In Iceland it is believed that at daybreak or upon the ringing of a bell the trolls flee.
10.
Fairy funerals, according to tradition, have been seen in other counties beside Lancashire, for an old Welsh writer alludes to such sights as having been witnessed in his day. Mr. Wirt Sikes, in his British Goblins, a recent and most valuable contribution to the folk lore and mythology of South Wales, says that the bell of Blaenporth, Cardiganshire, was noted for tolling thrice at midnight, unrung by human hands, to foretell death, and that when the 'Tolaeth before the burying,' the sound of an unseen funeral-procession passing by, is heard, the voices sing the 'Old Hundredth,' and the tramping of feet and the sobbing and groaning of mourners can be heard. In Normandy, says P. Le Fillastre, Annuaire de la Manche, 1832, the large white coffins, les bières, which the belated voyager sees along the roads, or placed on the churchyard fences, are unaccompanied by either bearers or mourners, and the cemetery bell is silent.
Readers of Professor Hunt's volumes of Cornish Drolls and Romances will remember the beautiful legend of the fisherman who, gazing by night through the window of a lonely church, saw a procession passing along the aisle, and witnessed the interment, near the sacramental table, of the fairy queen. The only point of resemblance, however, between the Southern and Northern traditions is to be found in the solemn tolling of the church-bell. The Cornish story is unique in one respect, inasmuch as, although we have plenty of legends in which the fairies evince a desire to peer into their future state, and even some in which their deaths are alluded to, it is extremely rare to find one in which the burial of a fairy is narrated; and this fact would seem to point to a defect in the 'Finn theory,' so plausibly advocated by Mr. Campbell; for, surely, if once upon a time 'the fairies were a real people, like the Lapps,' tradition would not be so silent, as it almost universally is, with reference to the outward and visible signs of their mortality.[C]
[C] Only since these notes were in type have I seen the excellent paper from the pen of Mr. Grant Allen (Cornhill Magazine, March 1881), on the Genesis of the Myth of the Fairies. See also the same charming writer's Vignettes from Nature, p. 206, and papers by B. Melle and F. A. Allen, in Science Gossip for 1866, 'The Track of the Pigmies.'
11.
My friend, Mr. W. E. A. Axon, in his interesting Black Knight of Ashton, tells a story of a 'Race with the Devil,' the hero of which was one of a party of pace-eggers, who, waking up after a doze by a farm-house fire, beside which the party had been permitted to sleep on a wild night, and, feeling cold, had put on his Beelzebub dress, to the terror of another member of the company, who awoke afterwards, and seeing, as he supposed, the Devil seated airing himself by the fire, fled into the darkness and the storm, his equally terrified companions following him, and the no-less-frightened Beelzebub bringing up the rear.
The Mid and South Lancashire stories, as will at once be seen, do not resemble each other in any way, however; and I refer to Mr. Axon's legend for the sake of directing my readers' attention to a valuable note appended to it, in which Mr. Axon points out that there is a similar old Hindoo story of such a chase, which was translated from the Sanscrit into Chinese not later than the year 800.
It seems hardly probable that the Lancashire pace-egging story, so exquisitely narrated by my friend, could have had an Aryan origin, yet the resemblance is a striking and remarkable one.