Now there are a great many other kinds of creatures in the Wonderland of all European countries; but I must not stop to tell you about them or we shall never have done. But there is one little story of the Danish Nis—who answers to the German Kobold—which I may tell you, because it is like the story of Hodeken which you have just read, and shows that the creatures were of the same kind. There was a Nis in Jutland who was very much teased by a mischievous boy. When the Nis had done his work he sat down to have his supper, and he found that the boy had been playing tricks with his porridge and made it unpleasant. So he made up his mind to be revenged, and he did it in this way. The boy slept with a servant-man in the loft. The Nis went up to them and took off the bed-clothes. Then, looking at the little boy lying beside the tall man, he said, "Long and short don't match," and he took the boy by the legs and pulled him down to the man's legs. This was not to his mind, however, so he went to the head of the bed and looked at them, Then said the Nis—"Short and long don't match," and he pulled the boy up again; and so he went on all through the night, up and down, down and up, till the boy was punished enough. Another Nis in Jutland went with a boy to steal corn for his master's horses. The Nis was moderate, but the boy was covetous, and said, "Oh, take more; we can rest now and then!" "Rest," said the Nis, "rest! what is rest?" "Do what I tell you," replied the boy; "take more, and we shall find rest when we get out of this." So they took more corn, and when they had got nearly home the boy said, "Here now is rest;" and so they sat down on a hill-side. "If I had known," said the Nis, as they were sitting there, "if I had known that rest was so good I'd have carried off all that was in the barn."
Now we must leave out much more that might be said, and many stories that might be told, about elves, and fairies, and nixes, or water spirits, and swan maidens who become women when they lay aside their swan dresses to bathe; and mermaids and seal maidens, who used to live in the islands of the North seas. And we must leave out also a number of curious Scotch tales and accounts of Welsh fairies, and stories about the good people of the Irish legends, and the Leprechaun, a little old man who mends shoes, and who gives you as much gold as you want if you hold him tight enough; and there are wonderful fairy legends of Brittany, and some of Spain and Italy, and a great many Russian and Slavonic tales which are well worth telling, if we only had room. For the same reason we must omit the fairy tales of ancient Greece, some of which are told so beautifully by Mr. Kingsley in his book about the Heroes; and we must also pass by the legends of King Arthur, and of romances of the same kind which you may read at length in Mr. Ludlow's "Popular Epics of the Middle Ages;" and the wonderful tales from the Norse which are told by Dr. Dasent, and in Mr. Morris's noble poem of "Sigurd the Volsung."
But before we leave this part of Wonderland we must say something about some kinds of beings who have not yet been mentioned—the Scandinavian Giants and Trolls, and the German Dwarfs. The Trolls—some of whom were Giants and some Dwarfs—were a very curious people. They lived inside hills or mounds of earth, sometimes alone, and sometimes in great numbers. Inside these hills, according to the stories of the common folk, are fine houses made of gold and crystal, full of gold and jewels, which the Trolls amuse themselves by counting. They marry and have families; they bake and brew, and live just like human beings; and they do not object, sometimes, to come out and talk to men and women whom they happen to meet on the road. They are described as being friendly, and quite ready to help those to whom they take a fancy—lending them useful or precious things out of the hill treasures, and giving them rich gifts. But, to balance this, they are very mischievous and thievish, and sometimes they carry off women and children. They dislike noise. This, so the old stories say, is because the god Thor used to fling his hammer at them; and since he left off doing that the Trolls have suffered a great deal from the ringing of church bells, which they very much dislike. There are many stories about this. At a place called Ebeltoft the Trolls used to come and steal food out of the pantries. The people consulted a Saint as to what they were to do, and he told them to hang up a bell in the church steeple, which they did, and then the Trolls went away. There is another story of the same kind. A Troll lived near the town of Kund, in Sweden, but was driven away by the church bells. Then he went over to the island of Funen and lived in peace. But he meant to be revenged on the people of Kund, and he tried to take his revenge in this way: He met a man from Kund—a stranger, who did not know him—and asked the man to take a letter into the town and to throw it into the churchyard, but he was not to take it out of his pocket until he got there. The man received the letter, but forgot the message, until he sat down in a meadow to rest, and then he took out the letter to look at it. When he did so, a drop of water fell from under the seal, then a little stream, and then quite a torrent, till all the valley was flooded, and the man had hard work to escape. The Troll had shut up a lake in the letter, and with this he meant to drown the people of Kund.
Some of the Trolls are very stupid, and there are many stories as to how they have been outwitted. One of them is very droll. A farmer ploughed a hill-side field. Out came a Troll and said, "What do you mean by ploughing up the roof of my house?" Then the farmer, being frightened, begged his pardon, but said it was a pity such a fine piece of land should lie idle. The Troll agreed to this, and then they struck a bargain that the farmer should till the land and that each of them should share the crops. One year the Troll was to have, for his share, what grew above ground, and the next year what grew underground. So in the first year the farmer sowed carrots, and the Troll had the tops; and the next year the farmer sowed wheat, and the Troll had the roots; and the story says he was very well content.
