WITCHES, ELVES, AND GOBLINS.

The creative power of man, though so much boasted, is after all but a mere phantom—a vapor which rises from the ground and floats with little change of form from place to place. The diapason which we thought so extensive, appears, on inquiry, to consist of only a few notes, and the changes that may be rung upon them, may almost be counted upon the fingers. Homer's fables are near of kin to those of Shakspeare; the legends of ancient Greece find their details mirrored exactly in the traditions of Spain, Scotland, and Scandinavia. Whether in the remoter fogs of the past some glimmering traces of light may lead us to discover a common origin, a universal fountain, whence proceed pure and limpid all the streams that are contaminated by baser contact in their later course, is a question which might mightily task the most powerful minds. The gods of Greece and Rome are reproduced in Odin and Thor, Freia, and Gerda and Tduna. Aphrodite at Athens, Venus on the Seven Hills, Freia in the North, differ but in name. Dark hair and coal-black eyes, and a warm, sunny beauty may please the ardent inhabitants of Greece and Rome; the Swedes and Germans may bow before golden hair and blue eyes, fair and blooming cheeks. But transport the Grecian Aphrodite to the Dofrefield glaciers, and she will soon grow white as their snow, her eyes will fade to the pale cold blue of their skies, and with the winter frosts her hair will turn like fall leaves, golden yellow; and under the sun of Italy, Freia will tan to the burning, dark-hued, voluptuous Venus of the South. The two soils naturally breed the one cold statues, the other passionate life, but these two different phases are in themselves identical, Thor's hammer, and the various wonderful exploits of the Northern gods and goddesses, their dim, ill-defined notions of creation, of time and space, and of future worlds, are but natural growths from the nature of the North. Their gods, like their men, are all action, and to raise their actions above those of the human race, they naturally invest them with peculiar supernatural physical endowments, and a strange, mysterious mode of action. The powers of magic come to their aid; they are not absolutely omnipotent. Dwarfs forge them invincible arms in subterranean caverns; earth, air, fire, and water, conspire to assist them. The elements rage or are appeased at their command.

In the same way the gods of Greece and Rome are all repose. Their actions acquire a superiority over those of man not by supernatural agencies or extraordinary developments of physical power; their preëminence lies in the quiet assumption of power, in the immediate sequence of action on volition. Their divinity is esoteric, consisting in attributes innate and not assumed. Action with them is power; but in the North power must be superadded.

Thus we find all the various attributes embodied in the gods of the South, likewise deified and modified in the North, Thus Loke is the Mercury of the ancients. He is the same sly rogue as Hermes, though he has not some of the better qualities of that god. He is essentially the god of deceit. His deceptions are more subtle and deep-laid than those of the Grecian adept. He combines with the Pagan element something of the old Christian Satanic element. Without the horn and hoof of the Christian devil, he has all his peculiar mental qualities, and uses them to the great prejudice and harm of the other gods. So, likewise, with many of the more human μυθοι. We find the same ideas to spring up in the agora of Athens, the wilds and snows of Norway, and the heathers and hills of Scotland. The fable of the Sirens finds an exact counterpart in the North. Like Ulysses, Duke Magnus and innumerable others escape with difficulty from the charms and enticements of sea-nymphs. Sometimes it is their wonderful song which the earth and the elements obey as they did Orpheus, that attracts them. Sometimes it is by more sensual blandishments, and sometimes by sweet and tender persuasion, suadæ medullâ. Mountain elves start from the ground, and from unseen caverns, and attempt to entice brave knights to their ruin; they dance round them beneath the trees, and endeavor to make them join in their dances. The natural fortitude of the stalwart champions is rarely able to resist the temptation, and they are always on the point of falling, when some unoffending barn-yard fowl sounds the signal for retreat, or some Christian word is uttered, or sign made, and the fair visions vanish, either naturally or in divers shapes with odors of brimstone and sulphur. The differences between the Grecian and the Northern conceptions are striking. In the Greek the forms are clear and vivid. The sirens are beautiful women, with angelic voices and vulture's talons. There are nothing but conceivable realities in their story. There is nothing strange or supernatural in their accessories. But in the Scandinavian elves the case is different. They vanish and reäppear at different times; they have no actual, permanent existence. The crow of a cock or the sign of the cross is enough to drive them back to their hiding-places. They shun daylight and fixed, customary spots. They generally surprise casual travelers, and upon them in lone, romantic spots, practice all their arts of enticement and seduction. There is always something of magic, of the supernatural, connected with them. The Greek sirens are not like common women; but once conceive of their physical existence, and you understand them thoroughly. Their laws of action are purely human, and we do not find them one half so unnatural as our neighbor that has a splay foot or a hunchback. The Northern witches, however, are formed like human females, but obey unknown and mysterious powers. The commonest words and associations of men are bans to them. Only so long do they have power as nothing human disturbs and overthrows their supernatural spells.

