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Popular Tales from the Norse

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




A very short investigation will serve to identify the two ancient
goddesses Frigga and Freyja with all these leaders of a midnight
host. Just as Odin was banished from day to darkness, so the two
great heathen goddesses, fused into one 'uncanny' shape, were
supposed to ride the air at night. Medieval chroniclers, writing in
bastard Latin, and following the example of classical authors, when
they had to find a name for this demon-goddess, chose, of course,
_Diana_ the heathen huntress, the moon-goddess, and the ruler of
the night. In the same way, when they threw Odin's name into a Latin
shape, he, the god of wit and will, as well as power and victory,
became Mercury. As for Herodias--not the mother, but the daughter who
danced--she must have made a deep impression on the mind of the early
Middle Age, for she was supposed to have been cursed after the
beheading of John the Baptist, and to have gone on dancing for ever.
When heathendom fell, she became confounded with the ancient
Goddesses, and thus we find her, sometimes among the crew of the
Wild Huntsman, sometimes, as we see in the passages below, in
company with, or in the place of _Diana, Holda, Satia_, and
_Abundia_, at the head of a bevy of women, who met at certain
places to celebrate unholy rites and mysteries. As for _Holda,
Satia_, and _Abundia_, 'the kind', 'the satisfying', and 'the
abundant', they are plainly names of good rather than evil powers;
they are ancient epithets drawn from the bounty of the 'Good Lady',
and attest the feeling of respect which still clung to them in the
popular mind. As was the case whenever Christianity was brought in,
the country folk, always averse to change, as compared with the more
lively and intelligent dwellers in towns, still remained more or less
heathen, [17] and to this day they preserve unconsciously many
superstitions which can be traced up in lineal descent to their old
belief. In many ways does the old divinity peep out under the new
superstition--the long train, the midnight feast, 'the good lady' who
presides, the bounty and abundance which her votaries fancied would
follow in her footsteps, all belong to the ancient Goddess. Most
curious of all is the way in which all these traditions from
different countries insist on the third part of the earth, the third
child born, the third soul as belonging to the 'good lady', who leads
the revel; for this right of a third, or even of a half, was one
which Freyja possessed. 'But Freyja is most famous of the Asynjor.
She has that bower in heaven hight Fólkvángr, and 'whithersoever she
rideth to the battle, there hath she one half of the slain; but Odin
the other half.' Again 'when she fares abroad, she drives two cats
and sits in a car, and she lends an easy ear to the prayers of men.'
[Snorro's _Edda_, Dasent's Translation, pp. 29 (Stockholm
1842).]

We have got then the ancient goddesses identified as evil influences,
and as the leader of a midnight band of women, who practised secret
and unholy rites. This leads us at once to witchcraft. In all ages
and in all races this belief in sorcery has existed. Men and women
practised it alike, but in all times female sorcerers have
predominated. [18] This was natural enough. In those days women were
priestesses; they collected drugs and simples; women alone knew the
virtues of plants. Those soft hands spun linen, made lint, and bound
wounds. Women in the earliest times with which we are acquainted with
our forefathers, alone knew how to read and write, they only could
carve the mystic runes, they only could chant the charms so potent to
allay the wounded warrior's smart and pain. The men were busy out of
doors with ploughing, hunting, barter, and war. In such an age the
sex which possessed by natural right book-learning, physic,
soothsaying, and incantation, even when they used these mysteries for
good purposes, were but a step from sin. The same soft white hand
that bound the wound and scraped the lint; the same gentle voice that
sung the mystic rune, that helped the child-bearing woman, or drew
the arrow-head from the dying champion's breast; the same bright eye
that gazed up to heaven in ecstacy through the sacred grove and read
the will of the Gods when the mystic tablets and rune-carved lots
were cast--all these, if the will were bad, if the soothsayer passed
into the false prophetess, the leech into a poisoner, and the
priestess into a witch, were as potent and terrible for ill as they
had once been powerful for good. In all the Indo-European tribes,
therefore, women, and especially old women, have practised witchcraft
from the earliest times, and Christianity found them wherever it
advanced. But Christianity, as it placed mankind upon a higher
platform of civilization, increased the evil which it found, and when
it expelled the ancient goddesses, and confounded them as demons with
Diana and Herodias, it added them and their votaries to the old class
of malevolent sorcerers. There was but one step, but a simple act of
the will, between the Norn and the hag, even before Christianity came
in. As soon as it came, down went Goddess, Valkyrie, Norn, priestess,
and soothsayer, into that unholy deep where the heathen hags and
witches had their being; and, as Christianity gathered strength,
developed its dogmas, and worked out its faith; fancy, tradition,
leechcraft, poverty, and idleness, produced that unhappy class, the
medieval witch, the persecution of which is one of the darkest pages
in religious history.

