Sabine Baring-Gould

“ The wagon of the Ankou is like the death-coach that one hears of in Devon and in Wales. It is all black, with black horses drawing it, driven by a headless coachman. A black hound runs before it, and within sits a lady—in the neighbourhood of Okehampton and Tavistock she is supposed to be a certain Lady Howard, but she is assuredly an impersonification of Death, for the coach halts to pick up the spirits of the dying. ”

“ Life is light and fire. This idea must have entered into the minds of primitive people. To this day in Yorkshire falling stars are supposed to be the souls coming down from above to new-born children and animating them, and when death ensues the flame of life passes out of the body. ”

“ Had the moon been behind the archway, instead of behind me, that might have furnished a loophole of explanation.
No; there was nothing whatever, so far as human eyes—and I can tell you that keen ones and sceptical ones have looked at it—to cast the shade, or to account for it. There, as you sat and watched, stretched out the plain, in the moonlight, with its low, trunk-like bushes, its clear space of bare land, the archway rising beyond it. ”

“ There is at the present day, or was till recently, a morass near Stadr by Reykjanes in Iceland, where from the other side of the bay a wavering blue flame is seen, and it is supposed that a treasure lies sunken there; but the light is that of the spirit of him whose gold lies beneath the marsh.
It was a belief among the German peasantry that the stars were human souls. When a child died its spirit was taken up to heaven and hung there as a star, but unbaptized children’s souls became wills-o’-the-wisp. So also those of men who have moved their neighbours’ landmarks. ”

“ Among the rude stone monument builders, whose huge allées couvertes in the north-west of France, in Ireland, in Denmark, and Southern Sweden are our wonder to-day, these immense structures, reared at the cost of enormous labour, were dwelling-houses for the dead. In life these megalithic monument builders were content to squat in small bee-hive huts, in which they could not stand upright. But for the dead, they reared palaces. ”

“ At night a wain is heard coming along the road with a creaking axle. It halts at a door, and that is the summons. A spirit passes, and the Ankou moves on. Marillier, who wrote a preface to M. le Braz’s work, says that Lower Brittany is before all else the Land of the Dead. ‘Souls do not remain enclosed in the tombs, they wander at night on the high-roads and in the lonely lanes. They haunt the fields and the moors, thick as blades of grass or as grains of sand on the shore. ”

“ But Asmund, when he saw the boy descend, cast him out, and got into the basket himself. Then he gave the signal to draw up. Those who drew thought by the weight that the basket contained much treasure. But when they saw the unknown figure of a man emerge, scared by his strange appearance, and thinking that the dead had come to life again, they flung down the rope and fled. He tried to recall them, and assured them that they were needlessly alarmed. And when Eric saw him, he marvelled at the aspect of his bloody face, the blood flowing freely and spurting out. Then Asmund told his story. ”

“ On the appointed day Svafurlami returned; the Dwarfs came forward and presented him with the sword. As Dvalin stood in the door he said: ‘This sword will cause the death of a man every time that it is drawn. Three of the most infamous acts will be done by it, and it will bring about your own ruin.’ At that Svafurlami smote at the dwarf, and the blade cut into the hard rock. But the sword was his; he named it Tyrfing, bore it in every battle, and with it slew the giant Thiassi and took his daughter to wife, and had by her a daughter Eyvör. ”

“ I do not myself think that the sacrifice of the first-born, or the first of any being, or the burial of a human victim under a foundation stone, was of Aryan origin, although Aryans may have adopted such a usage from those of another race whom they overlay. The notion of burying under foundations is very prevalent in India and throughout the East, among the Dravidian and Malay peoples, but to the best of my knowledge is not indigenous among the Hindus. ”

“ In the vast American continent, in which tribes are widely scattered and isolated, many in a state of lowest barbarism, the belief in a continuance of life after death is general; and the dead warrior is buried with his most useful weapons and choicest ornaments. Even the babe, whose life is usually accounted of little value among savages, was buried by the careful mother with precious strings of wampum that had occupied her busy fingers more months of patient toil than the days of the infant’s short life. ”

“ Nowadays the sportsman nails up the skulls and antlers of the stags he has shot, or the masks of foxes he has hunted, in his hall; but in Bavaria and Austria they still decorate the exterior as well as the interior of the shooting-lodge. There exists naturally in every sportsman an ambition to bring home and exhibit some trophy of his exploits; and as at the present day his energies and barbarous instincts are confined to the slaying of wild animals, it is only the heads of wild animals that he can display to his own satisfaction and that of admiring friends. ”