Again let us look for a moment at another division of Grecian fiction. The grim Cyclops who toils for Vulcan, working like mortal men, and forging divine things, it is true, like any Grecian blacksmith, has a counterpart of a somewhat different character in the North. The reality and vividness of the Greek changes as we approach the Pole. In deep caverns distorted, strange little dwarfs work by the aid of supernatural powers wondrous weapons, swords of incredible qualities, armor that defies mortal blades, bracelets of wondrous and cunning finish and singular properties—all here is miraculous, the workman, the process, and the work. The vividness with which Homer presents to us the one-eyed Polyphemus, with his tree-staff and his ponderous body, is exchanged by the Scandinavian for smallness, indistinctness of form and of power. The grand in the South is obtained by giving enlarged pictures of man as he is; in the North, by investing him with strange, magic, mysterious qualities. In mental as well as material nature, a general haziness of outline conveys the idea of greatness as strongly, though in another manner, as the sharp and perceptible outline of any thing really great.

This peculiarity we shall find running through the literature, the character, and the mind of the two nations. The North is misty, undefined, illimited; the Greek is clear as crystal, sharp and angular, on every side. Its conceptions are never vague, but are tangible, real, and human. Thus with the Greek, a vast ocean, like that they know, encircles the whole earth, and fixes its bounds and the limits which man shall not pass; the Northerns compassed it about with a vast serpent of immense size, which bounded infinity and space, time and eternity, thereby mirroring, in some degree, as it were, the ancient symbol for time and space without end, the snake biting his own tail, the circle with no one beginning nor end. The heaven of the Greeks is the summit of one of their own mountains, known to every peasant and inhabitant. Accessible only to the gods, there they live, as unconcernedly as though the earth were not. Thor, and Odin, and Freia live in the 'Shining Walhalla,' whither go the souls of brave and good warriors. Their way thither is over the heavenly bridge, the many-colored rainbow, thrown over between heaven and earth for the passage of the happy souls. And there in this dim, ghostly Walhalla they sit like the Grecian gods, and drink mead instead of ambrosia and nectar. They do not share in the earthly vices of the Southern gods. Thor never begat such a progeny as Jupiter.

