Chapter V: CONCLUSION—Literature of Popular Tales—Characters in Norse

Tales—Norse Nature.

“The loves and feuds of the Powers of Nature, after they had been told, first of gods, then of heroes, appear in the tales of the people as the flirting and teasing of fairies and imps. Christianity had destroyed the old gods of the Teutonic tribes, and supplied new heroes in the saints and martyrs of the Church. The gods were dead, and the heroes, the sons of the gods, forgotten. But the stories told of them would not die, and in spite of the excommunications of the priests, they were welcomed wherever they appeared in their strange disguises. Kind-hearted grannies would tell the pretty stories of old, if it was only to keep their little folk quiet. They did not tell them of the gods; for those gods were dead; or, worse than that, had been changed into devils. They told them of nobody; ay, sometimes they would tell them of the very saints and martyrs, and the apostles themselves have had to wear some of the old rags that belonged by right to Odin and other heathen gods. The oddest figure is that of the Devil in his half-Christian and half-heathen garb. The Aryan nations had no Devil. Pluto, though of a sombre character, was a very respectable personage; and Loki, though a mischievous person, was not a fiend. The German goddess, Hell, too—like Proserpina—had once seen better days. Thus, when the Germans were indoctrinated with the idea of a real Devil, the Semitic Satan or Diabolus, they treated him in the most good-humoured manner. They ascribed to him all the mischievous tricks of their most mischievous gods. But while the old Northern story-tellers delighted in the success of cunning, the new generation felt in duty bound to represent the Devil in the end as always defeated. He was outwitted in all the tricks which had formerly proved successful, and thus quite a new character was produced—the poor or stupid Devil, who appears not unfrequently in the German and in Norwegian tales.

All this Mr. Dasent has described very tersely and graphically in his Introduction, and we recommend the readers of his tales not to treat that Introduction as most introductions are treated.”—_Saturday Review, January 15, 1859._