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836 SOULS.
hath shodde them, dismisseth them to go through thick and thin,
without scratch or scalle/ The land to be traversed by the soul
is also called whinny moor, i.e. furzy bog (Thorns 89). In. