“Then the hangman said, ‘Hast thee done thy prayers? Now, lass, put thy head into t’ noose.’
“But she answered, ‘Stop, stop, I think I see my brother coming,’ etc. After which she excused herself because she thought she saw her sister coming, and her uncle, then her aunt, then her cousin, each of which was related in full; after which the hangman said, ‘I wee-nt stop no longer, tha’s making gam o’ me.’ But now she saw her sweetheart coming through the crowd, and he held overhead i’ t’ air her own golden ball; so she said—
‘Stop, stop, I see my sweetheart coming!
Sweetheart, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?’
‘Ay, I have brought thy golden ball
And come to set thee free;
I have not come to see thee hung
Upon this gallows tree.’”
In this very curious story, the portion within brackets reminds one of the German story of “Fearless John,” in Grimm (K. M. 4), of which I remember obtaining an English variant in a chap-book in Exeter when I was a child—alas! now lost. It is also found in Iceland,[26] and is indeed a widely-spread tale. The verses are like others found in Essex in connection with the child’s game of “Mary Brown,” and those of the Swedish “Fair Gundela.” But these points we must pass over. Our interest attaches specially to the golden ball. The story is almost certainly the remains of an old religious myth. The golden ball which one sister has is the sun, the silver ball of the other sister is the moon. The sun is lost; it sets, and the trolls, the spirits of darkness, play with it under the bed, that is, in the house of night, beneath the earth.
But the sun is not only a golden ball, but it is also a shining stone; and here at the outset we tell our secret: the sun is the true Philosopher’s Stone, that turns all to gold, that gives health, that fills with joy.
In primeval times, our rude forefathers were puzzled how to explain the nature of sun and moon and stars, and they thought they had hit on the interpretation of the phenomenon when they said that the stars were diamonds stuck in the heavenly vault, and that the sun was a luminous stone, a carbuncle; and the moon a pearl or silver disk. Even the classic writers had not shaken off this notion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus, all speak of the sun as a glowing stone,[27] and Orpheus[28] calls the opal the sunstone, because of its analogy to that shining ball. So Pliny also.[29] The old Norse spoke of the stars as the “gemstones of heaven,” so did the Anglo-Saxons.[30]
But perhaps the clearest idea we can have of the old cosmogony is from the pictures preserved to us of the world of the dwarfs. When a superior conception of the universe was general, then the old heathen idea sank, and what had been told of the world of men was referred to the underground world, peopled by the dwarfs, who were the representatives of the early race conquered by the Britons, and by Norse and Teuton, a race probably of Turanian origin. Our British and Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian forefathers knew of the cosmogony of the conquered race, and came to suppose that they inhabited another world to them, a world of which the vault that overarched it was set with precious stones; and as the aboriginal inhabitants were driven to live in caves, or in huts heaped over with turf so as to be like mounds, they regarded them as a subterranean people, and their world to be underground. In a multitude of stories the trolls or dwarfs are said to live in tumuli or cairns. This is nothing more than that their hovels were made of sticks stuck in the ground, gathered together in the middle and turfed over. The Lapp hut, even the Icelandic farmhouse, look like grass mounds. In many tales we hear of human children carried off by the dwarfs, and when these children are recovered they tell of a world in which they have been where the light is given by diamonds and a great carbuncle set in a stony black vault.
William of Newburgh[31] says that at Woolpit (Wolf-pits), near Stowmarket in Suffolk, were some very ancient trenches. Out of these trenches there once came, in harvest-time, two children, a boy and a girl, whose bodies were of a green colour, and who wore dresses of some unknown stuff. They were caught and taken to the village, where for many months they would eat nothing but beans. They gradually lost their green colour. The boy soon died. The girl survived, and was married to a man of Lynn. At first they could speak no English; but when they were able to do so they said that they belonged to the land of St. Martin, an unknown country, where, as they were once watching their father’s sheep, they heard a loud noise, like the ringing of the bells of St. Edmund’s Monastery. And then, all at once, they found themselves among the reapers at Woolpit. Their country was a Christian land and had churches. There was no sun there, only a faint twilight; but beyond a broad river there lay a land of light. Giraldus Cambrensis in his Itinerary of Wales tells another queer story of the underground world, and notices that some of the words used in it are closely related to the British tongue.[32] But in neither story are the sun and stars spoken of as stones incrusting the vault.
The underground Rose-garden of Laurin the Dwarf, by Botzen, is, however, illumined by one great carbuncle.[33] The same sun-stone—a white, marvellous stone—reappears in the “Grail Story,” which is from beginning to end a Christianised Keltic myth. In it the Grail is originally not invariably a basin or goblet, but a stone. It is so in Wolfran von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In that there is no thought of it as a chalice: it is a stone which feeds and delights all who surround, cherish, and venerate it.
Whatsoever the earth produces, whatsoever exhales,
Whatever is good, and sweet, in drink and meat,
That yields the precious stone, that never fails.