The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
There is also a passage in the earlier history of Helgi Hundingslayer
of which traces appear to be preserved in ballads, and before all in the
English ballad 'Earl Brand,' #A#. Hunding and Helgi's family were at
feud. Helgi introduced himself into Hunding's court as a spy, and when
he was retiring sent word to Hunding's son that he had been there
disguised as a son of Hagal, Helgi's foster-father. Hunding sent men to
take him, and Helgi, to escape them, was forced to assume woman's
clothes and grind at the mill. While Hunding's men are making search, a
mysterious blind man, surnamed the bale-wise, or evil-witted (Blindr inn
bölvísi), calls out, Sharp are the eyes of Hagal's maid; it is no
churl's blood that stands at the mill; the stones are riving, the
meal-trough is springing; a hard lot has befallen a war-king when a
chieftain must grind strange barley; fitter for that hand is the
sword-hilt than the mill-handle. Hagal pretends that the fierce-eyed
maid is a virago whom Helgi had taken captive, and in the end Helgi
escapes. This malicious personage reappears in the Hrômund saga as
"Blind the Bad" and "the Carl Blind, surnamed Bavís," and is found
elsewhere. His likeness to "old Carl Hood," who "comes for ill, but
never for good," and who gives information of Earl Brand's flight with
the king's daughter, does not require to be insisted on. Both are
identical, we can scarcely doubt, with the blind [one-eyed] old man of
many tales, who goes about in various disguises, sometimes as beggar,
with his hood or hat slouched over his face,--that is Odin, the Síðhöttr
or Deep-hood of Sæmund, who in the saga of Hálf and his champions is
called simple Hood, as here, and expressly said to be Odin.[114] Odin,
though not a thoroughly malignant divinity, had his dark side, and one
of his titles in Sæmund's Edda is Bölverkr, _maleficus_. He first caused
war by casting his spear among men, and Dag, after he has killed Helgi,
says Odin was the author of all the mischief, for he brought strife
among kinsmen.[115]
The disastrous effects of "naming" in a great emergency appear in other
northern traditions, though not so frequently as one would expect. A
diverting Swedish saga, which has been much quoted, relates how St. Olof
bargained with a troll for the building of a huge church, the pay to be
the sun and moon, or St. Olof himself. The holy man was equally amazed
and embarrassed at seeing the building run up by the troll with great
rapidity, but during a ramble among the hills had the good luck to
discover that the troll's name was Wind and Weather, after which all was
easy. For while the troll was on the roof of the church, Olof called out
to him,
'Wind and Weather, hi!
You've set the spire awry;'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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