Repose is also, as hinted at, a characteristic of Southern mythology, while action, assisted by supernatural agencies, is the feature of the Northern deities. Thus Jupiter sits majestic and silent upon Olympus and nods his head, and the whole earth shakes. He is human in his character, but of an ideal and superior human nature—man immensely magnified. The gods of Norway are also human, but they are, in themselves, mere men. What makes them gods is the magic power which is joined with them, a mere adjunct not forming a part of them. They toil and act like men—they are never still. Thor bears the hammer, the emblem of physical strength, energy, and activity. He can at a draught half drain the sea, and cause the tides to rise and ebb; he can lift the serpent that surrounds the world; he can wrestle with Death himself, and almost come off victorious. The giants are his mortal enemies, and against them he wages war and bears deadly hatred, as Jupiter against the Titans. None but the warrior, who has fought long and well, enjoys the long dreamt-of mead of Walhalla. A death on one's own bed is almost as ignominious as that of the coward. The straw-death (strödod) they will endeavor to avoid by opening their own veins and bleeding to death, and as the warm life-blood pours forth, they sing triumphant death-songs, and see the portals gradually open to receive them, and Braga the Scald, seated at the gate with his magic-sounding harp, his fingers running through the golden strings, and in such ecstasies they give up the ghost. The Greek dies in a more quiet, philosophical, and practical manner. He does not fear the shame of a warm and soft bed. Achilles, and Ajax, and Diomed, are not the only inmates of Elysium. Socrates, and Plato, and Homer, Apelles and Zeuxis, are all there too. The poet and the philosopher, the painter and the sculptor, rank as high through pen, pencil, and chisel, as the warrior by his blade and his bloody exploits. Art, in the North, finds no existence, and strikes no sympathizing chord in the bosoms of the sturdy Northmen. Art, to be perfect, requires a distinctness of conception, and an assimilation to human nature in its subjects, entirely at variance with the dim, mysterious character of the Scandinavian imagination. Painting is a thing utterly unknown, and sculpture, where found, deals in shapeless blocks and huge, massive, ill-proportioned forms, analogous to the primitive Egyptian art. In the Northern mythology and legendary history, minstrels play an important part. They are as indispensable as the Welsh bards, though not invested with the same authority as they. At the table of the gods, Braga strikes his wonderful harp and chants the triumphal hymns of dead warriors as they enter the Walhalla. Round the boards of the rougher Vikings, among the muscular, sun-browned champions, hardened to blood and strife, the minstrel is ever present, and as the huge cups pass around the long line, they sing the triumphs and praises of their hosts. They are like the old Grecian minstrels; like Phemius and Demodocus, they chant old memories of great sea-kings and champions, legends of magic elves and dwarfs, and wondrous and often touchingly beautiful stories of love and passion. The vague impressions of music seem to harmonize marvelously with the Northern nature. It is wild and weird in its character, for much of it, with the innumerable ballads of those days, have reached us from father to son, and vividly recall the times whence they date, and the men whose characters they mirror. There is often a magic element connected with their music. The music of the elves is like that of the sirens and of Orpheus, often irresistible. Through many of their ballads runs the same legendary undertone. A maiden's song moves the king's heart, and one by one he offers in vain every gift in his power, to the very half of his kingdom, and ends by placing a crown of gold upon her head, and seating her beside him on his throne as his lawful queen. The story of the two sisters, one ugly and one beautiful, reappears in the North in various forms. The younger and more lovely of the two is murdered, and the elder is to wed her bride-groom. Pilgrims who meet with the body, make a lyre from the bones, and string it with the golden hair of the maiden, and as they play at the bridal, each string tells its tale of horror in turn, while the unhappy sister sinks under these inanimate accusations.

In the Greek myths we find none of these mysterious elements. The supernatural creations we meet with are innumerable, and no less strange in themselves. But there is nothing in Polyphemus, in Circe, in the Sirens, beyond their physical natures, which can make us look beyond ourselves to understand and fully sympathize with them. Once fully grasp their superhuman endowments, and you feel they act like men on a large scale. Not so with the Northern supernatural beings. In themselves they approach nearer to men, and are but little above them in endowments and character, but it is their mode of action which makes them superior to us; their divinity and power lie not in themselves, but in the agents, visible and mysterious, that they employ. They are not like Jupiter, omnipotent. They are brought to a stand quite as often as more humble mortals. Thor, without his hammer, is no longer Thor himself. His trusty Mjölner is more to him than the thunderbolt of Zeus to the Grecian father of the gods. The eagle and thunderbolt of Jove, the ægis of Minerva, the girdle of Venus and Mercury's wands, are mere emblems of what powers their own natures give them. With the Northern deities their whole strength lies in the possession of these. Without them they are powerless, and in spite of all their might, they are often obliged to call on one another for assistance, and sometimes even stand in need of mortal aid. We may, perhaps, consider the Grecian gods as mere personifications and idealities, but those of the North are essentially real. They are the creations of a powerful but vague imagination, forms which resemble a Norwegian mountain, distinct in itself by its glittering snows and icy rocks, but which shrouds its head in a perpetual mist, except when some adverse wind with its indiscreet blowing, displays it in all its nakedness, and plain though grand reality.

