for him, but Bikki the False said to the youth: 'Better far were this
maiden for thee than for thy old father'; and the maiden and the
prince thought it good advice. Then Bikki went and told the king, and
Hermanaric bade them take and hang Randver at once. So on his way to
the gallows, the prince took his hawk and plucked off all its
feathers, and sent it to his father. But when his sire saw it, he
knew at once that, as the hawk was featherless and unable to fly, so
was his realm defenceless under an old and sonless king. Too late he
sent to stop the hanging; his son was already dead. So one day
as he rode back from hunting, he saw fair Svanhild washing her golden
locks, and it came into his heart how there she sat, the cause of all
his woe; and he and his men rode at her and over her, and their
steeds trampled her to death. But when Gudrun heard this, she set on
her three Niflung sons to avenge their sister. Byrnies and helms she
gave them so true that no sword would bite on them. They were to
steal on Hermanaric as he slept; Saurli was to cut off his hands,
Hamdir his feet, and Erp his head. So as the three went along, the
two asked Erp what help he would give them when they got to
Hermanaric. 'Such as hand lends to foot' he said. 'No help at all'
they cried; and passing from words to blows, and because their mother
loved Erp best, they slew him. A little further on Saurli stumbled
and fell forward, but saved himself with one hand, and said 'Here
hand helps foot: better were it that Erp lived.' So they came on
Hermanaric as he slept, and Saurli hewed off his hands, and Hamdir
his feet, but he awoke and called for his men. Then said Hamdir:
'Were Erp alive, the head would be off, and he couldn't call out.'
Then Hermanaric's men arose and took the twain, and when they found
that no steel would touch them, an old one-eyed man gave them advice
to stone them to death. Thus fell Saurli and Hamdir, and soon after
Gudrun died too, and with her ends the Volsung and the Niflung tale.

And here it is worth while to say, since some minds are so narrowly
moulded as to be incapable of containing more than one idea, that
because it has seemed a duty to describe in its true light the old
faith of our forefathers, it by no means follows that the same eyes
are blind to the glorious beauty of Greek Mythology. That had the
rare advantage of running its course free and unfettered until it
fell rather by natural decay than before the weapon of a new belief.
The Greeks were Atheists before they became Christian. Their faith
had passed through every stage. We can contemplate it as it springs
out of the dim misshapen symbol, during that phase when men's eyes
are fixed more on meaning and reality than on beauty and form, we can
mark how it gradually looks more to symmetry and shape, how it is
transfigured in the Arts, until, under that pure air and bright sky,
the glowing radiant figures of Apollo and Aphrodite, of Zeus and
Athene--of perfect man-worship and woman-worship, stand out clear and
round in the foreground against the misty distance of ancient times.
Out of that misty distance the Norseman's faith never emerged. What
that early phase of faith might have become, had it been once wedded
to the Muses, and learnt to cultivate the Arts, it is impossible to
say. As it is, its career was cut short in mid-course. It carried
about with it that melancholy presentiment of dissolution which has
come to be so characteristic of modern life, but of which scarce a
trace exists in ancient times, and this feeling would always have
made it different from that cheerful carelessness which so attracts
us in the Greeks; but even that downcast brooding heart was capable
of conceiving great and heroic thoughts, which it might have clothed
in noble shapes and forms, had not the axe of Providence cut down the
stately sapling in the North before it grew to be a tree, while it
spared the pines of Delphi and Dodona's sacred oaks, until they had
attained a green old age. And so this faith remained rude and rough;
but even rudeness has a simplicity of its own, and it is better to be
rough and true-hearted than polished and false. In all the feelings
of natural affection, that faith need fear no comparison with any
other upon earth. In these respects it is firm and steadfast as a
rock, and pure and bright as a living spring. The highest God is a
father, who protects his children; who gives them glory and victory
while they live, and when they die, takes them to himself; to those
fatherly abodes Death was a happy return, a glorious going home. By
the side of this great father stands a venerable goddess, dazzling
with beauty, the great mother of gods and men. Hand in hand this
divine pair traverse the land; he teaching the men the use of arms
and all the arts of war,--for war was then as now a noble calling,
and to handle arms an honourable, nay necessary, profession. To the
women she teaches domestic duties and the arts of peace; from her
they learn to weave, and sew, and spin; from her, too, the husbandman
learns to till his fields. From him springs poetry and song; from her
legend and tradition. Nor should it ever be forgotten that the
footsteps of Providence are always onward, even when they seem taken
in the dark, and that their rude faith was the first in which that
veneration for woman arose, which the Western nations may well claim
as the brightest jewel in their crown of civilization; that while she
was a slave in the East, a toy to the Greeks, and a housewife to the
Romans, she was a helpmeet to the Teuton, and that those stern
warriors recognized something divine in her nature, and bowed before
her clearer insight into heavenly mysteries. The worship of the
Virgin Mary was gradually developed out of this conception of woman's
character, and would have been a thing absurd and impossible, had
Christianity clung for ever to Eastern soil. And now to proceed,
after thus turning aside to compare the mythology of the Greek with
the faith of the Norseman. The mistake is to favour one or the other
exclusively instead of respecting and admiring both; but it is a
mistake which those only can fall into, whose souls are narrow and
confined, who would say this thing and this person you shall love,
and none other; this form and feature you shall worship and adore,
and this alone; when in fact the whole promised land of thought and
life lies before us at our feet, our nature encourages us to go in
and possess it, and every step we make in this new world of knowledge
brings us to fresh prospects of beauty, and to new pastures of
delight.