It is curious indeed to trace the belief in witches through the
Middle Age, and to mark how it increases in intensity and absurdity.
At first, as we have seen in the passages quoted, the superstition
seemed comparatively harmless, and though the witches themselves may
have believed in their unholy power, there were not wanting divines
who took a common-sense view of the matter, and put the absurdity of
their pretensions to a practical proof. Such was that good parish
priest who asked, when an old woman of his flock insisted that she
had been in his house with the company of 'the Good Lady', and had
seen him naked and covered him up, 'How, then, did you get in when
all the doors were locked?' 'We can get in,' she said, 'even if the
doors are locked.' Then the priest took her into the chancel of the
church, locked the door, and gave her a sound thrashing with the
pastoral staff, calling out 'Out with you, lady witch.' But as she
could not, he sent her home, saying 'See now how foolish you are to
believe in such empty dreams'. [19]

But as the Church increased in strength, as heresies arose, and
consequent persecution, then the secret meetings of these sectarians,
as we should now call them, were identified by the hierarchy with the
rites of sorcery and magic, and with the relics of the worship of the
old gods. By the time, too, that the hierarchy was established, that
belief in the fallen angel, the Arch-Fiend, the Devil, originally so
foreign to the nations of the West, had become thoroughly ingrafted
on the popular mind, and a new element of wickedness and superstition
was introduced at those unholy festivals. About the middle of the
thirteenth century, we find the mania for persecuting heretics
invading the tribes of Teutonic race from France and Italy, backed by
all the power of the Pope. Like jealousy, persecution too often makes
the meat it feeds on, and many silly, if not harmless, superstitions
were rapidly put under the ban of the Church. Now the 'Good Lady' and
her train begin to recede, they only fill up the background while the
Prince of Darkness steps, dark and terrible, in front, and soon draws
after him the following of the ancient goddess. Now we hear stories
of demoniac possession; now the witches adore a demon of the other
sex. With the male element, and its harsher, sterner nature, the
sinfulness of these unholy assemblies is infinitely increased; folly
becomes guilt, and guilt crime. [20]

From the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the seventeenth
century the history of Europe teems with processes against witches
and sorcerers. Before the Reformation it reached its height, in the
Catholic world, with the famous bull of Innocent the Eighth in 1484,
the infamous _Malleus Maleficarum_, the first of the long list
of witch-finding books, and the zeal with which the State lent all
the terrors of the law to assist the ecclesiastical inquisitors.
Before the tribunals of those inquisitors, in the fifteenth century,
innumerable victims were arraigned on the double charge of heresy and
sorcery--for the crimes ran in couples, both being children and sworn
servants of the Devil. Would that the historian could say that with
the era of the Reformation these abominations ceased. The Roman
Hierarchy, with her bulls and inquisitors, had sown a bitter crop,
which both she and the Protestant Churches were destined to reap; but
in no part of the world were the labourers more eager and willing,
when the fields were 'black' to harvest, than in those very reformed
communities which had just shaken off the yoke of Rome, and which had
sprung in many cases from the very heretics whom she had persecuted
and burnt, accusing them at the same time, of the most malignant
sorceries. [21]