Analogous to the story of Circe and Ulysses is a myth which forms the foundation of some of the most beautiful and pathetic ballads of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The mountain king bears to his cavern in the hill-side a fair maiden, and with him

'For eight long years, I ween, she lived in the mountain there, And sons full seven she bore him, and eke a daughter fair.'

And here the resemblance ceases, and the Northern legend assumes a more beautiful tone. The maiden longs for her mother and her old home, and goes from the mountain king with the promise not to mention her seven sons. She tells her tale, however, and the elf-king straightway appears, and strikes her till the life-blood flows. She then says:

'Farewell, dear father, and farewell, dear mother, too, Farewell, my sister dear, and dear brother, farewell to you. Farewell, thou lofty heaven, and the fresh, green earth, farewell! Now wend I to the mountain where the mountain king doth dwell.'

And so they ride to the mountain, through the long, wild, black wood, the mother weeping bitter tears, while the elf-king smiles. Her little daughter reaches her a golden chair:

'Oh! rest thee, my poor mother, so sad and woe-begone.'

She takes the foaming mead in her hand,

'And scarce from out the mead-glass bright the first draught does she take, (The hour goes heavy by,) Her eyes were sudden closed, and her weary heart it brake, (Ah! well sorrow's burden know I.)'

That the Greeks had similar ballads and legends can not be doubted, but to revive them from their present destruction is a task beyond the power of science and antiquarianism. Hardly more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the first important steps were taken in the North of Europe to preserve these ballads which had thus been orally handed down from ages that vanish in the darkness of the past, and which in a few years more, with the gradual disappearance of primitive simplicity in Sweden and Norway, might have been, for the greater part, lost to us forever. Who knows but that in some remote corner of Greece, in spite of the revolutions and shocks which have convulsed it, there may still lurk an occasional shadow at least of some good old popular song?

The refrains which accompany the Northern ballads, and which are, in fact, found among all nations whose ballad poetry has been preserved, merit some attention. Sometimes melancholy and sad, sometimes gay and joyous, they impart character wonderfully to the piece. There is something peculiarly mournful in the recurring of these sad, touching thoughts and words, and as the interest of the ballad deepens, their touching simplicity grasps more deeply into the soul, and affects us in a manner which nothing else could. When they are joyous—a rarer form, however—they impart to us also their own buoyancy and gayety. Sometimes they convey the moral of the piece, some simple yet profound reflection, which marks by itself the feeling that pervades the whole ballad; at other times they are merely descriptive of nature, and borrow their enlivening or heart-rending character from the assimilation or contrast they present with the groundwork of the poetry. The origin of this kind of refrain is evidently due to the manner in which the ballads were composed. Mainly extemporized, both words and music, by wandering scalds or minstrels, the refrain was a pause to enable the singer to compose the next line. The utter disregard of rhyme, alliterations the most slight and imperceptible, and words of no similarity of sound almost always taking their place, rendered this a very easy task. A thorough knowledge and mastery of legendary lore, and a little power and concentration of thought and imagery, were the only qualities requisite for a ballad-monger. Some of them bear the marks of superior minds, both by their wonderful vividness of description and by the tone of deep, genuine feeling which pervades them throughout.

