Popular Tales from the Norse

by Unknown

Vaitsi, Vaitsi, O sulli Van.
Stay for us, stay for us, how long will you stay for us?

Then the driver sent another and another, till he had sent the whole gang.

At last he went himself, and when he found the whole gang dancing, he too began to dance; and they all danced till night, when the cray-fish went back into the water; and if they haven’t done dancing, they are dancing still.

FOOTNOTES TO INTRODUCTION

[1] How strange is the terror of Natural Science, which seems to possess, with a religious possession, so many good and pious people! How rigidly do they bind themselves hand and foot with the mere letter of the law, forgetting Him who came to teach us, that “the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life!” What are we to say of those who, when the old crust which clogs and hampers human knowledge is cracking and breaking all around them, when the shell is too narrow an abode for the life within it, which is preparing to cast it off, still cling to the crust and shell, looking, like the disciples by the sepulchre, at the linen clothes lying, and know not that He has risen in glory? These are they who obstinately refuse to believe in the “Testimony of the Rocks”, who deny Geology the thousands, nay millions, of years which she requires to make her deposits in Nature’s great saving-bank. These are they for whom the Nile, as he brings down year by year his tribute to the sea from Central Africa, lays down in vain layer after layer of alluvial deposit, which can be measured to an inch for tens of thousands of years. These are they to whom the comparatively younger growth of trees, the dragon tree of Orotava, and the cedars of California, plead in vain when they show, year after year, ring on ring of wood for thousands of years. “No; the world is only five or six thousands of years old, or thereabouts. The Old Testament”—the dates in which have been confessedly tampered with, and in some cases forged and fabricated by Hebrew scribes—“says so. We believe in it—we will believe in nothing else, not even in our senses. We will believe literally in the first chapter of Genesis, in working days and nights of twenty-four hours, even before the sun and moon were made, on the fourth day, ‘to divide the day from the night’, and to be ‘for signs and for seasons, and for days and years’. We will not hear of ages or periods, but ‘days’, because the ‘letter’ says so”. This is what our Western Brahmins say; but if they remembered that He who set sun and moon also planted the eye and ear, that he gave sense, and speech, and mind; if they considered that faith is a lively thing, elastic and expansive; that it embraces a thousand or a million years as easily as a moment of time; that bonds cannot fetter it, nor distance darken and dismay it; that it is given to man to grow with his growth and strengthen with his strength; that it rises at doubts and difficulties, and surmounts them; they would cease to condemn all the world to wear their own strait-waistcoat, cut and sewn by rabbis and doctors some thousand years ago; a garment which the human intellect has altogether outgrown, which it is ridiculous to wear, which careless and impious men laugh at when it is seen in the streets; and might begin to see that spirit is spirit, and flesh is flesh; that while one lives for ever, the other is corruptible and passes away; that there are developments in faith as in every thing else; that as man’s intellect and human knowledge have grown and expanded, so his faith must grow and expand too; that it really matters nothing at all, as an act of faith, whether the world is six thousand or six million years old; that it must have had a beginning; that there must be one great first cause, God. Surely there is no better way to bring His goodness into question, to throw doubt on His revelation, and to make it the laughing stock of the irreligious, than thus to clip the wings of faith, to throw her into a dungeon, to keep her from the light of day, to make her read through. Hebrew spectacles, and to force her to be a laggard and dullard, instead of a bright and volatile spirit, forward and foremost in the race of life.

[2] But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest”—SHAKESPEARE, Dedication to Venus and Adonis.

[3] As a specimen of their thoughtful turn of mind, even in the Vedas, at a time before the monstrous avatars of the Hindoo Pantheon were imagined, and when their system of philosophy, properly so called, had no existence, the following metrical translation of the 129th hymn of the 10th book of the Rig-Veda may be quoted, which Professor Müller assures us is of a very early date:

Nor aught nor naught existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor Heaven’s broad woof outstretched above.
What covered all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the water’s fathomless abyss?
There was not death—yet was there nought immortal.
There was no confine betwixt day and night;
The only One breathed breathless by itself,
Other than It there nothing since has been.
Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom profound—an ocean without light—
The germ that still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
Then first came love upon it, the new spring
Of mind—yea, poets in their hearts discerned,
Pondering, this bond between created things
And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth,
Piercing and all pervading, or from Heaven?
Then seeds were sown, and mighty powers arose—
Nature below, and power and will above—
Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here,
Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
The Gods themselves came later into being—
Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
He from whom all this great creation came,
Whether His will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it—or perchance even he knows not.

If we reflect that this hymn was composed centuries before the time of Hesiod, we shall be better able to appreciate the speculative character of the Indian mind in its earliest stage.

[4] “A Brahmin, who had vowed a sacrifice, went to the market to buy a goat. Three thieves saw him, and wanted to get hold of the goat. They stationed themselves at intervals on the high road. When the Brahmin, who carried the goat on his back, approached the first thief, the thief said, ‘Brahmin, why do you carry a dog on your back?’ The Brahmin replied: ‘It is not a dog, it is a goat.’ A little while after, he was accosted by the second thief, who said, ‘Brahmin, why do you carry a dog on your back?’ The Brahmin felt perplexed, put the goat down, examined it, and walked on. Soon after he was stopped by the third thief, who said, ‘Brahmin, why do you carry a dog on your back?’ Then the Brahmin was frightened, threw down the goat, and walked home to perform his ablutions for having touched an unclean animal. The thieves took the goat and ate it.” See the notice of the Norse Tales in The Saturday Review, January 15. In Max Müller’s translation of the Hitopadesa, the story has a different ending. See also Le Piacevoli Notti, di M. Giovan Francesco Straparola da Caravaggio (Venice, 1567), Notte Prima, Favola III: “Pre Scarpacifico da tre malandrini una sol volta gabbato, tre fiate gabba loro, finalmente vittorioso con la sua Nina lietamente rimane”. In which tale the beginning is a parallel to the first part of “The Master Thief”, while the end answers exactly to the Norse tale added in this edition, and called Big Peter and Little Peter.”