Myths of the Rhine

by X.-B. Saintine

The city of Utgard is of incredible size, the city walls, the houses, the trees, the furniture, all are gigantic. Our travellers could easily pass between the legs of the little children they met in the streets, as we modern people pass under the triumphal arches of the ancients. You see, now we are no longer in Lilliput, we have reached the island of the giants with Gulliver. Gulliver might very well be the offspring of some Scandinavian legend.

The king received Thor and, his friends, laughing heartily at their small size, and the seats they are offered are three times as high as they are. After a host of adventures in which our men, that is to say, our gods, are continually victimized, Thor in his rage challenges the giants to single combat. The king accepts the challenge and offers to back his nurse, a toothless old woman, against the god. Thor consents, eager as he is to vent his wrath on somebody, and determines to pitch His Majesty’s nurse out of the window. But by all his efforts he hardly succeeds in lifting her slightly off the ground, and he himself, exhausted by the struggle, sinks on his knees.

On the next day our travellers came to the conclusion that they had travelled far enough. Skrymner again showed the way, with his usual courtesy, and when they were well out of the town he took the god Thor aside and said to him: “So far you have only known my name and nothing of myself, now you ought to know that I am Skrym-ner, the wizard. You ought, therefore, not to mind anything that has happened to you during these last days. You thought you were striking me three times with your hammer, but in reality you were striking the impenetrable rocks, on which I was apparently sleeping. As to the nurse, you have given proof there of such strength as I should not even have expected from the great Thor, when you lifted her from the ground; for the toothless old woman is none other but Death, yes Death, whom I had compelled to come and take part in our games. The rest was all enchantment, mere delusions! I wanted to see if the power of the art of Magic was equal to that of the gods. Farewell, Asa-Thor, and a pleasant journey to you.”

More enraged than ever, Asa-Thor was about to throw himself upon him; but the pretended giant had fled in the shape of a bird. Then Thor turned back towards the city of Utgard, determined to destroy it utterly, but before his eyes it dissolved into a column of smoke.

Well, I promised you some of Mother Goose’s stories—have I kept word? And do not imagine that this story of Thor and the giants’ city is of doubtful origin—you will find it in chapters 23, 24, 25, and 26 of the sacred book called Edda.

Of magicians and wizards I could say much, but the road is long and I am in haste to reach the end. And who does not know the story of the prowess of Merlin and of the Maugis?

In all the ancient traditions of the North there are found innumerable tales of wizards, witchcraft, and ghosts. Now rocks are changed into palaces, and now brutes into men and men into brutes; and the same fantastic but always epic element prevails largely in all the old romances of chivalry as well as in the great poems of Ariosto and Tasso. In almost all countries we find that epic poetry is closely allied to religious sentiments and through these to the marvelous; for it has always found a first home in temples and a first use for temples. Thus it was in India with the Mahabarata, and in Greece with the myths of Hercules and of Orpheus. It could not be otherwise with the Gallic or German bards, nor with the Scandinavian skalds, all of whose grand poems are most unfortunately unknown at present.

But a feature more peculiarly German than the wizards, are the bewitched, often called the Sleepers. In these Germany incorporates, as it were, the loftiest of her patriotic aspirations, the saddest of her disappointments, the most persistent of her hopes. They represent not only her old faith, that could never be completely eradicated, but also her old favorites, a Hermann and a Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen, a Theodoric and a Charlemagne, a Witikind and a Frederick Barbarossa, a William Tell and a Charles V. Her heroes, her beloved, her glory—she has not allowed them to fall into oblivion and be severed from the present; she will not admit that they are dead, they are but asleep. Witikind under the Siegberg in Westphalia, Charlemagne in the lowest rooms of his old castle at Nuremberg. There—and not, as might have been imagined, in Aix-la-Chapelle—the mighty old Emperor rests majestically, surrounded by his brave champions, ready to awake again whenever God shall be pleased to tell him that the moment has come.

As for Frederick Barbarossa, he sleeps in the Kyffhauser, one of the porphyry and granite mountains of the Taunus, and so do others; there is no denying the fact, for they have been seen!

A few years after his disappearance from this world, Frederick showed himself upon the summit of one of these mountains, whenever the sound of a musical instrument was heard in the valley. Knowing his love of music, the Philharmonic Societies of Erfurth and of other towns to this day, are fond of serenading the old warrior.