rage; and with that he whipped up the Goat, wrung his head off, and
threw him down into the cellar. Still he belonged to one of the
heathen gods, and so in later Middle-Age superstition he is assigned
to the Devil, who even takes his shape when he presides at the
Witches' Sabbath.

Nor in this list must the little birds be forgotten which taught the
man's daughter, in the tale of 'The Two Stepsisters', No. xvii, how
to act in her trials. So, too, in 'Katie Woodencloak', No. l, the
little bird tells the Prince, 'who understood the song of birds very
well,' that blood is gushing out of the golden shoe. The belief that
some persons had the gift of understanding what the birds said, is
primaeval. We pay homage to it in our proverbial expression, 'a
little bird told me'. Popular traditions and rhymes protect their
nests, as in the case of the wren, the robin, and the swallow.
Occasionally this gift seems to have been acquired by eating or
tasting the flesh of a snake or dragon, as Sigurd, in the Volsung
tale, first became aware of Regin's designs against his life, when he
accidentally tasted the heart-blood of Fafnir, whom he had slain in
dragon shape, and then all at once the swallow's song, perched above
him, became as intelligible as human speech.

We now come to a class of beings which plays a large part, and always
for ill, in these Tales. These are the Giants or Trolls. In modern
Norse tradition there is little difference between the names, but
originally Troll was a more general expression for a supernatural
being than Giant, [30] which was rather confined to a race more dull
than wicked. In the Giants we have the wantonness of boundless bodily
strength and size, which, trusting entirely to these qualities, falls
at last by its own weight. At first, it is true that proverbial