Their excuse is, that no one is before his age. The intense
personality given to the Devil in the Middle Age had possessed the
whole mind of Europe. We must take them as we find them, with their
bright fancy, their earnest faith, their stern fanaticism, their
revolting superstition, just as when we look upon a picture we know
that those brilliant hues and tones, that spirit which informs the
whole, could never be, were it not for the vulgar earths and oil out
of which the glorious work of art is mixed and made. Strangely
monotonous are all the witch trials of which Europe has so many to
show. At first the accused denies, then under torture she confesses,
then relapses and denies; tortured again she confesses again,
amplifies her story, and accuses others. When given to the stake, she
not seldom asserts all her confessions to be false, which is ascribed
to the power which the fiend still has over her. Then she is burnt
and her ashes given to the winds. Those who wish to read one
unexampled, perhaps for barbarity and superstition, and more curious
than the rest from the prominence given in it to a man, may find it
in the trial of Dr. Fian, the Scotch wizard, "which doctor was
register to the Devil, that sundry times preached at North Baricke
(North Berwick, in East Lothian) Kirke, to a number of notorious
witches." [22] But we advise no one to venture on a perusal of this
tract who is not prepared to meet with the most unutterable
accusations and crimes, the most cruel tortures, and the most absurd
confessions, followed as usual by the stoutest denial of all that had
been confessed; when torture had done her worst on poor human nature,
and the soul re-asserted at the last her supremacy over the body.
[23] One characteristic of all these witch trials, is the fact, that
in spite of their unholy connection and intrigues with the Evil One,
no witch ever attained to wealth and station by the aid of the Prince
of Darkness. The pleasure to do ill, is all the pleasure they feel.
This fact alone might have opened the eyes of their persecutors, for
if the Devil had the worldly power which they represented him to
have, he might at least have raised some of his votaries to temporal
rank, and to the pomps and the vanities of this world. An old German
proverb expresses this notorious fact, by saying, that 'every seven
years, a witch is three halfpence richer'; and so with all the unholy
means of Hell at their command, they dragged out their lives, along
with their black cats, in poverty and wretchedness. To this fate at
last, came the worshippers of the great goddess Freyja, whom our
forefathers adored as the goddess of love and plenty; and whose car
was drawn by those animals which popular superstition has ever since
assigned to the 'old witch' of our English villages.

The North was not free, any more than the rest of the Protestant
world, from this direful superstition, which ran over Europe like a
pestilence in the sixteenth century. In Sweden especially, the
witches and their midnight ridings to _Blokulla_, the black
hill, gave occasion to processes as absurd and abominable as the
trial of Dr. Fian and the witch-findings of Hopkins. In Denmark, the
sorceresses were supposed to meet at Tromsoe high up in Finmark, or
even on Heckla in Iceland. The Norse witches met at a Blokolle of
their own, or on the Dovrefell, or at other places in Norway or
Finmark. As might be expected, we find many traces of witchcraft in
these Tales, but it may be doubted whether these may not be referred
rather to the old heathen belief in such arts still lingering in the
popular mind than to the processes of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, which were far more a craze and mania of the educated
classes acting under a mistaken religious fanaticism against popular
superstitions than a movement arising from the mass of the community.
Still, in 'the Mastermaid', No. xi, the witch of a sister-in-law, who
had rolled the apple over to the Prince, and so charmed him, was torn
to pieces between twenty-four horses. The old queen in 'The Lassie
and her Godmother', No. xxvii, tries to persuade her son to have the
young queen burnt alive for a wicked witch, who was dumb, and had
eaten her own babes. In 'East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No.
iv, it is a wicked stepmother who has bewitched the prince. In 'Bushy
Bride', No. xlv, the ugly bride charms the king to sleep, and is at
last thrown, with her wicked mother, into a pit full of snakes. In
the 'Twelve Wild Ducks', No. viii, the wicked stepmother persuades
the king that Snow-white and Rosy-red is a witch, and almost
persuades him to burn her alive. In 'Tatterhood', No. xlvii, a whole
troop of witches come to keep their revels on Christmas eve in the
Queen's Palace, and snap off the young Princess's head. It is hard,
indeed, in tales where Trolls play so great a part, to keep witch and
Troll separate; but the above instances will show that the belief in
the one, as distinct from the other, exists in the popular
superstitions of the North.

The frequent transformation of men into beasts, in these tales, is
another striking feature. This power the gods of the Norseman
possessed in common with those of all other mythologies. Europa and
her Bull, Leda and her Swan, will occur at once to the reader's mind;
and to come to closer resemblances, just as Athene appears in the
Odyssey as an eagle or a swallow perched on the roof of the hall
[Od., iii, 372; and xxii, 239], so Odin flies off as a falcon, and
Loki takes the form of a horse or bird. This was only part of that
omnipotence which all gods enjoy. But the belief that men, under
certain conditions, could also take the shape of animals, is
primaeval, and the traditions of every race can tell of such
transformations. Herodotus had heard how the Neurians, a Slavonic
race, passed for wizards amongst the Scythians and the Greeks settled
round the Black Sea, because each of them, once in the year, became a
wolf for a few days, and then returned to his natural shape. Pliny,
Pomponius Mela, and St. Augustin, in his great treatise, _De
Civitate Dei_, tell the same story, and Virgil, in his Eclogues,
has sung the same belief [24]. The Latins called such a man, a
_turnskin--versipellis_, an expression which exactly agrees with
the Icelandic expression for the same thing, and which is probably
the true original of our _turncoat_. In Petronius the superstition
appears in its full shape, and is worth repeating. At the banquet of
Trimalchion, Nicoros gives the following account of the turn-skins
of Nero's time:

