Note 175 — 17 HIND HORN

This high-mettled horse is a capital figure in most of the versions. In one of them the caution is given, "Do not feel safe in spurring him: he will scatter thy brains ten ells below the ground." The gray (otherwise the black) is of the same breed as the Russian Dobrynya's, a little way on; or the foal that took Charles the Great, under similar circumstances, from Passau to Aachen between morn and eve, ('Karl der Grosse,' from Enenkels Weltbuch, c. 1250, in von der Hagen's Gesammtabenteuer, II, 619 ff); or the black in the poem and tale of Thedel von Walmoden.