Popular Tales from the Norse. Anonymous

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СКАЧАТЬ of which 'God' or 'Odin' might be substituted for 'Wish' with perfect propriety. Here we read how 'The Wish' has hands, feet, power, sight, toil, and art. How he works and labours, shapes and masters, inclines his ear, thinks, swears, curses, and rejoices, adopts children, and takes men into his house; behaves, in short, as a being of boundless power and infinite free- will. Still more, he rejoices in his own works as in a child, and thus appears in a thoroughly patriarchal point of view, as the Lord of creation, glorying in his handiwork, as the father of a family in early times was glad at heart when he reckoned his children as arrows in his quiver, and beheld his house full of a long line of retainers and dependants. For this attribute of the Great Father, for Odin as the God of Wish, the Edda uses the word 'Oski' which literally expresses the masculine personification of 'Wish', and it passed on and added the works wish, as a prefix to a number of others, to signify that they stood in a peculiar relation to the great giver of all good. Thus we have oska-steinn, wishing-stone, i.e. a stone which plays the part of a divining rod, and reveals secrets and hidden treasure; oska-byrr, a fair wind, a wind as fair as man's heart could wish it; osk-barn and oska-barn, a child after one's own heart, an adopted child, as when the younger Edda tells us that all those who die in battle are Odin's choice- bairns, his adopted children, those on whom he has set his heart, an expression which, in their turn, was taken by the Icelandic Christian writers to express the relation existing between God and the baptized; and, though last, not least, oska-maer, wish- maidens, another name for the Valkyries—Odin's corse-choosers—who picked out the dead for him on the field of battle, and waited on the heroes in Valhalla. Again, the Edda is filled with 'choice things', possessing some mysterious power of their own, some 'virtue', as our older English would express it, which belong to this or that god, and are occasionally lent or lost. Thus, Odin himself had a spear which gave victory to those on whose side it was hurled; Thor, a hammer which destroyed the Giants, hallowed vows, and returned of itself to his hand. He had a strength-belt, too, which, when he girded it on, his god-strength waxed one-half; Freyr had a sword which wielded itself; Freyja a necklace which, like the cestus of Venus, inspired all hearts with love; Freyr, again, had a ship called Skithblathnir.

      She is so great, that all the Aesir, with their weapons and war

       gear, may find room on board her; and as soon as the sail is set,

       she has a fair wind whither she shall go; and when there is no need

       of faring on the sea in her, she is made of so many things, and

       with so much craft, that Freyr may fold her together like a cloth,

       and keep her in his bag.

       [Snorro's Edda, Stockholm, 1842, translated by the writer.]

      Of this kind, too, was the ring 'Dropper' which Odin had, and from which twelve other rings dropped every night; the apples which Idun, one of the goddesses, had, and of which, so soon as the Aesir ate, they became young again; the helm which Oegir, the sea giant had, which struck terror into all antagonists like the Aegis of Athene; and that wonderful mill which the mythical Frodi owned, of which we shall shortly speak.

