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Popular Tales from the Norse

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




The horse was a sacred animal among the Teutonic tribes from the
first moment of their appearance in history, and Tacitus
[_Germania_, 9, 10.] has related, how in the shade of those
woods and groves which served them for temples, white horses were fed
at the public cost, whose backs no mortal man crossed, whose
neighings and snortings were carefully watched as auguries and omens,
and who were thought to be conscious of divine mysteries. In Persia,
too, the classical reader will remember how the neighing of a horse
decided the choice for the crown. Here, in England, at any rate, we
have only to think of Hengist and Horsa, the twin-heroes of the
Anglo-Saxon migration, as the legend ran--heroes whose name meant
'horse'--and of the vale of the White Horse in Berks., where the
sacred form still gleams along the down, to be reminded of the
sacredness of the horse to our forefathers. The Eddas are filled with
the names of famous horses, and the Sagas contain many stories of
good steeds, in whom their owners trusted and believed as sacred to
this or that particular god. Such a horse is Dapplegrim in No. xl, of
these tales, who saves his master out of all his perils, and brings
him to all fortune, and is another example of that mysterious
connection with the higher powers which animals in all ages have been
supposed to possess.

Such a friend, too, to the helpless lassie is the Dun Bull in 'Katie
Woodencloak', No. 1, out of whose ear comes the 'Wishing Cloth',
which serves up the choicest dishes. The story is probably imperfect,
as we should expect to see him again in human shape after his head
was cut off, and his skin flayed; but, after being the chief
character up to that point, he remains from that time forth in the
background, and we only see him darkly in the man who comes out of
the face of the rock and supplies the lassie's wants when she knocks
on it. Dun, or blue, or mouse-colour, is the favourite colour for
fairy kine. Thus the cow which Guy of Warwick killed was _dun_.
The _Huldror_ in Norway have large flocks of blue kine. In
Scotland runs the story of the mouse-coloured Elfin Bull. In Iceland
the colour of such kine is _apalgrár_, dapple grey. This animal
has been an object of adoration and respect from the earliest times,
and we need only remind our readers of the sanctity of cows and bulls
among the Indians and Egyptians, of 'the Golden Calf' in the Bible;
of Io and her wanderings from land to land; and, though last, not
least, of Audhumla, the Mythic Cow in the Edda, who had so large a
part in the creation of the first Giant in human forms. [Snorro's
_Edda_, ch. vi, English translation.]

The dog, to which, with all his sagacity and faithfulness something
unclean and impure clings, as Grimm well observes, plays no very
prominent part in these Tales. [29] We find him, however, in 'Not a
Pin to choose between them', No. xxiv, where his sagacity fails to
detect his mistress; and, as 'the foe of his own house', the half-
bred foxy hound, who chases away the cunning Fox in 'Well Done and
Ill Paid', No. xxxviii. Still he, too, in popular superstition, is
gifted with a sense of the supernatural; he howls when death impends,
and in 'Buttercup', No. xviii, it is Goldtooth, their dog, who warns
Buttercup and his mother of the approach of the old hag. In 'Bushy
Bride', No. xlv, he appears only as the lassie's lap-dog, is thrown
away as one of her sacrifices, and at last goes to the wedding in her
coach; yet in that tale he has something weird about him, and he is
sent out by his mistress three times to see if the dawn is coming.

In one Tale, No. xxxvii, the Goat appears in full force, and dashes
out the brains of the Troll, who lived under the bridge over the
burn. In another, 'Tatterhood', No. xlviii, he helps the lassie in
her onslaught on the witches. He, too, was sacred to Thor in the old
mythology, and drew his thundering car. Here something of the divine
nature of his former lord, who was the great foe of all Trolls, seems
to have been passed on in popular tradition to the animal who had
seen so many adventures with the great God who swayed the thunder.
This feud between the Goat and the Trolls comes out curiously in 'The
Old Dame and her Hen', No. iii, where a goat falls down the trapdoor
to the Troll's house, 'Who sent for you, I should like to know, you
long-bearded beast' said the Man o' the Hill, who was in an awful
rage; and with that he whipped up the Goat, wrung his head off, and
threw him down into the cellar. Still he belonged to one of the
heathen gods, and so in later Middle-Age superstition he is assigned
to the Devil, who even takes his shape when he presides at the
Witches' Sabbath.

Nor in this list must the little birds be forgotten which taught the
man's daughter, in the tale of 'The Two Stepsisters', No. xvii, how
to act in her trials. So, too, in 'Katie Woodencloak', No. l, the
little bird tells the Prince, 'who understood the song of birds very
well,' that blood is gushing out of the golden shoe. The belief that
some persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said, is
primaeval. We pay homage to it in our proverbial expression, 'a
little bird told me'. Popular traditions and rhymes protect their
nests, as in the case of the wren, the robin, and the swallow.
Occasionally this gift seems to have been acquired by eating or
tasting the flesh of a snake or dragon, as Sigurd, in the Volsung
tale, first became aware of Regin's designs against his life, when he
accidentally tasted the heart-blood of Fafnir, whom he had slain in
dragon shape, and then all at once the swallow's song, perched above
him, became as intelligible as human speech.

