Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/16

8 his bones tells the secret of his death, and thus acts the part of the soul-ghost.

In the pleasant green fields we trace the old faiths of the agricultural peasantry, which, put into the words of Hesiod, tell us that "for them earth yields her increase; for them the oaks hold in their summits acorns, and in their midmost branches bees. The flocks bear for them their fleecy burdens they live in unchanged happiness, and need not fly across the sea in impious ships"—faiths which are in striking contrast to the Aryan warrior's conception as set forth by the Saxon thane of King Eadwine of Northumbria. "This life", said this poetical thane, "is like the passage of a bird from the darkness without into a lighted hall where you, O King, are seated at supper, while storms, and rain, and snow rage abroad. The sparrow flying in at our door and straightway out at another is, while within, safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes into the darkness whence it came."

But I must not now linger over contrasts in belief. What I am anxious to illustrate is that the beliefs of this pagan Englishman reveal to us an individual whose stage of culture was due, not to the prevailing academic or religious teaching of his own time, but to the ideas and beliefs of a culture which had ceased to exist as a prevailing or recognised culture for eight or nine centuries. Having ascertained this much, what does it indicate to us further? In the first place, such a belief, such a veritable stage of paganism, must have come down by tradition from pre-Christian times. It cannot well be that this Englishman had gone abroad, and meeting somewhere a tribe of uncivilised people, had overthrown what little religious teaching he might have received in the seventeenth century, and had deliberately adopted the religion of savages. It cannot well be, either, that some uncivilised belief had travelled to England, either by means of an individual holding such a belief, or of an individual relating to wondering peasants his knowledge of such a belief, and had by this means been