We can give only one more story of the Trolls. They have power over human beings until their names are found out, and when the Troll's name is mentioned his power goes from him. One day St. Olaf, a very great Saint, was thinking how he could build a very large church without any money, and he didn't quite see his way to it. Then a Giant Troll met him and they chatted together, and St. Olaf mentioned his difficulty. So the Troll said he would build the church, within a year, on condition that if it was done in the time he should have for his reward the sun, and the moon, or St. Olaf himself. The church was to be so big that seven priests could say mass at seven altars in it without hearing each other; and it was all to be built of flint stone and to be richly carved. When the time was nearly up the church was finished, all but the top of the spire; and St. Olaf was in sad trouble about his promise. So he walked out into a wood to think, and there he heard the Troll's wife hushing her child inside a hill, and saying to it, "To-morrow, Wind and Weather, your father, will come home in the morning, and bring with him the sun and the moon, or St. Olaf himself." Then St. Olaf knew what to do. He went home, and there was the church, all ready except the very top of the weather-cock, and the Troll was just putting the finishing-touch to that. Then St. Olaf called out to him, "Oh! ho! Wind and Weather, you have set the spire crooked!" And then, with a great noise, the Troll fell down from the steeple and broke into pieces, and every piece was a flint-stone.
The same thing is told in the German story of Rumpelstiltskin. A maiden is ordered by a King to spin a roomful of straw into gold, or else she is to die. A Dwarf appears, she promises him her necklace, and he does the task for her. Next day she has to spin a larger roomful of straw into gold. She gives the Dwarf the ring off her finger, and he does this task also. Next day she is set to work at a larger room, and then, when the Dwarf comes, she has nothing to give him. Then he says, "If you become Queen, give me your first-born child." Now the girl is only a miller's daughter, and thinks she never can be Queen, so she makes the promise, and the Dwarf spins the straw into gold. But she does become Queen, for the King marries her because of the gold; and she forgets the Dwarf, and is very happy, especially when her little baby comes. Directly it is born the Dwarf appears also, and claims the child, because it was promised to him. The Queen offers him anything he likes besides; but he will have that, and that only. Then she cries and prays, and the Dwarf says that if she can tell him his name she may keep the baby; and he feels quite safe in saying this, because nobody knows his name, only himself. So the Queen calls him by all kinds of strange names, but none of them is the right one. Then she begs for three days to find out the name, and sends people everywhere to see if they can hear it. But all of them come back, unable to find any name that is likely, excepting one, who says, "I have not found a name, but as I came to a high mountain near the edge of a forest, where the foxes and the hares say 'good-night' to each other, I saw a little house, and before the door a fire was burning, and round the fire a little man was dancing on one leg, and singing:—
"To-day I stew, and then I'll bake,
To-morrow shall I the Queen's child take.
How glad I am that nobody knows
That my name is Rumpelstiltskin."
Then the Dwarf came again, and the Queen said to him, "Is your name Hans?" "No," said the Dwarf, with an ugly leer, and he held out his hands for the baby. "Is it Conrade?" asked the Queen. "No," cried the Dwarf, "give me the child." "Then," said the Queen, "is it Rumpelstiltskin?" "A witch has told you that!" cried the Dwarf; and then he stamped his right foot so hard upon the ground that it sank quite in, and he could not draw it out again. Then he took hold of his left leg with both his hands and pulled so hard that his right leg came off, and he hopped away howling, and nobody ever saw him again.
The Giant in the story of St. Olaf, as we have seen, was a rather stupid giant, and easily tricked; and indeed most of the giants seem to have been dull people, from the great Greek Kyklops, Polyphemos the One-Eyed, downwards to the ogres in Puss in Boots, and Jack and the Bean Stalk, and the giants in Jack the Giant Killer. The old northern giants were no wiser. There was one in the island of Rugen, a very mighty giant, named Balderich. He wanted to go from his island, dry-footed, to the mainland. So he got a great apron made, and filled it with earth, and set off to make a causeway from Rugen to Pomerania. But there was a hole in the apron, and the clay that fell out formed a chain of nine hills. The giant stopped the hole and went on, but another hole tore in the apron, and thirteen more hills fell out. Then he got to the sea-side, and poured the rest of the load into the water; but it didn't quite reach the mainland, which made giant Balderich so angry that he fell down and died; and so his work has never been finished. But a giant maiden thought she would try to make another causeway from the mainland to an island, so that she might not wet her slippers in going over. So she filled her apron with sand, and ran down to the sea-side. But a hole came in the apron, and the sand which ran out formed a hill at Sagard. The giant maiden said, "Ah! now my mother will scold me!" Then she stopped the hole with her hand and ran on again. But the giant mother looked over the wood, and cried, "You nasty child! what are you about? Come here, and you'll get a good whipping." The daughter in a fright let go her apron, and all the sand ran out, and made the barren hills near Litzow, which the white and brown dwarfs took for their dwelling-place.
There are many other stories of the same kind. One of them tells of a Troll Giant who wanted to punish a farmer; so he filled one of his gloves with sand, and poured it out over the farmer's house, which it quite covered up; and with what was left in the fingers he made a row of little sand hillocks to mark the spot.