Strange Survivals. Baring-Gould Sabine

occupies us is the presence of the horses’ heads in the window. Now, singularly enough, precisely the same story is told of other horses’ heads occupying precisely similar positions in other parts of Germany. We know of at least a dozen.5 It seems therefore probable that the story is of later origin, and grew up to account for the presence of the heads, which the popular mind could not otherwise explain. This conjecture becomes a certainty when we find that pairs of horses’ heads were at one time a very general adornment of gable ends, and that they are so still in many places.

      In Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Luneburg, Holstein, it is still customary to affix carved wooden horse-heads to the apex of the principal gable of the house. There are usually two of these, back to back, the heads pointed in opposite directions. In Tyrol, the heads of chamois occupy similar positions. The writer of this article was recently in Silesia, and sketched similar heads on the gables of wooden houses of modern construction in the “Giant Mountains.” They are also found in Russia.

      Originally, in Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and indeed England, all houses were built of timber, and those which were not of circular form, with bee-hive roofs, had gables. Unfortunately, we have but one very early representation of a Teutonic village, and that is on the Antonine column at Rome. One of the bas-reliefs there shows us the attack by Romans on a German village. The houses are figured as built of wattled sides, and thatched over. Most are of bee-hive shape, but one, that of the chief, is oblong and gabled. The soldiers are applying torches to the roofs, and, provokingly enough, we cannot see the gable of the quadrangular house, because it is obscured by the figure of a German warrior who is being killed by a Roman soldier. Though this representation does not help us much, still there is abundance of evidence to show that the old German houses – at least, those of the chiefs – were like the dwellings of the Scandinavian Bonders, with oblong walls with gables, and with but a single main front and gable a-piece. The Icelandic farmhouses perpetuate the type to the present day, with some modifications. These dwellings have lateral walls of stone and turf scarcely six feet high, and from six to ten feet thick, to bank out the cold. On these low parallel walls rest the principals of the roof, which is turf-covered. The face of the house is to the south, it is the only face that shows; the back is banked up like the sides, so that from every quarter but one a house looks like a grassy mound. The front consists of two or more wooden gables, and is all of wood, often painted red. Originally, we know, there was but a single gable. At present the subsidiary gable is low, comparatively insignificant, and contains the door. Now the old Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and German houses of the chiefs were all originally constructed on the same principle, and the timber and plaster gable fronts of our old houses, the splendid stone and brick-gabled faces of the halls of the trade guilds in the market-place at Brussels, and the wonderful stepped and convoluted house-fronts throughout Holland and Germany, are direct descendants of the old rude oblong house of our common forefathers.

      We come now to another point, the gable apex. A gable, of course, is and must be an inverted v,

; but there are just three ways in which the apex can be treated. When the principals are first erected they form an x,

, the upper limbs shorter than the lower. Sometimes they are so left. But sometimes they are sawn off, and are held together by mortices into an upright piece of timber. Then the gable represents an inverted

. If the ends are sawn off, and there be no such upright, then there remains an inverted v, but, to prevent the rotting of the ends at the apex, a crease like a small v is put over the juncture,

. These are the only three variations conceivable. The last is the latest, and dates from the introduction of lead, or of tile ridges. By far the earliest type is the simplest, the leaving of the protruding ends of the principals forming

. Then, to protect these ends from the weather, to prevent the water from entering the grain, and rotting them, they were covered with horse-skulls, and thus two horse-skulls looking in opposite directions became an usual ornament of the gable of a house. Precisely the same thing was done with the tie-beams that protruded under the eaves. These also were exposed with the grain to the weather, though not to the same extent as the principals. They also were protected by skulls being fastened over their ends, and these skulls at the end of the tie-beams are the prototypes of the corbel-heads round old Norman churches.

      Among the Anglo-Saxons the

gable was soon displaced by that shaped like

, if we may judge by early illustrations, but the more archaic and simple construction prevailed in North Germany and in Scandinavia. To the present day the carved heads are affixed to the ends of the principals, and these heads take the place of the original skulls. The gable of the Horn Church in Essex has got an ox’s head with horns on it.

      In one Anglo-Saxon miniature representing a nobleman’s house, a stag’s head is at the apex. The old Norwegian wooden church of Wang of the twelfth century, which was bought and transported to the flanks of the Schnee-Koppe in Silesia by Frederick William IV. in 1842, is adorned with two heads of sea-snakes or dragons, one at each end of the gable. In the Rhætian Alps the gables of old timber houses have on them the fore-parts of horses, carved out of the ends of the intersecting principals.

      But the horse’s head, sometimes even a human skull, was also affixed to the upright leg of the inverted y– the hipknob,6 as architects term it – partly, no doubt, as a protection of the cross-cut end from rain and rotting. But though there was a practical reason for putting skulls on these exposed timber-ends, their use was not only practical, they were there affixed for religious reasons also, and indeed principally for these.

      As a sacrifice was offered when the foundations of a house were laid, so was a sacrifice offered when the roof was completed. The roof was especially subject to the assaults of the wind, and the wind was among the Northmen and Germans, Odin, Woden, or Wuotan. Moreover, in high buildings, there was a liability to their being struck by lightning, and the thunder-god Thorr had to be propitiated to stave off a fire. The farmhouses in the Black Forest to the present day are protected from lightning by poles with bunches of flowers and leaves on the top, that have been carried to church on Palm Sunday, and are then taken home and affixed to the gable, where they stand throughout the year. The bunch represents the old oblation offered annually to the God of the Storm.7 Horses were especially regarded as sacred animals by the Germans, the Norsemen, and by the Slaves. Tacitus tells us that white horses were kept by the ancient Germans in groves sacred to the gods; and gave auguries by neighing. The Icelandic sagas contain many allusions to the old dedication of horses to the gods. Among the Slaves, horses were likewise esteemed sacred animals; swords were planted in the ground, and a horse was led over them. Auguries were taken by the way in which he went, whether avoiding or touching the blades. In like manner the fate of prisoners was determined by the actions of an oracular horse. When a horse was killed at a sacrifice, its flesh was eaten. St. Jerome speaks of the Vandals and other Germanic races as horse-eaters, and St. Boniface forbade his Thuringian converts to eat horse-flesh.

      The eating of this sort of meat was a sacramental token of allegiance to Odin. When Hakon, Athelstan’s foster-son, who had been baptised in England, refused to partake of the sacrificial banquet of horse-flesh at the annual Council in Norway, the Bonders threatened to kill him. A compromise was arrived at, so odd that it deserves giving in the words of the saga: “The Bonders pressed the King strongly to eat horse-flesh; and as he would not do so, they wanted him to drink the soup; as he declined, they insisted that he should taste the gravy; and on his refusal, were about to lay hands on him. Earl Sigurd made peace by inducing the King to hold his mouth over the handle of the kettle upon which the fat steam of the boiled horse-flesh had settled; and the King laid a linen cloth over the handle, and then gaped above it, and so returned to his throne; but neither party was satisfied with this.” This was at the harvest gathering. At Yule, discontent became so threatening, that King Hakon was forced to appease the ferment by eating

5

Magdeburg, Danzig, Glückstadt, Dünkirchen, Hamburg, Nürnberg, Dresden, etc. (see Petersen: “Die Pferdekópfe auf den Bauerhäusern,” Kiel, 1860).

6

Herodotus, iv. 103: “Enemies whom the Scythians have subdued they treat as follows: each having cut off a head, carries it home with him, then hoisting it on a long pole, he raises it above the roof of his house – and they say that these act as guardians to the household.”

7

The floreated points of metal or stone at the apex of a gable are a reminiscence of the bunch of grain offered to Odin’s horse.