For the early English farmer, the world around was full of spiritual
beings, half divine, half devilish. Fiends and monsters peopled the
fens, and tales of their doings terrified his childhood. Spirits of
flood and fell swamped his boat or misled him at night. Water nicors
haunted the streams; fairies danced on the green rings of the pasture;
dwarfs lived in the barrows of Celtic or neolithic chieftains, and
wrought strange weapons underground. The mark, the forest, the hills,
were all full for the early Englishman of mysterious and often hostile
beings. At length the Weirds or Fates swept him away. Beneath the earth
itself, Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at last
received him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior's death, he was
admitted to the happy realms of Wælheal. As a whole, the Anglo-Saxon
heathendom was a religion of terrorism. Evil spirits surrounded men on
every side, dwelt in all solitary places, and stalked over the land by
night. Ghosts dwelt in the forest; elves haunted the rude stone circles
of elder days. The woodland, still really tenanted by deer, wolves, and
wild boars, was also filled by popular imagination with demons and imps.
Charms, spells, and incantations formed the most real and living part of
the national faith; and many of these survived into Christian times as
witchcraft. Some of them, and of the early myths, even continue to be
repeated in the folk-lore of the present day. Such are the legends of
the Wild Huntsman and of Wayland Smith. Indeed, heathendom had a strong
hold over the common English mind long after the public adoption of
Christianity; and heathen sacrifices continued to be offered in secret
as late as the thirteenth century. Our poetry and our ordinary language
is tinged with heathen ideas even in modern times.

Still more interesting, however, are those relics of yet earlier social
states, which we find amongst the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The
production of fire by rubbing together two sticks is a common practice