It happened that my master was gone to Capua to dispose of some
second-hand goods. I took the opportunity and persuaded our guest
to walk with me to the fifth milestone. He was a valiant soldier,
and a sort of grim water-drinking Pluto. About cock-crow, when the
moon was shining as bright as mid-day, we came among the monuments.
My friend began addressing himself to the stars, but I was rather
in a mood to sing or to count them; and when I turned to look at
him, lo! he had already stripped himself and laid down his clothes
near him. My heart was in my nostrils, and I stood like a dead man;
but he '_circumminxit vestimenta_', and on a sudden became a
wolf. Do not think I jest; I would not lie for any man's estate.
But to return to what I was saying. When he became a wolf, he began
howling, and fled into the woods. At first I hardly knew where I
was, and afterwards, when I went to take up his clothes, they were
turned into stone. Who then died with fear but I? Yet I drew my
sword, and went cutting the air right and left, till I reached the
villa of my sweetheart. I entered the court-yard. I almost breathed
my last, the sweat ran down my neck, my eyes were dim, and I
thought I should never recover myself. My Melissa wondered why I
was out so late, and said to me: 'Had you come sooner you might at
least have helped us, for a wolf has entered the farm, and worried
all our cattle; but he had not the best of the joke, for all he
escaped, for our slave ran a lance through his neck.' When I heard
this, I could not doubt how it was, and, as it was clear daylight,
ran home as fast as a robbed innkeeper. When I came to the spot
where the clothes had been turned into stone, I could find nothing
except blood. But when I got home, I found my friend the soldier in
bed, bleeding at the neck like an ox, and a doctor dressing his
wound. I then knew he was a turn-skin, nor would I ever have broke
bread with him again; No, not if you had killed me. [25]

A man who had such a gift or greed was also called lycanthropus,
a man-wolf or wolf-man, which term the Anglo-Saxons translated
literally in Canute's Laws _verevulf_, and the early English
_werewolf_. In old French he was _loupgarou_, which means the
same thing; except that _garou_ means man-wolf in itself without
the antecedent _loup_, so that, as Madden observes, the whole
word is one of those reduplications of which we have an example
in _lukewarm_. In Brittany he was _bleizgarou_ and _denvleiz_,
formed respectively from _bleiz_, wolf, and _den_, man; _garou_ is
merely a distorted form of _wer_ or _vere_, man and _loup_. In
later French the word became _waroul_, whence the Scotch _wrout_,
_wurl_, and _worlin_. [26]

It was not likely that a belief so widely spread should not have
extended itself to the North; and the grave assertions of Olaus
Magnus in the sixteenth century, in his Treatise _De Gentibus
Septentrionalibus_, show how common the belief in were-wolves was
in Sweden so late as the time of Gustavus Vasa. In mythical times
the _Volsunga Saga_ [_Fornald Sog_, i, 130, 131.] expressly
states of Sigmund and Sinfjötli that they became were-wolves--which,
we may remark, were Odin's sacred beasts--just in the same way as
Brynhildr and the Valkyries, or corse-choosers, who followed the god
of battles to the field, and chose the dead for Valhalla when the
fight was done, became swan-maidens, and took the shape of swans. In
either case, the wolf's skin or the swan's feathery covering was
assumed and laid aside at pleasure, though the _Völundr Quidr_,
in the _Edda_, and the stories of 'The Fair Melusina', and other
medieval swan-maidens, show that any one who seized that shape while
thus laid aside, had power over its wearer. In later times, when this
old heroic belief degenerated into the notion of sorcery, it was
supposed that a girdle of wolfskin thrown over the body, or even a
slap on the face with a wolfskin glove, would transform the person
upon whom the sorcerer practised into the shape of a ravening wolf,
which fled at once to the woods, where he remained in that shape for
a period which varied in popular belief for nine days, three, seven,
or nine years. While in this state he was especially ravenous after
young children, whom he carried off as the were-wolf carried off
William in the old romance, though all were-wolves did not treat
their prey with the same tenderness as that were-wolf treated
William.

