last, came the worshippers of the great goddess Freyja, whom our
forefathers adored as the goddess of love and plenty; and whose car
was drawn by those animals which popular superstition has ever since
assigned to the 'old witch' of our English villages.

The North was not free, any more than the rest of the Protestant
world, from this direful superstition, which ran over Europe like a
pestilence in the sixteenth century. In Sweden especially, the
witches and their midnight ridings to _Blokulla_, the black
hill, gave occasion to processes as absurd and abominable as the
trial of Dr. Fian and the witch-findings of Hopkins. In Denmark, the
sorceresses were supposed to meet at Tromsoe high up in Finmark, or
even on Heckla in Iceland. The Norse witches met at a Blokolle of
their own, or on the Dovrefell, or at other places in Norway or
Finmark. As might be expected, we find many traces of witchcraft in
these Tales, but it may be doubted whether these may not be referred
rather to the old heathen belief in such arts still lingering in the
popular mind than to the processes of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, which were far more a craze and mania of the educated
classes acting under a mistaken religious fanaticism against popular
superstitions than a movement arising from the mass of the community.
Still, in 'the Mastermaid', No. xi, the witch of a sister-in-law, who
had rolled the apple over to the Prince, and so charmed him, was torn
to pieces between twenty-four horses. The old queen in 'The Lassie
and her Godmother', No. xxvii, tries to persuade her son to have the
young queen burnt alive for a wicked witch, who was dumb, and had
eaten her own babes. In 'East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No.
iv, it is a wicked stepmother who has bewitched the prince. In 'Bushy
Bride', No. xlv, the ugly bride charms the king to sleep, and is at
last thrown, with her wicked mother, into a pit full of snakes. In