1^4 HSIJ'S HOLE IN CHEVIOT 



the Epiphany, or Twelfth Night ; which I should say must 

 have been the old festival of the goddess, held when the 

 daylight begins perceptibly to lengthen. 



The goddess Hel has in the Scandinavian mythology been 

 degraded to the position of the daughter of Lok, the god 

 of mischief, and that of custodian of the dead, of either sex, 

 who had not qualified for Odin's military paradise of Valhalla, 

 by dying a violent death ; but that mythology, as we have 

 it, at least, I should call rather literature than folk-lore ; 

 the Scandinavians had much in common with the Greeks in 

 the way they slapped their beliefs into form, and I believe 

 what relics we have of the old German mythology to be much 

 more genuine. One element of confusion in the north is 

 that the worship of Odin seems to have supervened upon, 

 and been combined with, that of Thor. In any case, no 

 such person as a great mother-goddess appears. 



What first gave me the idea, I think, of certain heroes or 

 heroines of authentic history being identified with old deities, 

 was Kemble's theory about Dietrich of Berne, Theodoric of 

 Verona ; that the reason he pervades German legend in the 

 way he does, is that he has been amalgamated by tradition 

 with the old deity, or demi-god, of the same name, Dietrich. 

 And what shows curiously that Kemble was probably right, 

 is that the association of the name with divinity reappears 

 among the Saxons of Northumbria. There is a personage who 

 is called DectMrec frater Tin, in the queer lists of the Kings 

 of the Picts ; and he is supposed to be Theodoric, son of Ida, 

 designated as the brother of Tiu or Tyr, the northern god 

 of war ! (We know now that Theodoric had probably 

 married one of the Pictish princesses, who carried on the 

 succession.) 



And whether St. Helena has been taken for Frau Holle 

 or not, it is said that Bertha, the regent of Burgundy, who 

 is a very historical personage indeed, her device of the 

 spindle appearing on the existing seal of a document, has 

 been very much identified with Berchta. 



And it has occurred to me that the predominance of the 

 Saint of the Bass in the East Lothian promontory may be 

 owing to an older tradition of the northern sun-god — his 



