Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/162

 clvi as "The Mastermaid," p. 71, "The Blue Belt," p. 155, "Farmer Weathersky," p. 285, a sort of settled malignity against man appears as the direct working and result of a bad and evil spirit. In "Buttercup," p. 124, and "The Cat on the Dovrefell," we have the Troll proper,—the supernatural dwellers of the woods and hills, who go to church, and eat men, and porridge, and sausages indifferently, not from malignity, but because they know no better, because it is their nature, and because they have always done so. In one point they all agree: in their place of abode. The wild pine forest that clothes the spurs of the fells, but more than all, the interior recesses of the rocky fell itself, is where the Trolls live. Thither they carry off the children of men, and to them belongs all the untold riches of the mineral world. There, in caves and clefts in the steep face of the rock, sits the. Troll, as the representative of the old giants, among heaps of gold and silver and precious things. They stride off into the dark forest by day, whither no rays of the sun can pierce; they return home at nightfall, feast themselves full, and snore out the night. One thing was fatal to them: the sight of the sun. If they looked him full in the face, his glory was too great for them, and they burst, as in "Lord Peter," p. 295, and in "The Old Dame and her Hen," p. 14. This, too, is a deeply mythic trait. The old religion of the North was a bright and lively faith; it lived in the light of joy and gladness; its gods were the "blithe powers"; opposed to them were the dark powers of mist and gloom, who could not bear the glorious face of the Sun, of Baldr's beaming visage, or the bright flash of Thor's levin bolt.