Such were the gods, and such the heroes of the Norseman; 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 mythological dream of the Norsemen could be fulfilled, the
religious mist in which they walked was scattered by the sunbeams of
Christianity. A new state and condition 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
North; how kings and queens became the foster-fathers 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
effeminate; 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 altogether more than three
centuries, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden--we run them over in
the order of conversion--became faithful to Christianity, as preached
by the missionaries of the Church of Rome. One fact, however, we must
insist on, which might be inferred, indeed, both from the nature of
the struggle itself, and the character of Rome; and that is, that
throughout there was something in the process of conversion 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 elevating, and
so grand, 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
miserable than the time-serving 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 that 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 doubtful struggle in a single sentence,
and so tempting to believe it when once written. But in the North,
the state of things, and the manner of proceeding, were entirely
different. There the dogma was proclaimed, indeed; but the manner of
preaching it was not in that mild spirit with which the Saviour
rebuked the disciple when he said 'Put up again thy sword into his
place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.'
There the sword was used to bring converts to the font, and the
baptism was often one rather of blood than of water. There the new
converts perpetually relapsed, chased away the missionaries and the
kings who sheltered them, and only yielded at last to the
overwhelming weight of Christian opinion in the Western world. St
Olof, king and martyr, martyred in pitched battle by his mutinous
allodial freemen, because he tried to drive rather than to lead them
to the cross; and another Olof, greater than he, Olof Tryggvason, who
fell in battle against the heathen Swedes, were men of blood rather
than peace; but to them the introduction of the new faith into Norway
is mainly owing. So also Charlemagne, at an earlier period, had dealt
with the Saxons at the Main Bridge, when his ultimatum was
'Christianity or death'. So also the first missionary to Iceland--who
met, indeed, with a sorry reception--was followed about by a stout
champion named Thangbrand, who, whenever there was what we should now
call a missionary meeting, challenged any impugner 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 sail back to Norway.

'Precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a
little', was the motto of Rome in her dealings with the heathen
Norsemen, and if she suited herself at first rather to their habits
and temper than to those of more enlightened nations, she had an
excuse in St Paul's maxim of making herself 'all things to all men.'
Thus, when a second attempt to Christianize Iceland proved more
successful--for in the meantime, King Olof Tryggvason, a zealous
Christian, had seized as hostages all the Icelanders of family and
fame who happened to be in Norway, and thus worked on the feelings of
the chiefs of those families at home, who in their turn bribed the
lawman who presided over the Great Assembly to pronounce in favour of
the new Faith--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, the exposure of infants and the
eating of horseflesh, for horses were sacred animals, and the heathen
ate their flesh after they had been solemnly sacrificed to the gods.
As a matter of fact, it is far easier to change a form of religion
than to extirpate a faith. The first indeed is 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 clung to
the Church of Rome, long after the State had declared for the
Reformation. But to change the faith of a whole nation in block and
bulk on the instant, was a thing contrary to the 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 stood, and to point to the sacred emblem which
had supplanted the old object of national adoration, when the
populace came at certain seasons with songs and dances to perform
their heathen rites. Near the cross soon rose a church; and both were
girt by a cemetery, the soil of which was doubly sacred as a heathen
fane and a Christian sanctuary, and where alone the bodies of the
faithful could repose in peace. But the songs and dances, and
processions in the church-yard round the cross, continued long after
Christianity had become dominant. So also the worship of wells and
springs was christianized when it was found impossible to prevent 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 Nornir were gradually converted
into votaries of the Virgin Mary. Such practices form a subject of
constant remonstrance and reproof in the treatises and penitential
epistles of medieval divines, and in some few places and churches,
even in England, such rites are still yearly celebrated. [13]