There is a wonderful affinity between the Scotch and the Norwegians and Swedes, especially in their traditionary literature, which marks a common origin and common customs at some remote period. We find among the genuine Scotch ballads many that are almost literal versions of the same Scandinavian legends no less indigenous in their own land. A large number of the most beautiful Scotch ballads plainly point to an extraneous Northern origin, and their exact counterparts in form, ideas, and words, we find circulating as popular songs among the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian peasantry. These may often be traced back centuries, at the end of which they seem still to be as old and as thoroughly implanted in their native soil as they now seem. They have been sung from mouth to mouth, with the same wild old melodies and the same quaint language, as they were sung centuries ago among the scenes they so faithfully depict.

The characteristics we have so briefly alluded to as marking the two classes of nations, namely, mysterious grandeur among the Northmen, and among the Greeks ideality, grandness, and vividness of conception, might by skillful hands be traced in more modern times under the influence of an ever-changing and growing civilization. I will only allude, in passing, to a few prominent points.

The literature of Greece, as we know it, had already reached its hight, two thousand years before our time. It was already gray with years before the North had begun its infancy. Homer is the boundary which is insurmountably opposed to our further retrospection, and Homer is already the beginning of perfection in Greek letters. Of earlier periods we can but conjecture that there must have been such, bearing a character analogous to the relics of those nations whose fabulous history is better known to us. Northern literature can hardly be said to have had an existence till within the last hundred years. Before that time we must look for all phases of progress and germs of progress in the physical and animal character of the nation, their social and political features and relations. The vividness and ideality of the ancients find their natural change in the more purely impassioned style of more modern Southern poetry. Their creations have naturally lost with the fall of paganism, the supernatural endowments they had, and retaining in some their ideality, they have hightened and fired the human nature they depict by the addition of wilder and more flaming passions, of love that consumes, and ambition, revenge, and hatred that destroy. Thus we again obtain consistent characters governed by human laws, but raised above the ordinary mass of men by different qualities from those which ennobled ideal creations among the ancients. Repose still constitutes greatness in some instances; but the inner man is made all fire, and seething metal, ever-burning and quenchless. Elevation and subtlety of ideas naturally follow these causes, they are another natural growth of the simple ideality of conception.

The Northern character at the present day has very different qualities. Though renowned for philosophical and metaphysical prose, yet their poetry they require to deal with realities and not with ideas; it must be clear as a fountain, and any opaqueness is an inexcusable flaw. They are yet in the infancy of literature, and the imagination is still more sensuous than acute and subtle. However much they court abstractions in prose, in verse they love only the actual, the real, the tangible. Nature, and not metaphysics, are the subjects of their poetry, and they still preserve a freshness and simplicity reminding of more ancient and ruder days, delightful amidst the hair-splitting of most modern poetry. Their infancy is like the infancy of all national literatures, peculiarly modified by the advanced state of civilization in which their birth was thrown. At first sight there seems something unnatural and unaccountable in this apparent contradiction in the character of the nation, manifested respectively in their prose and their poetry. But on farther examination all becomes clear as a spring day. Their prose was, as their whole literature might and should have been, contemporary with their civilization through its various phases. Metaphysics is the last refinement, or rather, corruption, which national literature undergoes. Their prose had naturally arrived at this stage when the true poetic feeling woke for the first time. And in spite of the rational tendencies of the age, it assumed that character of warm, bodily imagination which marks all early literatures. The tendency to the mysterious and the superhuman has mostly vanished, and more vivid conceptions of every thing have, under their Christian development, taken the place of dim magic and weird creations. Northern poets still delight in dealing with those wonderful poetical inventions of their own ancient mythology, and revel among the elves and dwarfs that surround the bosoms of mountains and woods. Lif, with her golden hair, Gerda, with cheeks like auroras, the cunning Loke, with his mixture of guile, wickedness and deceit, Thor's mighty Mjölner, and the mead-horns of Walhalla—from among these wonderful beings, they have culled with a careless hand, and every sprig and flower is radiant with poetic beauty. The taste for old legends and traditions has revived within a few years, and scholars and antiquarians are now laying open unknown mines of treasure.