Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844. Various
and other tools, and would have their share of the treasure, but none of them was able to find the spot where the silver had welled out.
“The Prince of Brunswick had a pound of the coined silver brought him, as did moreover a burgess of Halberstadt, N. Everkan, purchase the like.”
The quick-sighted reader will not easily have missed detecting the sudden effect produced upon the two spirits by the truthful right-mindedness of the two little girls.
Correspondingly, James Grimm, from surveying collectively the Teutonic traditions of bewitched or mysteriously hidden treasure, says—
“To the lifting of the treasure is required silence and innocence. * * * Innocent children’s hands are able to lay hold upon it, as to draw the lot. * * * Who has viciously stained himself cannot approach it.”13
Two short instances more from the copious fraternal collection, and we have done. With a temper of pure childlike antiquity, they express in the persons of the dwarfs—Teutonic approximative, fairies—the sympathy of the spirits with unstained and innocent human manners; and may, if the traditions which exhibit the fairies under a cloud of sin and sorrow should have been felt by the reader as at all grating upon his old love of them, help to soothe and reconcile him by a soft gleam of illumination, here lingering as in a newly revealed Golden Age of his own.
“In the summer, the dwarfs often came trooping from the cliffs down into the valley, and joined either with help, or as lookers-on at least, the human inhabitants at their work, especially the mowers, in hay-harvest. They, then and there, seated themselves at their ease and pleasantly, upon the long and thick arm of a maple in the embowering shade. But once there came certain evil-disposed persons, who, in the night, sawed the bough through, so that it held but weakly on to the trunk; and when the unsuspecting creatures, upon the morrow, settled themselves down upon it, the bough cracked in two, the dwarfs tumbled to the ground, were heartily laughed at, fell into violent anger, and cried aloud—
‘O, how is the heaven high and long!
And falsehood waxen on earth so strong!
Here to-day, and for ever away!’
They kept their word, and never again made their appearance in the country.”
“It was the wont of the dwarflings to seat themselves upon a great crag stone, and from thence to watch the haymakers; but a few mischievous fellows kindled a fire upon the stone, made it red-hot, and swept away embers and ashes. Morning came, and with it the tiny folk, who burned themselves pitiably. They exclaimed in high anger—
‘O wicked world! O wicked world!’
cried vengeance, and vanished for evermore!”
We have shown,—1. The Anti-christian character imputed by tradition to the fairies. 2. The occasional dependence of the more powerful spirits upon the less powerful human beings; and, 3. The strong affectionate leaning in the will of the spirits towards moral human excellence. Of the ability which, in virtue of this excellence, the human creature possesses to help, Maud must, for the present, be permitted to stand for the sole, as she is beyond all comparison our best, example.
The book of Ernst Willkomm takes a position in strong contrast to the corresponding works due to the Brothers Grimm, and other great gatherers of legendary lore. He has a personal poetic interest in the tales which they have not. He presents himself as the expositor, not only of his native superstitions, but also, zealously, of the Upper Lusatian manners. Himself cradled amongst the mountains, he has drawn with infinite pains, and by slow degrees, as he best could, from the deep interior life of the people, their jealously withheld credences, and the traditions which are sacredly associated with every nook of their craggy district.
“The tract of country,” says Willkomm in his Preface, “the true Highlands of Upper Lusatia, called by the inhabitants themselves the Upper Country, to which the tales are native, is one very narrowly circumscribed. It amounts to scarcely ten square (German) miles. I have, however, selected it for my undertaking,” he continues, “because it is intimately familiar to me; because the innermost character of the small population who inhabit it is confidentially known to me; because there is hardly a road or a path in the country which, on the darkest night, I could not find. Interesting, romantic, magnificent is the piece of earth which, at the confines of Bohemia, runs over hilly heights and lofty hill, tops on to the high mountain-chain. But still more interesting, I maintain with confidence, is the race of people.”
It may seem strange at first, that the wise and profound explorers whom we have so often had occasion to cite, the brothers Grimm, should have failed to present us with any traditions from a corner of ground around which they have so successfully laboured. We have hinted already at the sufficient reason of the blank. Willkomm tells us, that the rest of the world, which “the cabin’d cribb’d” Lusatian has himself learned to call “o’ th’ outside,” has taken no cognisance of his beautiful hill country. Lusatia has a literature of her own, and no one is acquainted with it. “She had, and partly still has, her own, similar to the Imperial cities, exceeding free and energetic municipal constitution.” But no one cares about it. Celebrated and learned historians, questioned by Willkomm on the subject, have acknowledged their ignorance in regard to the character and laws of its small people. A more cogent reason, however, lies nearer home, in the impenetrable reserve and self-insulation of the mountaineers themselves. Willkomm confesses that their coldness towards strangers is unparalleled; they have no confidence whatever in foreigners; “and let a Lusatian but suspect,” he says, “that you come a-fishing to him, and to listen out his privacies; then may you,” as we may render the Lusatian proverb, “‘Lose yourself before you find his mushroom.’” He will communicate to strangers little of his manners and customs; of his superstitious practices, his sacredly guarded traditions, absolutely nothing. “He is unpliant, self-sequestered, coarse-grained; beyond all conception easy and phlegmatic.”
Every genuine people, however, is rough-handed; and Willkomm proceeds, after an ingenuous description of their defects, to vindicate the natural heart of his brother highlanders. “Let him amongst the gentle,” he proudly exclaims, “who desire to hear for once something novel, something right vigorous, sit down beside me. He need not fear that morals and decency will be cast out of doors. No, no! The people are thoroughly moral and chaste at heart, if they are somewhat coarse in expression;—ay, and tender withal. Their imagination glides as delighted along fragrant threads of gold, as it eagerly descends amongst the powers of darkness, amidst the dance of will-o’-the-wisps and horrible ghost-reels. They are, at once, a blunt, good-hearted, aboriginal stamp of men, with all the advantages and deficiencies appurtenant.”
The Lusatian traditions, brought to light in Germany by Ernst Willkomm, and now first made known to Englishmen in these pages, were collected by our author, as we have already observed, with difficulty and labour. A native only of the mountain district could obtain from the lips of the people their sacred and well-preserved lore, and even he not easily. The tales were narrated from time to time in the spinning-room, or in the so-called “Hell” of the boor or weaver, without any determinate connexion. The listener gathered mere fragments, and these not fully, when, thrown off his guard, he ventured to interrupt the speaker. Each narrator conceives his tale differently, and one individual is apt to garnish the experience of many, or what he has heard from others, with a little spice of his own invention. Further, the details of ten or twelve occurrences are associated with one single spot; all of which appear externally different, and yet internally are connected closely, “so that when comprehended in one whole picture, and not till then, they form what, in a strict and literary sense, we are accustomed to call a Tradition or Tale. I, at least,” adds Ernst Willkomm, “in such an upgathering of these disjointed tones of tradition, could only accomplish something that satisfied me by searching out the profound hidden meaning of the people’s poesy: and I have at last gone no further than attempting to compose these detached fragments of tradition, Lusatianwise and popularwise, from the people’s own telling, into a whole. Upon this scheme
Grimm’s German Mythology, p. 544.