Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/158

 clii In one tale (p. 264) the Goat appears in full force, and dashes out the brains of the Troll, who lived under the bridge over the burn. In another, "Tatterhood," p. 345, he helps the lassie in her onslaught on the witches. He, too, was sacred to Thor in the old mythology, and drew his thundering car. Here something of the divine nature of his former lord, who was the great foe of all Trolls, seems to have been passed on in popular tradition to the animal who had seen so many adventures with the great God who swayed the thunder. This feud between the Goat and the Trolls comes out curiously in "The Old Dame and her Hen," p. 14, where a goat falls down the trapdoor to the Troll's house: "Who sent for you, I should like to know, you long-bearded beast? " said the Man o' the Hill, who was in an awful rage; and with that he whipped up the Goat, wrung his head off, and threw him down into the cellar." Still he belonged to one of the heathen gods, and so in later Middle-Age superstition he is assigned to the Devil, who even takes his shape when he presides at the "Witches' Sabbath.

Nor in this list must the little birds be forgotten which taught the man's daughter, in the tale of "The Two Stepsisters," p. 113, how to act in her trials. So, too, in "Katie Woodencloak," p. 357, the little bird tells the Prince, "who understood the song of birds very well," that blood is gushing out of the golden shoe. The belief that some persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said is primeval. We pay homage to it in our proverbial expression, "A little bird told me." Popular traditions and rhymes protect their nests, as in the case of the wren, the robin, and the swallow. Occasionally this gift seems