Hör du Plat,
Siig til din Kat,
At Knurremurre er död.
[186] The scene of this story is in Zealand. The same is related of a hill called Ornehöi in the same island. The writer has heard it in Ireland, but they were cats who addressed the man as he passed by the churchyard where they were assembled.
[187] This legend was orally related to Mr. Thiele.
[188] Hülpher, Samlingen om Jämtland. Westeras, 1775. p. 210 ap. Grimm, Deut. Mythol., p. 425.
[189] Ödmans Bahuslän, ap. Grimm. Deut. Mythol. p. 426. Ödman also tells of a man who, as he was going along one day with his dog, came on a hill-smith at his work, using a stone as an anvil. He had on him a light grey coat and a black woollen hat. The dog began to bark at him, but he put on so menacing an attitude that they both deemed it advisable to go away.
[190] Thiele, iv. 120. In both these legends we find the tradition of the artistic skill of the Duergar and of Völundr still retained by the peasantry: see Tales and Popular Fictions, p. 270.
[191] Thiele, iv. 21. In Otmar's Volksagen, there is a German legend of Peter Klaus, who slept a sleep of twenty years in the bowling green of the Kyffhäuser, from which Washington Irving made his Ripp van Winkle. We shall also find it in the Highlands of Scotland. It is the Irish legend of Clough na Cuddy, so extremely well told by Mr. C. Croker (to which, by the way, we contributed a Latin song), in the notes to which further information will be found. The Seven Sleepers seems to be the original.
[192] Oral. See the [Young Piper] and the Brewery of Egg-shells in the Irish Fairy Legends, with the notes. The same story is also to be found in Germany where the object is to make the changeling laugh. The mother breaks an egg in two and sets water down to boil in each half shell. The imp then cries out: "Well! I'm as old as the Westerwald, but never before saw I any one cooking in egg-shells," and burst out laughing at it. Instantly the true child was returned.—Kinder and Haus-Märchen, iii. 39. Grose also tells the story in his Provincial Glossary. The mother there breaks a dozen of eggs and sets the shells before the child, who says, "I was seven years old when I came to nurse, and I have lived four since, and yet I never saw so many milkpans." See also Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and below, [Wales], [Brittany], [France].
[193] This legend is taken from Resenn Atlas, i. 36.