s carry
the day; Shortshanks has the princess and half the kingdom, and Ritter
Red is thrown into a pit full of snakes,--on the French general's
principle, we suppose, who hung his cowards "_pour encourager les
autres_." But the king has another daughter, whom an ogre has carried
off to the bottom of the sea. Shortshanks discovers her while the ogre
is out looking for a man who can brew a hundred lasts of malt at one
strike. He finds the man at home, of course, and puts him to his task.
Shortshanks gets the ogre and all his kith and kin to help the brew, and
brews the wort so strong, that, on tasting it, they all fall down dead,
except one, an old woman, "who lay bed-ridden in the chimney-corner,"
and to her our hero carries his wort and kills her too. He then carries
off the treasure of the ogres, and gives this princess and the other
half of the kingdom to his brother Sturdy.

Now we have no particular fault to find with such stories as these, when
they are produced as characteristic specimens of the folk-lore of a
people; as such, they have a value beside their intrinsic interest;--but
when we are asked to receive them as part of the evidence that that
people is an honest and manly race, and as an acceptable addition to our
stock of household tales, we demur. The truth is, that the very worth of
these tales is to be found not only in the fact that they form a part of
the stock from which our own are derived, but in the other fact that
they represent that stock as it existed at an earlier and ruder stage of
humanitarian development. They were told by savage mothers to savage
children; and although some of them teach the few virtues common to
barbarism and civilization, they are filled with the glorification of
savage vice and crime;--deceit, theft, violence, even ruthless vengeance
upon a cruel parent, are constantly practised by the characters which
they hold up to favor. Such humor as they have, too, is of the coarsest
kind, and is expressed chiefly in rude practical jokes, or the bloody
overreaching of the poor thick-headed Trolls, who are the butts of the
stories and the victims of their heroes. There is good ethnological and
mythological reason why the Trolls should be butts and victims, it is
true; but that is not to the present purpose.

But although this judgment must be passed upon the collection,
considered merely as tales to be told and read at this stage of the
world's progress, there are several notable