But the favourite beast for Norse transformations in historic times,
if we may judge from the evidence afforded by the Sagas, was the
bear, the king of all their beasts, whose strength and sagacity made
him an object of great respect [See Landnama in many places.
_Egil's Sag., Hrolf Krak. Sag._].

This old belief, then, might be expected to be found in these Norse
Tales, and accordingly we find men transformed in them into various
beasts. Of old these transformations, as we have already stated, were
active, if we may use the expression, as well as passive. A man who
possessed the gift, frequently assumed the shape of a beast at his
own will and pleasure, like the soldier in Petronius. Even now in
Norway, it is matter of popular belief that Finns and Lapps, who from
time immemorial have passed for the most skilful witches and wizards
in the world, can at will assume the shape of bears; and it is a
common thing to say of one of those beasts, when he gets unusually
savage and daring, 'that can be no Christian bear'. On such a bear,
in the parish of Oföden, after he had worried to death more than
sixty horses and six men, it is said that a girdle of bearskin, the
infallible mark of a man thus transformed, was found when he was at
last tracked and slain. The tale called 'Farmer Weathersky', No. xli
in this collection, shows that the belief of these spontaneous
transformations still exists in popular tradition, where it is easy
to see that Farmer Weathersky is only one of the ancient gods
degraded into a demon's shape. His sudden departure through the air,
horse, sledge, and lad, and all, and his answer 'I'm at home, alike
north, and south, and east, and west'; his name itself, and his
distant abode, surrounded with the corpses of the slain, sufficiently
betray the divinity in disguise. His transformation, too, into a hawk
answers exactly to that of Odin when he flew away from the Frost
Giant in the shape of that bird. But in these tales such
transformations are for the most part passive; they occur not at the
will of the person transformed, but through sorcery practised on them
by some one else. Thus the White Bear in the beautiful story of 'East
o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No. iv, is a Prince transformed by
his stepmother, just as it is the stepmother who plays the same part
in the romance of William and the Were-wolf. So the horse in 'the
Widow's Son', No. xliv, is a Prince over whom a king has cast that
shape. [27] So also in 'Lord Peter', No. xlii, which is the full
story of what we have only hitherto known in part as 'Puss in Boots',
the cat is a princess bewitched by the Troll who had robbed her of
her lands; so also in 'The Seven Foals', No. xliii, and 'The Twelve
Wild Ducks', No. viii, the Foals and the Ducks are Princes over whom
that fate has come by the power of a witch or a Troll, to whom an
unwary promise had been given. Thoroughly mythic is the trait in 'The
Twelve Wild Ducks', where the youngest brother reappears with a wild
duck's wing instead of his left arm, because his sister had no time
to finish that portion of the shirt, upon the completion of which his
retransformation depended.