“ Where did our nurses, whence did Grimm obtain their tales of kobolds, gnomes, dwarfs, pixies, brownies, etc.? They derived them from traditions of the past, handed down from generation to generation.
But to go to the root of the matter. In what did the prevailing belief in the existence of these small people originate? I do not myself hold that a widely extended belief, curiously coinciding, whether found in Scandinavia, in Germany, in England, Scotland, and Ireland, can have sprung out of nothing. Everything comes out of an egg or a seed. ”

“ A gentleman was riding alone near the Land’s End on a still dark night, when the yelping cry broke out above his head so suddenly, and to all appearance so near, that he instinctively pulled up his horse as if to allow the pack to pass, the animal trembling violently at the unexpected sounds. ”

“ I have several times in Yorkshire seen at a wedding a race for a ribbon. Properly speaking, it should be the bride’s garter which is claimed. She stands at the winning-post, and the lads race to see who can reach her first and get the ribbon and a kiss. But the ribbon is a substitute for the garter, provided by the bridegroom; the usage dates back to a remote and particularly barbarous antiquity. The girl belonged to her tribe, and the bridegroom could not obtain her as his wife without resistance from the youths of the tribe, and buying them off. ”

“ We come now to the consideration as to whence came these traditions of human sacrifice—whether to the corn, or the sea; to the river, or to the earth.
There can exist no doubt that the Aryan race did practise human sacrifice. The Greeks, the Latins, the Germans, and Scandinavians, the Celts, and the Sclaves all practised these horrible rites. But with all of them, if I mistake not, the notion was the same as with the Semitic—that the offering was made to an offended God, and that it was expiatory. ”

“ At his death a cloud came up, with a square-rigged ship in it, and the words, ‘The hour is come, but not the man,’ were heard. As the ship sailed over the house, the dying man’s room was filled with the noise of waves and breakers, and the house shook as the soul of the wrecker passed away, borne in the cloud ship. ”

“ J. Barmby that a wedding in the Dales of Yorkshire is indeed a thing to see; that nothing can be imagined comparable to it in wildness and obstreperous mirth. The bride and bridegroom may possibly be a little subdued, but their friends are like men bereft of reason. They career round the bridal party like Arabs of the desert, galloping over ground on which, in cooler moments, they would hesitate even to walk a horse—shouting all the time, and firing volleys from the guns they carry with them.... ”

“ As peoples became more civilised and thought more deeply of the mystery of death, they conceived of a place where the souls lived on, and being puzzled to account for the rainbow, came to the conclusion that it was a bridge by means of which spirits mounted to their abode above the clouds. ”

“ In Devonshire, as a bride leaves the church an old woman presents her with a little bag containing hazel nuts. These have the same signification as rice, and betoken fruitfulness—the rice is undoubtedly a late substitution for hazel nuts. And now we have confetti of paper as substitute for rice, itself a substitute for nuts. Catullus tells us that among the ancient Romans newly-married people were given nuts. Among the Germans ‘to go a-nutting’ is a euphemism for love-making; and the saying goes that a year in which are plenty of nuts will also be one in which many children will be born. ”

“ I have given the tale at length, because it illustrates so fully what is the point now being insisted on. The bird is the transmigrated little girl. But that is not all. The dog that carries away the bunches of candles is the cruel stepmother who, in life, has transformed herself in this manner.
For as human souls after death go into the bodies of birds or beasts, so can they during life shift their quarters. This is the origin of the numerous tales of werewolves, and witches becoming cats or hares. ”

“ It is but a step from drowning a man as an offering to the hungry sea to allowing a man to drown, refusing him help, as was the case in Orkney and Shetland and in Cornwall as well. On the west coast of Ireland, when the Spanish sailors were wrecked from the Armada, the Irish murdered and threw them back into the sea, not that they bore them animosity—these Spaniards were Roman Catholics as well as the Irishmen, but because it was unlucky to rescue anyone from the sea, which exacts its toll of human life. It is not only the sea that makes these demands, but, as we have seen, rivers as well. ”

“ That at some time in the remote past the skull of the ancestor was regarded as oracular is possible enough, but we have no evidence to that effect. What we have seen has been the survival of the preservation of the skull, presumedly of an ancestor, at all events of a founder, as a protecting relic, not genius, for no thought of spirit enters into it. It is the osseous mass of bone that is the guardian, not any soul that once inhabited it. ”

“ The belief in ghosts is so prevalent, so widely extended, and so many more or less authentic stories of their appearances exist, that a thick book might be filled with them. What is more to the point is that though most educated individuals repudiate the notion, they nevertheless retain a sneaking conviction that there may be some truth in the many stories that they hear; and they endeavour to explain them on natural grounds. All these stories derive from the period when men burnt their dead, and so put an end to the conception of the continued life after death of dead bodies. ”

