Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/78

 lxxii fight for their inheritance—a club which turns everything to stone, a hat which makes the wearer invisible, and a cloak by help of which one can wish one's-self whithersoever one pleases. Again, in a Mongolian tale, the Chan's son comes upon a group of children who fight for a hood which makes the wearer invisible; he is to be judge between them, makes them run a race for it, but meanwhile puts it on and vanishes from their sight. A little further on he meets another group, who are quarrelling for a pair of boots, the wearer of which can wish himself whithersoever he pleases, and gains possession of them in the same way.

Nor in one Norse tale alone, but in many, we find traces of these three wonderful things, or of things like them. They are very like the cloth, the ram, and the stick, which the lad got from the North Wind instead of his meal. Very like, too, the cloth, the scissors, and the tap, which will be found in p. 252, "The Best Wish." If we drop the number three, we find the Boots again in "Soria Moria Castle," p. 396. Leaving the Norse Tales, we see at once that they are the seven-league boots of Jack the Giant Killer. In the Nibelungen Lied, when Siegfried finds Schilbung and Niblung, the weird heirs of the famous "Hoard," striving for the possession of that heap of red gold and gleaming stones; when they beg him to share it for them, promising him, as his meed, Balrnimg, best of swords; when he shares it, when they are discontent, and when in the struggle which ensues he gets possession of the tarnhut, the "cloak of darkness," which gave its