There was the Norse goddess, Freya, which, like the Dragon of Wantley, and the Caliban of the “still vexed Bermoothes,” blasted the fair face of nature, and far eclipsed the giant-serpent off Cape Saint Anne, or the kraken of Norway; and even that monstrous sea-snake, the jormungandz (so conspicuous among the wild romances of the Edda), whose coils entwined the globe. Thor angled for this snake with a bull’s head, but it was not to be caught, being reserved for some splendid achievement in the grand conflict which is to herald the Ragnarockr,—the twilight of the gods.
Among the mountains of our own island we have a profuse legion. In Wales, the Tylwth Tag and the Pooka; and many a hollow in the mountain where these strange animals resort, is called Cwm Pooka; and the wondrous cavern of the Meltè, in Breconshire, was believed to be haunted by this little pony.
In Ireland, they have a Merrow, the Runic sea, or oigh-maid; the Banshee, or fairy prophet; the Fear-Dearg, the Irish Puck; the Clurricane, a sottish pigmy; and the Pooke, the wild pony.
Cast. These must have been a prolific as well as a wandering brood, for I also have seen many caverns in the rocky districts, called Poola Phouka, in which these mischievous little creatures concealed themselves.
Astr. In Man there is a hill called the “Fairy Hill,” a tumulus of the Danes, which is thought to be a nocturnal revel-place for the Man fairies which preside over their fisheries.
Scotland was a fertile mother of monsters: the Ourisks or Uriskin, the goblin-satyrs or shaggy men; the Brownies; the Kelpies, or river-demons; the Bargheists; the Red-cap; the Daoine Shi, or Men of Peace; the Glaslic, or noontide hag, which haunted the district of Knoidart; and the Lham-Dearg, or red-hand, in the forests of Glenmore, and Rothiemurchus; the Bodach-Glas; and the Pixies, or small grey men.
Cast. There is an islet among the Scottish Hebrides, which is called the Isle of Pigmies; and I remember a chapel there, in which very minute human bones were some time ago discovered. Think you, Astrophel, that these were the skeletons of pixies?
Astr. I cannot think the notion irrational; there are dwarfs and giants even in our days. The Bosgis-men of the Cape, and the Patagonians of South America, prove the existence of beings of another stature; and perchance of another nature, in days long agone. The Laplander and Bushman of the Cape are little more than three feet high; and that there were giants too, is proved by the fossil bones which have been found in the strata of our earth.
Cast. Then we have really dwindled in our growth, and Adam was really a hundred and twenty-three feet nine inches high, and Eve a hundred and eighteen feet nine inches and three quarters, as we are solemnly informed by our profane chronicles? Nay, even the story may be true of the Pict, who bit off the end of the mattock, with which some slave of science was opening his coffin, and thundered forth this exclamation: “I see the degeneracy of your race by the smallness of your little finger.”
Ida. If Evelyn were here, he would ask why we have no skeletons of giants as of lizards in our secondary rocks; and he would tell this learned Theban, Castaly, that Cuvier decided these fossils, which seemed to be the débris of a giant race, to be the bones of elephants. The legends of Athenæus are probably a fable, and the fossils of the pigmies were, I dare say, the petrified skeletons of “span-long, wee unchristen’d bairns.”