King Helgi, father of Hrólfr Kraki, in consequence of a lamentable misadventure, was living in a solitary way in a retired lodge. One stormy Yule-night there was a loud wail at the door, after he had gone to bed. Helgi bethought himself that it was unkingly of him to leave anything to suffer outside, and got up and unlocked the door. There he saw a poor tattered creature of a woman, hideously misshapen, filthy, starved, and frozen (A), who begged that she might come in. The king took her in, and bade her get under straw and bearskin to warm herself. She entreated him to let her come into his bed, and said that her life depended on his conceding this boon. "It is not what I wish," replied Helgi, "but if it is as thou sayest, lie here at the stock, in thy clothes, and it will do me no harm." She got into the bed, and the king turned to the wall. A light was burning, and after a while the king took a look over his shoulder; never had he seen a fairer woman than was lying there, and not in rags, but in a silk kirtle. The king turned towards her now, and she informed him that his kindness had freed her from a weird imposed by her stepmother, which she was to be subject to till some king had admitted her to his bed, A. She had asked this grace of many, but no one before had been moved to grant it.
Every point of the Norse saga, except the stepmother's weird, is found in the Gaelic tale 'Nighean Righ fo Thuinn,' 'The Daughter of King Under-waves,' Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands, No lxxxvi, III, 403 f.
The Finn were together one wild night, when there was rain and snow. An uncouth woman knocked at Fionn's door about midnight, and cried to him to let her in under cover. "Thou strange, ugly creature, with thy hair down to thy heels, how canst thou ask me to let thee in!" he answered. She went away, with a scream, and the whole scene was repeated with Oisean. Then she came to Diarmaid. "Thou art hideous," he said, "and thy hair is down to thy heels, but come in." When she had come in, she told Diarmaid that she had been travelling over ocean and sea for seven years, without being housed, till he had admitted her. She asked that she might come near the fire. "Come," said Diarmaid; but when she approached everybody retreated, because she was so hideous. She had not been long at the fire, when she wished to be under Diarmaid's blanket. "Thou art growing too bold," said he, "but come." She came under the blanket, and he turned a fold of it between them. "She was not long thus, when he gave a start, and he gazed at her, and he saw the finest drop of blood that ever was, from the beginning of the universe till the end of the world, at his side."
Mr Campbell has a fragment of a Gaelic ballad upon this story, vol. xvii., p. 212 of his manuscript collection, 'Collun gun Cheann,' or 'The Headless Trunk,' twenty-two lines. In this case, as the title imports, a body without a head replaces the hideous, dirty, and unkempt draggle-tail who begs shelter of the Finn successively and obtains her boon only from Diarmaid. See Campbell's Gaelic Ballads, p. ix.
The monstrous deformity of the woman is a trait in the ballad of '[The Marriage of Sir Gawain],' and related stories, and is described in these with revolting details. Her exaggerated appetite also is found in the romance of The Wedding of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, see p. 290. The occasion on which she exhibits it is there the wedding feast, and the scene consequently resembles, even more closely there than here, what we meet with in the Danish ballads of 'Greve Genselin,' Grundtvig, No 16, I, 222, and 'Tord af Havsgaard,' Grundtvig, No 1, I, 1, IV, 580 (== Kristensen, 'Thors Hammer,' I, 85, No 35) the latter founded on the þrymskviða, or Hamarsheimt, of the older Edda. In a Norwegian version of 'Greve Genselin,' Grundtvig, IV, 732, the feats of eating and drinking are performed not by the bride, but by an old woman who acts as bridesmaid, brúrekvinne.[293]
A maid who submits, at a linden-worm's entreaty, to lie in the same bed with him, finds a king's son by her side in the morning: Grundtvig, 'Lindormen,' No 65, B, C, II, 213, III, 839; Kristensen, I, 195, No 71; Afzelius, III, 121, No 88; Arwidsson, II, 270, No 139; Hazelius, Ur de nordiska Folkens Lif, p. 117, and p. 149. In 'Ode und de Slang',' Müllenhoff, Sagen u. s. w., p. 383, a maid, without much reluctance, lets a snake successively come into the house, into her chamber, and finally into her bed, upon which the snake changes immediately into a prince.
Scott's copy is translated by Schubart, p. 127, and by Gerhard, p. 129; Jamieson's, without the interpolations, after Aytoun, II, 22, by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 36.
1
Lat never a man a wooing wend
That lacketh thingis three;
A routh o gold, an open heart,
Ay fu o charity.
2
As this I speak of King Henry,
For he lay burd-alone;
An he's doen him to a jelly hunt's ha,
Was seven miles frae a town.
3
He chas'd the deer now him before,
An the roe down by the den,
Till the fattest buck in a' the flock
King Henry he has slain.