Note 18 — DISENCHANTMENT.
Reading edition
Of the many mysterious chapters of the human mind, surely one of the most obscure and puzzling is that of witchcraft. For some reason, not sufficiently explained, Lapland was set down as a favourite seat of the orgies of the "Midnight Hags." When, in the ballad of "The Witch of Fife," the auld gudeman, in the exercise of his conjugal authority, questions his errant spouse regarding her nocturnal absences without leave, she is made ecstatically to answer,
"Whan we came to the Lapland lone, The fairies war all in array; For all the genii of the North War keepyng their holyday. The warlocke man and the weird womyng, And the fays of the woode and the steep, And the phantom hunteris all were there, And the mermaidis of the deep. And they washit us all with the witch-water, Distillit fra the moorland dew, Quhill our beauty bloomit like the Lapland rose, That wylde in the foreste grew."
Queen's Wake, Night 1st.
"Like, but oh how different," are these unearthly goings on to the details in the Walpurgis Night of Faust (Act v. Scene 1.) The "phantom-hunters" of the north were not the "Wilde Jäger" of Burger, or "the Erl-king" of Goethe. It is related by Hearne, that the tribes of the Chippewas Indians suppose the northern lights to be occasioned by the frisking of herds of deer in the fields above, caused by the hallo and chase of their departed friends.