{257}
IN the last number of Folk-Lore were given three tales, collected, along with some others, during my residence in the northern districts of Lincolnshire; when I also described, so far as possible, the country and surroundings in which dwell the people amongst whom these legends have originated. It is not easy, in so short a notice, to present vividly the curious mixture of rusticity and savagery, of superstition and indifference, of ignorance and shrewdness, which is found in these peasants, and it would require greater powers than I possess to do justice to them in a more finished study. During the comparatively short time I spent amongst them, close observance of their ways of life and thought assured me that the old and simple heathendom still lay untouched, though hidden, below successive varnishes of superstition, religion, and civilisation.
Perhaps some other time I may be permitted to show how this betrays itself, even in the vulgar speech and common life, and amongst those, moreover, whom one would have thought to be above the reach of it; but the leaven of the ancient paganism has spread itself throughout the mass, {258} till there are few in whom some trace of it, however unconscious, may not be found.
The following tales were collected in the same district. They are, perhaps, more commonplace than “Tiddy Mun” or “The Dead Moon”, but much depends on the narrator, and these four were told by men who had not a strong and instinctive sense of the dramatic art of story-making. I may say, in spite of their receptiveness towards things marvellous, that they were otherwise practical and somewhat unimaginative, and accepted the tales they had heard from their fathers, with respect, indeed, but content not to ask themselves for absolute belief. Thus it is more as vestiges of a bygone religion that these tales may interest, than as samples of modern credulity.
In the “Green Mist” and “The Strangers’ Share”, for instance, there are traces of ancient rites, faithful of observance, but emptied of their primitive devotion, which lead us back into a very dim and misty region before the lamp of history was lit to light the way. And in “The Dead Hand” there is an intimate acquaintance with the bog-spirits that contrasts oddly with the later influence of modern Christianity in the almost biblical lamentation of the mourning mother.
There are still by me the notes from one or two tales treating of death and the after-life, and at least one which shows the curious unconscious immorality of very primitive minds—the immorality which is reflected in our most familiar fairy tales, where murder and theft and lying are often accepted as the natural path towards success, as well in the lives of these wonderful cold-blooded barbaric princes and princesses of storydom, the ideals of our childhood, as in the simpler but perhaps more poetic legends still lingering amid the people in this lonely corner of the Parts of Lindsey.