Such authority as this was likely to be followed with zeal; once open, the career of unbridled fancy was sure to find no limit; the more sure, since then, as now, the fears and miseries of the mass were sources of profit to the few. Then, as now, there were rogues found who dared to step between man and God, to clothe themselves in the coat without seam, to make themselves the mediators between eternal mercy and the perishing sinner. Accordingly in later times we find variation upon variation in the outline already so vigorously sketched; William of Malmesbury furnishes an ample field for collectors of this kind of literature. I shall content myself here with citing from the so often quoted Salomon and Saturn two passages, which to me are redolent of heathendom, disguised after the fashion which has been described.
| Mæg simle se Godes cwide gumena gehwylcum, ealra feónda gehwone fleónde gebringan, ðurh mannes múð, mánfulra heáp sweartne geswencan; næfre híe ðæs syllíce bleóum bregdað æfter báncofan, feðerhoman onfóð. Hwílum flótan grípað, hwílum híe gewendað on wyrmes líc scearpes and sticoles, stingað nýten feldgongende, feoh gestrúdað; hwílum híe on wætere wicg gehnǽgað, hornum geheáwað oððæt him heortan blód, fámig flódes bæð, foldan geséceð. Hwílum híe gefeterað fǽges monnes handa, gehefegað ðonne he æt hilde sceall wið láðwerud lifes tiligan: áwrítað híe on his wæpne wælnóta heáp. | Ever may the God’s word[[718]] for every man, every fiend put to flight, through mouth of man, the troop of evil ones, the black troop, oppress; let them never so strangely change their colours in their body, or assume plumage. Sometimes they seize the sailor, sometimes they turn into the body of a snake sharp and piercing, they sting the neat going about the fields, the cattle they destroy; sometimes in the water they bow the horse, with horns they hew him until his heart’s blood, a foaming bath of flood, falls to the earth. Sometimes they fetter the hands of the doomed, they make them heavy when he is called upon in war, against a hostile troop to provide for his life: they write upon his weapon a fatal heap of marks[[719]]. |
Again we are told, in the same composition: “And when the devil is very weary he seeketh the cattle of some sinful man, or an unclean tree; or if he meeteth the mouth and body of a man that hath not been blessed with the sign of the cross, then goeth he into the bowels of the man who hath so forgotten, and through his skin and through his flesh departeth into the earth, and from thence findeth his way into the desert of hell[[720]].”
NICOR.—To the class of elemental gods must originally have been reckoned the Nicor, or water-spirit, whose name has not only been retained in the Water Nixes of our own country, and in the Neck of Germany, but in our own common name for the devil, Old Nick. According to the account given in Beówulf, these were supernatural, elvish creatures haunting the lakes, rivers and seas, ever on the watch to injure the wayfarer, and apparently endowed with the power of creating tempests. In this semi-Christian view they were fiendish and savage enemies of the sailor, whom they pursued with horns and tusks, dragged to the bottom of the waves and then no doubt devoured[[721]]. Probably, like other supernatural beings dreaded by our forefathers, they were included in the family of ogres and monsters descended from the first homicide. Yet it may be doubted whether this, was the original and heathen sense of the word Nicor. As late as the thirteenth century I find in an old German glossary Neckar translated by Neptunus, the god of the sea; and it is notorious that one of the names borne by Oþinn, whenever he appears as a sea-god is Hnikuþr and Nikuz. Hence it is not unlikely that in their ancient creed, the pagan Saxons recognized Nicor as Wóden. The name Hwala which occurs in the genealogies, and like Geát may be assumed to be only another name of Wóden, confirms this view. Hwala is formed from Hwæl, cetus, just as Scyldwa is from Scyld, clypeus, and was probably only a name of Wóden as a sea-god. The danger attending the whale or walrus fishery[[722]] made the first at least of these animals an object of superstitious dread to the Anglosaxon sailor; perhaps, as in the case of the bear, natural peculiarities which are striking enough even to our more scientific eyes, helped to give an exceptional character to the monarch of the Northern seas. Be this as it may, it is not without importance that Hwala should appear in the genealogies among names many of which are indisputably Wóden’s, that in Scandinavia and Germany Nikuz or Necker should be names of the sea-god, and that till a very late period,—when the heathen gods had everywhere assumed the garb of fiends and devils,—the Nicor should appear as the monster of the deep par excellence. The miraculous power attributed to the Nicor,—in Beówulf he is called “wundorlíc wǽgbora,” a supernatural bringer of the waves,—is in itself evidence of earlier godhead; and in this sense I am disposed to identify him with the demon marinus whom St. Gall defeated by his constant watchfulness. In his altered and degraded form we may also recognize the demon of the lines lately cited, who stabs the horse with his horns while crossing the water. The beautiful Nix or Nixie who allures the young fisher or hunter to seek her embraces in the wave which brings his death, the Neck who seizes upon and drowns the maidens who sport upon his banks, the river-spirit who still yearly in some parts of Germany demands tribute of human life, are all forms of the ancient Nicor; but more genuine perhaps,—certainly more pleasing,—is the Swedish Stromkarl, who from the jewelled bed of his river, watches with delight the children gambol in the adjoining meadows, and singing sweetly to them in the evening, detaches from his hoary hair the sweet blossoms of the water-lily, which he wafts over the surface to their hands.
