Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/129

 Rh and her bolts and bars huge; traits which come out in "The Master-Smith," p. 105, when the Devil, who here assumes Hel's place, orders the watch to go back and lock up all the nine locks on the gates of Hell—a lock for each of the goddesses' nine worlds—and to put a padlock on besides. In the twilight between heathendom and Christianity, in that half- Christian half-heathen consciousness which this tale reveals, heaven is the preferable abode, as Valhalla was of yore, but rather than be without a house to one's head after death, Hell was not to be despised; though, having behaved ill to the ruler of one, and actually quarrelled with the master of the other, the Smith was naturally anxious on the matter. This notion of different abodes in another world, not necessarily places of torment, comes out too in "Not a Pin to choose between them," p. 173, where Peter, the second husband of the silly Goody, goes about begging from house to house in Paradise.

For the rest, whenever the Devil appears in these tales, it is not at all as the Arch-enemy, as the subtle spirit of the Christian's faith, but rather as one of the old Giants, supernatural and hostile indeed to man, but simple and easily deceived by a cunning reprobate, whose superior intelligence he learns to dread, for whom he feels himself no match, and whom, finally, he will receive in Hell at no price. We shall have to notice some other characteristics of this race of giants a little further on, but certainly no greater proof can be given of the small hold which the Christian Devil has taken of the Norse mind, than the heathen aspect under which he constantly appears, and the ludicrous way in which he is always outwitted.