Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/52

 44 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

A possible origin for these stories occurred to me lately while reading a paper in the Saga-Book of the Viking Club of London, named " Odinic Traces in Somerset," by the Rev. Charles W. Whistler.

Mr. Whistler says " that the thing that is never forgotten in a district is a terror. Often the latest terror will absorb into its own story the legends of the older days," and " one can trace the remains of the past beliefs in many ways as coloring the thoughts of our people, and in nothing more than in the matter of the one terror of our faith, — the fear of the spiritual enemy, the Power of Evil. The fear of the old gods has been, not replaced by, but transmuted into, the fear of Satan. And this is natural ; for to the early converts from heathenism the sway of the pagan deities represented the power of evil from which they had escaped, and to their minds Satan was to a certain extent typified in the likeness and with the ways of them, as they had been wont to fear them."

Mr. Whistler then traces several of the Somerset traditions back to an Odinic origin. Among them is a story about footprints of the Devil which are still to be seen on the rocks.

Two stories are about the " wild hunt." Once a man saw it pass in the air over him. The rider stayed to speak to him, to his ter- ror, for he saw that the huntsman was the Devil, and that he rode a great sow.

" ' Good fellow, now tell me, how ambles my sow ? '

" ' Eh, by the Lord ! her ambles well now ! ' the man answered. But the pious emphatic was not to be stood by the fiend, and he vanished in a flash of fire." In this tradition Mr. Whistler sees Frey mounted on his golden-bristled boar Gullinbursti, transmuted into the Devil, while his boar, for the sake of the rhyme, is changed into a sow. In another story the appearance of a headless man riding on a black horse is supposed to have been the hooded Odin ; and in a third, the wild huntsman riding on a headless horse suggests that the horse was headless from his sacrifice to Thor at the Ve. Horse sacrifice was the cause of much trouble in England in the old days, as it was to King Olaf Tryggvason in the far North.

Is it possible that these stories about the terror of horses for the scene of a crime, and for the footprint of Satan, may have come down from the time of the confusion of the Christian and old Norse faiths in England, when, if a crime had been committed, the wrath of the ^Esir must be appeased by the sacrifice of a horse ; and like- wise when Satan, invested with the character of the northern gods, would be supposed to desire for himself their ancient sacrifice, a horse ?

Cornelia Horsford. December 17, 1898.

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