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 origin of all things good; but their
existence was tolerated; they became powerful for ill, and
degenerated into malignant demons. Thus the worshippers of Odin had
supposed that at certain 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 offerings and homage of their grateful
votaries. But these were naturally only exceptional instances; on
ordinary occasions the pious heathen recognized his gods sweeping
through the air in cloud and storm, riding on the wings 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 din 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 his swift steed, seen in glimpses
among the trees, took up the hunt where weary mortals laid it down,
outstripped them all, and brought the noble quarry to the ground.
Looking up to the stars and heaven, they saw the footsteps 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
domestic divinities. They help women in their greatest need, they
spin themselves, they teach the maids to spin, and punish them if the
wool remains upon their spindle. They are kind, and good, and
bright, for _Holda_, _Bertha_, are the epithets given to them. And
so, too, this mythology which, in its aspect to the stranger and the
external world, was so ruthless and terrible, when looked at from
within and at home, was genial, 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; but that
unless it has peace within, and industry at home, it must perish from
the face of the earth. But when Christianity came, the whole
character of this goodly array of divinities was soured and spoilt.
Instead of the stately procession of the God, which the intensely
sensuous 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 [D. M., p. 900: _Wütendes Heer_], the heathen
had fondly fancied that the spirits of those who had gone to Odin
followed him in his triumphant progress either visibly or invisibly;
that they rode with him in the whirlwind, just as they followed him
to battle, and feasted with him in Valhalla; but now the Christian
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 of the hunt only the spectres of
suicides, drunkards, and ruffians; and, with all the uncharitableness
of a dogmatic faith, the spirits of children 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 hears, in spring and autumn nights, when sea-fowl
take the wing to fly either south or north, the strange accents and
uncouth yells 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 Norway it is _Aaskereida_, that is
_Asgard'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
Veneur_ who ranges at night through the Forest of Fontainebleau.
Nor was England without her Wild Huntsman and his ghastly following.
Gervase of Tilbury, 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
baying hounds and blast of horns; and when those hunters were asked
of whose company and household they were, they replied "of
Arthur's".' We hear of him again in _The Complaynt of Scotland_,
that curious composition attributed by some to Sir David Lyndsay of
the Mount in Fife, and of Gilmerton in East Lothian, pp. 97, 98,
where he says:

Arthur knycht, he raid on nycht,
With gyldin spur and candil lycht.

Nor should we forget, when considering this legend, that story of
Herne the Hunter, who

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act. iv, sc. 4.

And even yet, in various parts of England, the story of some great
man, generally a member of one of the county families, who drives
about the country at night, is common. Thus, in Warwickshire, it is
the 'One-handed Boughton', who drives about in his coach and six, and
makes the benighted traveller hold gates open for him; or it is 'Lady
Skipwith', who passes through the country at night in the same
manner. This subject might be pursued to much greater length, for
popular 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, how the majesty of
the old belief strives to rescue itself by clinging, in the popular
consciousness, to some king or hero, as Arthur or Waldemar, or,
failing that, to some squire's family, as Hackelberend, or the 'one-
handed Boughton', or even to the Keeper Herne.

Odin and the Aesir then were dispossessed and degraded by our Saviour
and his Apostles, just as they had of old thrown out the Frost
Giants, and the two are mingled together, in medieval Norse
tradition, as Trolls and Giants, hostile alike to Christianity and
man. Christianity had taken possession 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 faith, which put it
out of her 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 affection, and made it
bleed to the very root. With the celibacy of the clergy he
established the hierarchy of the church, but her labours as a
missionary 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,
Templars and Hospitallers, whose pride and luxury, and pomp, brought
swift destruction on one at least of those fraternities. Now she
became feudal,--she owned land instead of hearts, and forgot that the
true patrimony 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 is dead while she liveth', and became
filled with idle superstitions and vain beliefs. No wonder, then,
that instead of completing her conquest over the heathen, and
carrying out their conversion, she became half heathen herself; that
she 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 returned--fell before the indignation of
enlightened men, working 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.




NORSE POPULAR TALES

The preceding observations will have given a sufficient account of
the mythology of the Norsemen, and of the way in which it fell. They
came from the East, and brought that common stock of tradition with
them. Settled in the Scandinavian peninsula, they developed
themselves through Heathenism, Romanism, and Lutheranism, in a
locality little exposed to foreign influence, so that even now the
Daleman in Norway or Sweden may be reckoned among the most primitive
examples left of peasant life. We should expect, then, that these
Popular Tales, which, for the sake of those ignorant in such matters,
it may be remarked, had never been collected or reduced to writing
till within the last few years, would present a faithful picture of
the national consciousness, or, perhaps, to speak more correctly, of
that half consciousness out of which the heart of any people speaks
in its abundance. Besides those world-old affinities and primaeval
parallelisms, besides those dreamy recollections of its old home in
the East, which we have already pointed out, we should expect to find
its later history, after the great migration, still more distinctly
reflected; to discover heathen gods masked in the garb of Christian
saints; and thus to see a proof of our assertion above, that a nation
more easily changes the form than the essence of its faith, and
clings with a toughness which endures for centuries to what it has
once learned to believe.

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