HEL.—Among the fearful beings whose power was dreaded even by the gods, was Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless under-world. Called, through the fate of battle, to the glories of Wælheal, the Teutonic or Norse hero trembled at a peaceful death which would consign him to a dwelling more desolate and wretched than even that which awaited the fallen warriors of heroic Greece[[723]], and many a legend tells of those whose own hand saved them from a futurity so abhorred[[724]]. But Hel was not herself the agent of death; she only received those who had not earned their seat in Oþinn’s hall by a heroic fall, and the Wælcyrian or Shieldmays were the choosers of the slain. The realm of Hel was all that Wælheal was not,—cold, cheerless, shadowy; no simulated war was there, from which the combatants desisted with renovated strength and glory; no capacious quaighs of mead, or cups of the life-giving wine; no feast continually enjoyed and miraculously reproduced; no songs nor narratives of noble deeds; no expectation of the last great battle where the einherjar were to accompany Allfather to meet his gigantic antagonists; no flashing Shieldmays animating the brave with their discourse, and lightening the hall with their splendour: but chill and ice, frost and darkness; shadowy realms without a sun, without song or wine or feast, or the soul-inspiring company of heroes, glorying in the great deeds of their worldly life.
For the perjurer and the secret murderer Nástrond existed, a place of torment and punishment—the strand of the dead—filled with foulness, peopled with poisonous serpents, dark, cold, and gloomy: the kingdom of Hel was Hades, the invisible, the world of shadows[[725]]: Nástrond was what we call Hell. Christianity however admitted no goddess of death, and when it was thought necessary to express the idea of a place of punishment after death, the Anglosaxon united the realm of Hel with Nástrond to complete a hideous prison for the guilty: the prevailing idea in the infernal regions of the Teuton is cold and gloom[[726]]; the poisonous snakes, which waking or sleeping seem ever to have haunted the Anglosaxon, formed a convenient point of junction between his own traditional hell and that which he heard of from the pulpit, in quotations from the works of the Fathers; and to these and their influence alone can it be attributed when we find flames and sulphur, and all the hideous apparatus of Judaic tradition, adopted by him. In this fact seems to me to lie a very important mark of ancient heathendom, and one which the clergy themselves admitted, a belief in which they shared, and which they did not scruple to impress upon their flocks, even in spite of the contrary tendency of their authorities: it will be sufficient to refer to the description given of hell in the poetic Salomon and Saturn, a composition redolent of heathendom: on the defeat of the rebel angels, it is said, God
| him helle gescóp, wælcealde wíc, wintre beðeahte: wæter insende and wyrmgeardas, atol deór monig írenum hornum; blódige earnas and bláce nædran; þirst and hungor and þearle gewin, eácne egesan, unrótnisse. | for them he made hell, a dwelling deadly cold, with winter covered: water he sent in and snake-dwellings, many a foul beast with horns of iron; bloody eagles and pale adders; thirst and hunger and fierce conflict, mighty terror, joylessness[[727]]. |
Even in their more orthodox descriptions, ecclesiastical poets, though naturally adopting the Judaic notions, cannot always shake off the old, habitual tradition of their forefathers, but recur to the frost, gloom and serpents of Nástrond, and the realm of Hel; of which a passage already quoted from Beda is ample evidence.
As far as we can judge from the descriptions which survive, the Anglosaxons represented Hell to themselves as a close and covered dwelling, a prison duly secured as earthly prisons are by locks, bolts and bars[[728]]. But the popular fancy had probably even then adopted the notion of a monstrous beast whose mouth was the entrance to the place of torment: this appears not only from the illustrations to Cædmon[[729]], but from the common expression, so long current, of Hell-mouth. From this peculiar feature however we may believe that a remembrance still lurked among our forefathers of the gigantic or Titanic character of the ancient goddess, who, in Norse mythology, was Loki’s daughter. In nearly every case, the word Hel in Anglosaxon, and especially Anglosaxon prose, has merely the abstract sense we now give it; but here and there a passage may be found in which we discover traces of the personal meaning: thus perhaps in Beówulf where we find these lines,
| siððan dreámaleás in fenfreoðo feorh álegde, hǽðene sáwle, ðǽr him Hel onfeng. | when reft of joy in his fen-refuge he his life laid down, his heathen soul, there Hel received him[[730]]. |