Strange Survivals. Baring-Gould Sabine

ideas, modern luxury, have invaded the phantom world, and now – we hear of death-coaches drawn by headless horses. These are black, like mourning carriages, and the horses are sable; a driver sits on the box; he is in black, but he has no weeper to his hat, because he has not a hat. He has not a hat, because he is without a head. The death-coach is sometimes not seen, but heard. At others it is seen, not heard. It rolls silently as a shadow along the road.

      But, indeed, Woden had a black horse as well as one that was white. Rime-locks (Hrimfaxi) was his sable steed, and Shining-locks (Skinfaxi) his white one. The first is the night horse, from whose mane falls the dew; the second is the day horse, whose mane is the morning light. One of the legends of St. Nicholas refers to these two horses, which have been transferred to him when Woden was displaced. The saint was travelling with a black and a white steed, when some evil-minded man cut off their heads at an inn where they were spending the night. When St. Nicholas heard what had been done, he sent his servant to put on the heads again. This the man did; but so hurriedly and carelessly, that he put the black head on the white trunk, and vice versâ. In the morning St. Nicholas saw, when too late, what had been done. The horses were alive and running. This legend refers to the morning and the evening twilights, part night and part day. The morning twilight has the body dark and the head light; and the evening twilight has the white trunk and the black head.

      St. Nicholas has taken Odin’s place in other ways. As Saint Klaus he appears to children at Yule. The very name is a predicate of the god of the dead. He is represented as the patron of ships; indeed, St. Nicholas is a puzzle to ecclesiastical historians – his history and his symbols and cult have so little in common. The reason is, that he has taken to him the symbols, and myths, and functions of the Northern god. His ship is Odin’s death-ship, constructed out of dead men’s finger and toe-nails.

      In Denmark, a shovelful of oats is thrown out at Yule for Saint Klaus’s horse; if this be neglected, death enters the house and claims a soul. When a person is convalescent after a dangerous illness, he is said to have “given a feed to Death’s Horse.” The identification is complete. Formerly, the last bundle of oats in a field was cast into the air by the reapers “for Odin at Yule to feed his horse.” And in the writer’s recollection it was customary in Devon for the last sheaf to be raised in the air with the cry, “A neck Weeday!” That is to “Nickar Woden.”

      The sheaf of corn, which is fastened in Norway and Denmark to the gable of a house, is now supposed to be an offering to the birds; originally, it was a feed for the pale horse of the death-god Woden. And now we see the origin of the bush which is set up when a roof is completed, and also of the floral hip-knobs of Gothic buildings. Both are relics of the oblation affixed to the gable made to the horse of Woden, – corn, or hay, or grass; and this is also the origin of the “palms,” poles with bouquets at the top, erected in the Black Forest to keep off lightning.

      A little while ago the writer was at Pilsen in Bohemia, and was struck with the gables in the great square. Each terminated in a vase of flowers or fruit, or some floral ornament, except only the Town Hall, which had three gables, each surmounted by spikes of iron, and spikes stood between each gable, and each spike transfixed a ball. The floral representations are far-away remembrances of the bunch of corn and hay offered to Woden’s horse, but the balls on the spikes recall the human skulls set up to his honour. That the skulls were offerings to a god was forgotten, and those set up were the heads of criminals. The Rath-Haus had them, not the private houses, because only the town council had a right to execute.

      Throughout the Middle Ages, among ourselves down to the end of last century, heads of traitors and criminals were thus stuck up on spikes over city gates, and town halls, and castles. Those executed by justice were treated according to immemorial and heathen custom. A new meaning was given to the loathsome exhibition. It deterred from treason and crime. Nevertheless, our Christian mediæval rulers simply carried out the old custom of offering the heads to Odin, by setting them up above the gables. Skulls and decaying heads came to be so thoroughly regarded as a part – an integral ornament of a gate or a gable – that when architects built renaissance houses and gateways, they set up stone balls on them as substitutes for the heads which were no more available. A lord with power of life and death put heads over his gate; it was the sign that he enjoyed capital rights. The stone balls on lodge gates are their lineal descendants. Some manors were without capital jurisdiction, and the lords of these had no right to set up heads, or sham heads, or stone balls. If they did so they were like the modern parvenu who assumes armorial bearings to which he has no heraldic right.

      When the writer was a boy, he lived for some years in a town of the south of France, where was a house that had been built by one of the executioners in the Reign of Terror. This man had adorned the pediment of his house with stone balls, and the popular belief was that each ball represented a human head that he had guillotined. Whether it was so or not, we cannot say. It was, perhaps, an unfounded belief, but the people were right in holding that the stone balls used as architectural adornments were the representatives of human heads.

      In the Pilsen market-place, it was remarkable that only the Town Hall had balls on it, and balls in the place where there had previously been spiked heads. No private citizen ventured to assume the cognisance of right of life and death.

      At Chartres all the pinnacles of the cathedral are surmounted by carved human heads.

      In the farmhouse of Tresmarrow in Cornwall, in a niche, is preserved a human skull. Why it is there, no one knows. It has been several times buried, but, whenever buried, noises ensue which disturb the household, and the skull is disinterred and replaced in its niche. Formerly it occupied the gable head.

      As already said, these heads were regarded as oracular. In one of Grimm’s “Folk-Tales” a King marries a chamber-maid by mistake for her mistress, a princess, who is obliged to keep geese. The princess’s horse is killed, and its head set up over the city gate. When the princess drives her geese out of the town she addresses the head, and the head answers and counsels her. So in Norse mythology Odin had a human head embalmed, and had recourse to it for advice when in any doubt. In the tale of the Greek King and Douban, the Physician, in the Arabian Nights’ Tales, the physician’s head, when he is decapitated, is set on a vase, where it rebukes the King. Friar Bacon’s brazen head whereby he conjured is a reminiscence of these oracular heads.

      In one of the Icelandic Sagas, the gable ends whistle in the wind, and give oracles according to the tone or manner in which they pipe.

      The busts that occupy niches in Italian buildings are far-off remembrances of the real human heads which adorned the fronts of the wigwams of our savage ancestors. So, also, as already said, are the head corbels of Norman buildings.

      On old Devonshire houses, the first ridge-tile on the main gable was very commonly moulded to represent a horse and his rider. The popular explanation is that these tiles were put up over the houses where Charles I. slept; but this is a mistake; they are found where Charles I. never was.

      At one time they were pretty common. Now some remain, but only a few, at Plymouth, Exeter, Totnes, Tavistock, and at East Looe, and Padstow, in Cornwall. One at Truro represents a horse bearing skins on the back, and is so contrived as to whistle in the wind. None are earlier than the seventeenth century, yet they certainly take the place of more ancient figures, and they carry us back in thought to the period when the horse or horse-head was the ornament proper to every gable. These little tile-horses and men are of divine ancestry. They trace back to Wuotan and his hell-horse.11

      The historical existence of the leaders Hengest and Horsa, who led the Anglo-Saxons to the conquest of Britain, has long been disputed. There probably never were such personages. What is more likely is that they were the horse-headed beams of the chief’s house of the invading tribe. Both names indicate horses. When the Norsemen moved their quarters, they took the main beams of their dwellings with them, and they took omens from these beams, when they warped or whistled in wet and wind. The first settlers in Iceland threw their house-beams into the sea off Norway, and colonised at the spot where they were washed ashore on the black volcanic sands of Iceland.

      The white horse in the arms of Kent, the white horse on the Hanovarian coat, the white horses on the chalk downs throughout Wessex, have all reference to Woden

11

See numerous examples in “The Western Antiquary,” November, 1881.