      Now, let us see what traces of this great god 'Wish' and his choice- bairns and wishing-things we can find in these Tales, faint echoes of a mighty heathen voice, which once proclaimed the goodness of the great Father in the blessings which he bestowed on his chosen sons. We shall not have long to seek. In tale No. xx, when Shortshanks meets those three old crookbacked hags who have only one eye, which he snaps up, and gets first a sword 'that puts a whole army to flight, be it ever so great', we have the 'one-eyed Odin', degenerated into an old hag, or rather—by no uncommon process—we have an old witch fused by popular tradition into a mixture of Odin and the three Nornir. Again, when he gets that wondrous ship 'which can sail over fresh water and salt water, and over high hills and deep dales,' and which is so small that he can put it into his pocket, and yet, when he came to use it, could hold five hundred men, we have plainly the Skith-blathnir of the Edda to the very life. So also in the Best Wish, No. xxxvi, the whole groundwork of this story rests on this old belief; and when we meet that pair of old scissors which cuts all manner of fine clothes out of the air, that tablecloth which covers itself with the best dishes you could think of, as soon as it was spread out, and that tap which, as soon as it was turned, poured out the best of mead and wine, we have plainly another form of Frodi's wishing-quern—another recollection of those things of choice about which the old mythology has so much to tell. Of the same kind are the tablecloth, the ram, and the stick in 'the Lad who went to the North Wind', No. xxxiv, and the rings in 'the Three Princesses of Whiteland', No. xxvi, and in 'Soria Moria Castle', No. lvi. In the first of those stories, too, we find those 'three brothers' who have stood on a moor 'these hundred years fighting about a hat, a cloak, and a pair of boots', which had the virtue of making him who wore them invisible; choice things which will again remind the reader of the Nibelungen Lied, of the way in which Siegfried became possessed of the famous hoard of gold, and how he got that 'cap of darkness' which was so useful to him in his remaining exploits. So again in 'the Blue Belt', No. xxii, what is that belt which, when the boy girded it on, 'he felt as strong as if he could lift the whole hill', but Thor's 'choice-belt'; and what is the daring boy himself, who overcomes the Troll, but Thor himself, as engaged in one of his adventures with the Giants? So, too, in 'Little Annie the Goose- girl', No. lix, the stone which tells the Prince all the secrets of his brides is plainly the old Oskastein, or 'wishing-stone'. These instances will suffice to show the prolonged faith in 'Wish', and his choice things; a belief which, though so deeply rooted in the North, we have already traced to its home in the East, whence it stretches itself from pole to pole, and reappears in every race. We recognize it in the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, which is a Celtic legend; in the cornucopia of the Romans; in the goat Amalthea among the Greeks; in the wishing-cow and wishing-tree of the Hindoos; in the pumpkin-tree of the West Indian Ananzi stories; in the cow of the Servian legends, who spins yarn out of her ear; in the Sampo of the Finns; and in all those stories of cups, and glasses, and horns, and rings, and swords, seized by some bold spirit in the midst of a fairy revel, or earned by some kind deed rendered by mortal hand to one of the 'good folk' in her hour of need, and with which the 'luck' [See the well- known story of 'The Luck of Eden Hall'.] of that mortal's house was ever afterwards bound up; stories with which the local traditions of all lands are full, but which all pay unconscious homage to the worship of that great God, to whom so many heathen hearts so often turned as the divine realizer of their prayers, and the giver of all good things, until they come at last to make an idol out of their hopes and prayers, and to immortalize the very 'Wish' itself.

      Again, of all beliefs, that in which man has, at all times of his history, been most prone to set faith, is that of a golden age of peace and plenty, which had passed away, but which might be expected to return. Such a period was looked for when Augustus closed the temple of Janus, and peace, though perhaps not plenty, reigned over what the proud Roman called the habitable world. Such a period the early Christian expected when the Saviour was born, in the reign of that very Augustus; and such a period some, whose thoughts are more set on earth than heaven, have hoped for ever since, with a hope which, though deferred for eighteen centuries, has not made their hearts sick. Such a period of peace and plenty, such a golden time, the Norseman could tell of in his mythic Frodi's reign, when gold or Frodi's meal, as it was called, was so plentiful that golden armlets lay untouched from year's end to year's end on the king's highway, and the fields bore crops unsown. Here, in England, the Anglo-Saxon Bede [Hist., ii, 16.] knew how to tell the same story of Edwin, the Northumbrian King, and when Alfred came to be mythic, the same legend was passed on from Edwin to the West Saxon monarch. The remembrance of 'the bountiful Frodi' echoed in the songs of German poets long after the story which made him so bountiful had been forgotten; but the Norse Skalds could tell not only the story of Frodi's wealth and bounty, but also of his downfall and ruin. In Frodi's house were two maidens of that old giant race, Fenja and Menja. These daughters of the giant he had bought as slaves, and he made them grind his quern or hand-mill, Grotti, out of which he used to grind peace and gold. Even in that golden age one sees there were slaves, and Frodi, however bountiful to his thanes and people, was a hard task-master to СКАЧАТЬ