“ In less than an hour they bring their boats across to Great Britain, whereas ordinarily a ship with stout and continuous rowing would not reach it in a day and a half. As soon as they have reached the British shore, the souls leave the ships, and these at once rise in the sea, as though wholly without lading. ”

“ But I think we do know enough to say that there did exist, in England and generally in the British Isles, in Scandinavia and in Germany, a blacksmithying people, not of Iberian nor of Aryan blood, not found in large numbers nor forming big colonies, but vagrant and dispersed as are the Gipsies of the present day. And I suspect that it is this people who have occasioned the stories told of pixies, kobolds, brownies, elves, etc. Such a people, shy, living a different life from, those for whom they worked, were sure to excite imagination and give rise to fantastic stories. ”

“ One in Brittany, at Tregastel, has carved on it and painted a crucifix and the instruments of the passion. Such are all the deities that we can safely say were culted by the prehistoric race that lies below the peoples that successively overlaid them, of which any trace remains in modern folk-lore.
We come next to Aryan folk-lore, and to that in which there is some reminiscence of the gods our ancestors once worshipped. It is remarkable that two common names for the devil should enshrine those of ancient deities, one Celtic and the other Teutonic or Norse. ”

“ The supposition that death was the complete annihilation of the living, the thought that any human being who to-day is a dweller full of joy and vigour in our midst, could possibly be absolutely extinct to-morrow, such a notion was utterly and entirely foreign to the mind of prehistoric man, as it is to the savage of to-day. The earliest and rudest conception of death is that of suspended animation, like sleep or a fit. ”

“ Two days later several individuals in the place fell ill, and in eight days nine of them were dead. Every one of these declared that Peter Posojowitz was the sole cause of their illness. He had visited them in the night, thrown himself upon them, and sucked their blood. In order to put a stop to this, the grave was opened at the end of three weeks, and the body was found undecomposed. The hair, beard, and nails had grown; the old skin had peeled off and a fresh skin had formed. Face and body appeared as sound and healthy as in life. Fresh blood stained the lips. ”

“ He says: ‘According to the popular tale a lady is sent by her stepmother to draw water from the well of the world’s end. She arrives at the well after encountering many dangers, but soon perceives that her adventures have not reached a conclusion. A frog emerges from the well, and, before it suffers her to draw water, obliges her to betroth herself to the monster, under the penalty of being torn to pieces. The lady returns safe; but at midnight the frog lover appears at the door and demands entrance according to promise, to the great consternation of the lady and her nurse. ”

“ In Yorkshire, when a man is drowned, in order to find the place where the body is, a lighted candle is stuck in a loaf of bread which is committed to the water, and the light after a while floats above the spot where the corpse lies below the surface. When I was in Yorkshire in 1865 a man was drowned in the Calder Canal, and this method was adopted before dragging for the body. In this case the candle-flame represents the soul going in quest of its husk. ”

“ The body itself decays and moulders, and is thus not only difficult to preserve but also has the repulsive properties of soft corrupting flesh, whereas it is always easy to keep the skull. But even that may be felt too cumbrous, and the North American Indian contented himself with a scalp as a trophy; and the ancient Irish chief extracted the brain of his slain enemy, mixed it with chalk, rolled it into a ball, and so preserved a trophy of his prowess. ”

“ Then as the souls could not find bodies to animate, they went wandering in quest of them. Next they formed the notion that across the sea, or the river that flowed round the earth, the souls went in boats. ”

“ Birth, marriage, death lore go into their several piles, so do ghost and witch stories, and tales of dwarfs. What we really want to know is, Whence came the several items found?
Here, in Great Britain, we form an amalgam of several distinct races, and each race has contributed something towards the common stock of folk-lore. In my own neighbourhood we have two distinct types of humanity: one with high cheekbones, dusky skin, dark hair, full of energy, unscrupulous as to the meum and tuum, money-making, by every conceivable means. ”

“ With all the difficulty of analysing the mixed nature of the dwarfs in European folk-lore, and judging how far they are elves, or gnomes, or such like nature spirits, and how far human beings in a mystic aspect, it is impossible not to recognise this latter element in the kindly or mischievous aborigines of the land, with their special language, and religion, and costume.’ [1]
As a farmer marks his sheep, and his horse turned out on the moors by a hole punched in the ear, or a snip, so persons are marked out as pertaining to the gods. ”