We now come to a class of beings which plays a large part, and always
for ill, in these Tales. These are the Giants or Trolls. In modern
Norse tradition there is little difference between the names, but
originally Troll was a more general expression for a supernatural
being than Giant, [30] which was rather confined to a race more dull
than wicked. In the Giants we have the wantonness of boundless bodily
strength and size, which, trusting entirely to these qualities, falls
at last by its own weight. At first, it is true that proverbial
wisdom, all the stores of traditional lore, all that could be learnt
by what may be called rule of thumb, was ascribed to them. One
sympathises too with them, and almost pities them as the
representatives of a simple primitive race, whose day is past and
gone, but who still possessed something of the innocence and virtue
of ancient times, together with a stock of old experience, which,
however useful it might be as an example to others, was quite useless
to help themselves. They are the old Tories of mythology, as opposed
to the Aesir, the advanced liberals. They can look back and say what
has been, but to look forward to say what will be and shall be, and
to mould the future, is beyond their ken. True as gold to the
traditional and received, and worthless as dross for the new and
progressive. Such a nature, when unprovoked, is easy and simple; but
rouse it, and its exuberant strength rises in a paroxysm of rage,
though its clumsy awkward blows, guided by mere cunning, fail to
strike the slight and lissom foe who waits for and eludes the stroke,
until his reason gives him the mastery over sheer brute force which
has wearied itself out by its own exertions.[31]

This race, and that of the upstart Aesir, though almost always at
feud, still had their intervals of common intercourse, and even
social enjoyment. Marriages take place between them, visits are paid,
feasts are given, ale is breached, and mirth is fast and furious.
Thor was the worst foe the giants ever had, and yet he met them
sometimes on good terms. They were destined to meet once for all on
that awful day, 'the twilight of the gods', but till then, they
entertained for each other some sense of mutual respect.

The Trolls, on the other hand, with whom mankind had more to do, were
supposed to be less easy tempered, and more systematically malignant,
than the Giants, and with the term were bound up notions of sorcery
and unholy power. But mythology is a woof of many colours, in which
the hues are shot and blended, so that the various races of
supernatural beings are shaded off, and fade away almost
imperceptibly into each other; and thus, even in heathen times, it
must have been hard to say exactly where the Giant ended and the
Troll began. But when Christianity came in, and heathendom fell; when
the godlike race of the Aesir became evil demons instead of good
genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief,
whether Aesir, Giants, or Trolls, were mingled together in one
superstition, as 'no canny'. They were all Trolls, all malignant; and
thus it is that, in these tales, the traditions about Odin and his
underlings, about the Frost Giants, and about sorcerers and wizards,
are confused and garbled; and all supernatural agency that plots
man's ill is the work of Trolls, whether the agent be the arch enemy
himself, or giant, or witch, or wizard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough surely has now been said to shew that the old religion and
mythology of the Norseman still lives disguised in these popular
tales. Besides this internal evidence, we find here and there, in the
written literature of earlier days, hints that the same stories were
even then current, and current then as now, among the lower classes.
Thus, in _King Sverri's Saga_ we read: 'And so it was just like
what is said to have happened in old stories of what the king's
children suffered from their stepmother's ill-will.' And again, in
_Olof Tryggvason's Saga_ by the monk Odd: 'And better is it to
hear such things with mirth than stepmother's stories which shepherds
tell, where no one can tell whether anything is true, and where the
king is always made the least in their narrative.' But, in truth, no
such positive evidence is needed. Any one who has read the Volsung
tale as we have given it, will be at no loss to see where the 'little
birds' who speak to the Prince and the lassie, in these tales, come
from; nor when they read in the 'Big Bird Dan', No. lv, about 'the
naked sword' which the Princess lays by her side every night, will
they fail to recognize Sigurd's sword _Gram_, which he laid
between himself and Brynhildr when he rode through the flame and won
her for Gunnar. These mythical deep-rooted groves, throwing out fresh
shoots from age to age in the popular literature of the race, are far
more convincing proofs of the early existence of these traditions
than any mere external evidence'. [32]




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 [33] 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 [_Popular Rhymes of Scotland_ (Ed. 1847).]
are as good in tone and keeping as anything of the kind in the whole
range of such popular collections. [34] 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_',[35] 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 [36]

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';[Moe, _Introd. Norsk. Event._] 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.'

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