sickly age. We do not want carefully-constructed poems of mosaic, self-possessed and self-conscious. Force is what we need and what will heal us. In so far as it is force, it is the true morality, the true beauty, and the only revelation. It is the magnificent force in Byron which makes the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought against him, so strange. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. Therefore he is infinitely precious. The books which have lived and always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The world's literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron's own words—

who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it, imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many novelists there are who know their art better than Charlotte Brontë, but she, like Byron,—and there are more points of resemblance between them than might at first be supposed,—is imperishable because she speaks under overwhelming pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the spirit breathes through her. The Byron "vogue" will never pass so long as men and women are men. and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may remind us of his imperfections of form, but they are nothing more than the flaws of a mountain, and Goethe will be right after all, for not since Shakespeare have we had any one der ihm zu vergleichen wäre.

W. HALE WHITE.

VOL. XL.

SCOTTISH, SHETLANDIC, AND GERMANIC

WATER TALES.

PART I.

I.

A

SHORT time ago it was my good fortune to be able to publish the discovery of two most remarkable remnants of ancient Germanic poetry, lying hidden, until now, in Shetland folklore. The one was the fragmentary Unst Lay, a half-heathen, half-christianized popular version of the Eddic Rune-Song of Odin. The other was the long lost "Arthur Knight" song, of which Dr. John Leyden, in "The Complaynt of Scotland," had only recovered two lines that were made the frequent theme of speculation by mythologists, and which, when the text was at last gathered from the lips of a living person, was also seen to contain the unmistakable traces of the Odinic faith under an Arthurian guise. Both these valuable survivals of our common Teutonic forefathers' creed appeared in June, 1879.

Since then, fresh curious myths, spell-songs, and other waifs of a faith long gone down, have reached me from Shetland-all of them, to my knowledge, utterly unknown to the world of letters. Some of these interesting communications have come unsought, in consequence of the publication of the paper mentioned. Others are the encouraging

result and reward of inquiries made after the opening up of a corrcspondence. So far as in me lies, I shall endeavour to bring about the gradual unearthing of those hidden treasures in which the northern Thule seems so rich, though it is very difficult to make the popular layers in which they are embedded, yield what they still hold of sunken beliefs. My only regret is, that I have not more leisure for this laborious research; for there is imminent danger-now that the steamhorse snorts through almost every corner of the land, and the electric telegraph flashes messages into the most secluded huts-of the utter loss of those wonderful tales of oral tradition which are of the greatest importance for the full reconstruction of the old Germanic creed, and for Comparative Mythology even more.

A Shetland correspondent, of the tradesmen's class, Mr. Robert Sinclair, of Lerwick-who, he says, has only now had his interest awakened in the subject in a manner never felt before, and in a way which to him was one of sudden pleasure-writes to me the following:

.. Yet, looking back over more than half a century, in the greater part of which time I have been placed in a position in which I might have done much in recovering from oblivion many of these valuable and interesting relics, I cannot say the pleasure is without regret that I was at that time alike ignorant of their origin, nature, and value, and have only been awakened to it in some sense now. I was born in one of the most outlying districts in the islands, where charms and incantations were much resorted to; and I lived there during the first thirty years of my life. During these years I had ample opportunities of acquiring folk-lore, had I not been restrained by my parents, who frowned on everything of the kind. Naturally, I felt a kind of instinctive desire to acquire such knowledge from sheer curiosity, but found it very difficult, as those who were in possession of it generally had some sinister end for withholding it, and were well aware that I sought to acquire it for no practical purpose; and thus any stock is very poor, compared with what it might have been."

Speaking of the now recovered Nightmare Incantation ("Arthur Knight, he rade a' night,") which in Shetland folk-speech is known as the spell against the Mahara or Mara, the same correspondent continues:

"I can never forget the evening when 'Ingo, Geords' dochter,' a servant in my father's house, with whom I was a special favourite, took me aside and said: Come, an' I'll tell dee for ta tell awa' da Mahara!' We went, and she told me. I was then between twelve and thirteen years of age; and the words soon fixed themselves on my memory, and, what gave me more pleasure, the bold picture on my imagination. It was, I think, the first poetical idea that fixed itself on my mind. I questioned her how the Knight rode his steed, and she said: His horse's feet never touched da grund.' My young fancy soon endowed 'Erter' (Arthur) with supernatural powers, and I could fancy I saw him rushing through the darkness, the mane and tail of his steed streaming in the wind, and his open sword gleaming in the light of his candle. . . . . When I had grown up, and had begun to gather a little information, the spell of his image was broken. I learned a little of the history of chivalry, and had read some of the legends of the Knights of the Round Table. I at once became satisfied my hero had sprung from one of these fictions, and I thought little of it, till I read your article."

The same letter from which the above is quoted, gives a curious malediction charm, gathered from "an old cross-grained virago who was generally regarded as a witch." Its meaning I have not been able as yet to decipher. Here my correspondent remarks:

"The transition of our speech from the Norse to what it is, no doubt led to the loss of much of the folklore, as few would either have been able or willing to translate these relics, unless in such cases as they might have been utilized for superstitious purposes, or used as a stock on which to graft new religious ideas, such as we see in the Unst Lay. Another cause lies in the aversion of those who regarded them as heathenish, to have aught to do with them. My own mother, who, on the paternal side, had descended from a pure Scandinavian stock, was doubtless imbued with that idea. I remember, when very young, asking her how the days of the week got their names, and she gave me a pretty correct account of it, stating that three of them at least were named after heathen deities that our forefathers worshipped-namely, Woden, Thor, and Freyja; the latter

of whom, she said, was a goddess.* I, in my youthful ignorance, laughed at the idea of a female god, having always been taught that God was a spirit with whom we could never associate the idea of sex, and wondered how our forefathers could believe such nonsense. She replied:Yae, my dear, baith doo an' I might 'a believed gritter nonsense bit for da Wird o' Revelation, an' we sood be tankfoo' 'it da darkness is past, an' da true light noo shines.' Under such teaching I grew up; and I have no doubt she could have told us many other things relating to the subject, but she did not see that the mythology of our forefathers might have been retained by her children without making them less Christian."

