kept their reputation
of sanctity. That they were really the abiding-places of the gods the
common people would not cease to hold, whatever might be taught or held
by those who had renounced that crudity. And, indeed, it may be doubted
whether anybody ever renounced it altogether. Probably, at all events,
most persons would see no difficulty in believing that the god dwelt on
the sacred spot of earth and also at the same time in heaven. They would
accept both traditions as equally true, without troubling themselves how
to reconcile them.

But the gods did not always remain in their dwellings. The Wild Hunt, a
tradition of a furious host riding abroad with a terrific noise of
shouts and horns and the braying of hounds, common to Germany and
England, has been identified beyond doubt by Grimm with Woden and his
host. We cannot here discuss the subject except in its relations with
the group of stories now under consideration. Woden, it will be borne in
mind, is one of the figures of the old mythology merged in the Hidden
Hero beneath the German hills. Now, nothing is more natural than that,
when a company of warriors is conceived as lying ready for a summons,
themselves all armed and their steeds standing harnessed at their sides,
they should be thought now and then to sally forth. This was the sound
which surprised the good burgesses of Jung-Wositz when Ulrich von
Rosenberg and his train rode out by night upon the plain. In this way
King Wenzel exercises his followers, and the unfortunate Stoymir
vindicated his existence beneath the Blanik notwithstanding his death.
In this way too, before a war, Diedrich is heard preparing for battle at
one o'clock in the morning on the mountain of Ax. Once in seven years
Earl Gerald rides round the Curragh of Kildare; and every seventh year
the host at Ochsenfeld in Upper Alsace may be seen by night exercising
on their horses. On certain days the Carpathian robber issues from his
cavern in the Czornahora. Grimm mentions the story of a blacksmith who
found a gap he had never noticed before in the face of a cliff on the
Odenberg, and entering, stood in the presence of mighty men, playing
there at bowls with balls of iron, as Rip van Winkle's friends were
playing at ninepins. So a Wallachian saga connects the Wild Hunt with a
mysterious forest castle built by the Knight Sigmirian, who was cursed
with banishment for three hundred years from the society of men for
refusing the daughter of th