But we should ill understand the spirit of the Norsemen, if we
supposed that these transformations into beasts were all that the
national heart has to tell of beasts and their doings, or that, when
they appear, they do so merely as men-beasts, without any power or
virtue of their own. From the earliest times, side by side with those
productions of the human mind which speak of the dealings of men with
men, there has grown up a stock of traditions about animals and their
relations with one another, which forms a true Beast Epic, and is
full of the liveliest traits of nature. Here, too, it was reserved
for Grimm to restore these traditions to their true place in the
history of the human mind, and show that the poetry which treats of
them is neither satirical nor didactic, though it may contain touches
of both these artificial kinds of composition, but, on the contrary,
purely and intensely natural. It is Epic, in short, springing out of
that deep love of nature and close observation of the habits of
animals which is only possible in an early and simple stage of
society. It used to be the fashion, when these Beast traditions were
noticed, to point to Aesop as their original, but Grimm has
sufficiently proved [Reinhart Fuchs, Introduction] that what we see
in Aesop is only the remains of a great world-old cycle of such
traditions which had already, in Aesop's day, been subjected by the
Greek mind to that critical process which a late state of society
brings to bear on popular traditions; that they were then already
worn and washed out and moralized. He had also shown how the same
process went on till in Phaedrus nothing but the dry bones of the
traditions, with a drier moral, are served up to the reader; and he
has done justice on La Fontaine, who wrote with all the wanton
licentiousness of his day, and frittered away the whole nature of his
fables by the frivolity of his allusions to the artificial society of
his time. Nor has he spared Lessing, who, though he saw through the
poverty of Phaedrus as compared with Aesop, and was alive to the
weakness of La Fontaine, still wandered about in the classical mist
which hung heavy over the learning of the eighteenth century, and saw
in the Greek form the perfection of all fable, when in Aesop it
really appears in a state of degeneracy and decay. Here too, as in so
many other things, we have a proof that the world is older than we
think it. The Beast-Fables in the _Pantcha Tantra_ and the
_Hitopadesa_, the Indian parallels to Aesop, reveal, in the
connection in which they occur, and in the moral use to which they
are put, a state of society long past that simple early time in which
such fictions arise. They must have sprung up in the East in the very
dawn of time; and thence travelling in all directions, we find them
after many centuries in various shapes, which admit of no mistake as
to their first origin, at the very ends of the earth, in countries as
opposite as the Poles to each other; in New Zealand and Norway, in
Central Africa and Servia, in the West Indies and in Mongolia; all
separated by immense tracts of land or sea from their common centre.
To the earnest inquirer, to one who believes that many dark things
may yet be solved, it is very satisfactory to see that even Grimm, in
his _Reynard the Fox_, is at a loss to understand why the North,
properly so called, had none of the traditions which the Middle Age
moulded into that famous Beast-Epic. But since then the North, as the
Great Master himself confesses in his later works, has amply avenged
herself for the slight thus cast upon her by mistake. In the year
1834, when Grimm thus expressed his surprise on this point, the North
had no such traditions to show in books indeed, but she kept them
stored up in her heart in an abundance with which no other land
perhaps can vie. This book at least shows how natural it seems to the
Norse mind now, and how much more natural of course it seemed in
earlier times, when sense went for as much and reflection for so
little, that beasts should talk; and how truly and faithfully it has
listened and looked for the accents and character of each. The Bear
is still the King of Beasts, in which character he appears in 'True
and Untrue', No. i, but here, as in Germany, he is no match for the
Fox in wit. Thus Reynard plays him a trick which condemns him for
ever to a stumpy tail in No. xxiii. He cheats him out of his share of
a firkin of butter in No. lvii. He is preferred as Herdsman, in No.
x, before either Bear or Wolf, by the old wife who wants some one to
tend her flock. Yet all the while he professes immense respect for
the Bear, and calls him 'Lord', even when in the very act of
outwitting him. In the tale called 'Well Done and Ill Paid', No.
xxxviii, the crafty fox puts a finish to his misbehaviour to his
'Lord Bruin', by handing him over, bound hand and foot, to the
peasant, and by causing his death outright. Here, too, we have an
example, which we shall see repeated in the case of the giants, that
strength and stature are not always wise, and that wit and wisdom
never fail to carry the day against mere brute force. Another tale,
however, restores the bear to his true place as the king of beasts,
endowed not only with strength, but with something divine and
terrible about him which the Trolls cannot withstand. This is 'The
Cat on the Dovrefell', No. xii. In connection with which, it should
be remembered that the same tradition existed in the thirteenth
century in Germany,[Grimm, _Irisch. Elfenm._, 114-9, and _D.
M._, 447.] that the bear is called familiarly grandfather in the
North, and that the Lapps reckon him rather as akin to men than
beasts; that they say he has the strength of ten and the wit of
twelve men. If they slay him, they formally beg his pardon, as do
also the Ostjaks, a tribe akin to the Lapps, and bring him to their
huts with great formalities and mystic songs. To the Wolf, whose
nickname is 'Graylegs', [28] these tales are more complimentary. He
is not the spiteful, stupid, greedy Isengrim of Germany and France.
Not that Isengrim, of whom old English fables of the thirteenth
century tell us that he became a monk, but when the brethren wished
to teach him his letters that he might learn the paternoster, all
they could get out of him was _lamb, lamb_; nor could they ever
get him to look to the cross, for his eyes, with his thoughts, 'were
ever to the woodward'. [Douce, _Illust. to Shakspeare_, ii, 33,
344, quoted in _Reinhart Fuchs_, ccxxi.] He appears, on the
contrary, in 'The Giant who had no Heart in his body', No. ix, as a
kindly grateful beast, who repays tenfold out of the hidden store of
his supernatural sagacity the gift of the old jade, which Boots had
made over to him.

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