In seeking to recover now what can be recovered, difficulties are to be encountered little dreamt of by those who do not know the kind of religious fervour with which the holders of those ancient oral traditions try to shelter them against what they regard as the intrusion of the merely curious, or, may be, the mockers and disbelievers. This secretiveness is often a bar against direct inquiry. In order to circumvent the jealously-guarded positions, strategy has to be used, so as to disarm suspicion and to win the merited confidence. From what my correspondent writes, it seems that the mere bruiting about of the fact of an essay on Shetland tales having already been published was enough to set some of the sentinels of the eerie Folklore Castle on the alert. Ladies being more successful agents in extracting hidden knowledge, one of them was told off to put leading questions about certain spells; but an old woman to whom such questions were addressed, answered :— "Güde trüth! gin I wid tell you onything, ye wid shüne hae it in print, an' dan da gude o' it ta me wid be düne!"

Her idea, my informant adds, evidently was that when such charms and incantations became common property, their virtue would be gone; popular faith in them would be destroyed by the publicity given to them, and by the discussion arising therefrom; hence concealment alone could save a spell-sayer's or Sibyl's craft. This reticent character of a great many persons who still possess the old unwritten poetical literature of the people, must be kept in mind by those who would gain access to it at a time when the lapse of a few more years may entail an irreparable loss.

II.

Both in its tales and in its terminology, Shetland folk-lore has evidently preserved some striking relics which go far to supplement hitherto missing links of the Teutonic creed. Mythic Water-Horses and Water-Bulls, or Cows, are to be found in the religious systems of

In reality, all the days of the week have their names from Teutonic gods. Sunday and Monday refer to the worship of the Sun and the Moon, which, according to Cæsar and Tacitus (Ann. xiii., 55), were adored by the Germans, as if these heavenly bodies were persons. When the German chieftain Boiocal pleaded the cause of himself and his Ansibarian tribe before the Roman legate Avitus, he invoked the Sun and the other stars like individual deities (see Grote's "History of Greece," i., 336). Tuesday has its name from the Teutonic war-god Tiu, Tyr, or Ziu; hence "Zistig" (Tuesday) in the Alemannic dialect. In Bavarian folkspeech, Tuesday is called Ertag, or Erchtag, from a tribal war-god whose name is formed from the same root as that of the Greek Ares. Even Saturday is, in all probability, not a corruption of dies Saturni, but has its name from Saetere, an alias of the firegod Loki, who, though an evil-doer, had often been the confidential counsellor of the goddesses "in the morning of Time," and who had even drank blood-brotherhood with Odin.

many nations of old. Ay, they still haunt the imagination of living men in the shape of Scotch Water-Kelpies, or of dapple-gray stallions and brown steers that rise from some mysterious German lake, such as the nix-haunted Mummel-See of the Black Forest. But nowhere in this country have I yet met with, after much personal inquiry among English and Scotch friends, the highly significant name of a Shetlandic water-horse, which deserves being rescued from oblivion. It is called the NUGGLE.

It was in a somewhat casual way I, at first, heard of this remarkable I was told that there is, in the superstitious beliefs of the northernmost island group which historically bears so strong a Norse character, "an ideal existence, called the Nuggle, which is always regarded as a horse-never as a mare; the distinction being, however, that his tail is said to resemble a wheel." This Nuggle is "believed to be possessed of semi-aquatic properties, and used to play his pranks on water-mills while in the act of grinding the corn." My first informant, Mr. Robert Sinclair, to whom, as well as to his son, I am greatly indebted for excellent communications, added:-"When young, I saw the ruins of a water-mill which tradition said had been deserted because of the Nuggle."

Both the suggestive name and the qualities of this mythic horse deeply aroused my interest, for they seemed to fit in wonderfully with the elaborate system of the Germanic Water-Cult-a form of worship which may have preceded, or for some time gone side by side, with the Asa Religion, and which was only fused into the latter after a hostile struggle dimly recorded in the Edda. I, therefore, continued inquiries about the connections of this gruesome phantom figure of the waves. In reply to various questions-especially as to whether its name was connected with any Shetlandic word referring to water-I received the following:

"With regard to the legendary attributes of the Nuggle, he was believed to be more deceitful than courageous; and his sole bent seemed to be to play mischievous pranks on the human race. I am not aware of any Shetland word that connects the name with water, but the tradition is that the Nuggle was never found at any distance from the water; generally frequenting a footpath near a loch or a burn on which water-mills were built. The object the Nuggle had in frequenting footpaths near a loch, was to offer his services to any unsuspecting wayfarer who might feel disposed to take advantage of them, in order to facilitate his progress, if likely to be benighted. In form be was exactly like a pony, with the exception of his tail, which was said to resemble the rim of a wheel, but which he cunningly kept concealed between his hind legs, when he meant to victimise any pedestrian; and woe be to the man who bestrode him without examining that appendage! It was not stated whether he used his tail as a means of locomotion or not; but no sooner had he felt the weight of his victim, than with lightning speed he flew into the water, and the equestrian found himself submerged beyond his depth, and if he ever gained the shore, it was no fault of the Nuggle. He did not, however, attempt attack; but it is said when the rider got his head above water, he saw him disappear in cloudy vapour or blue flame."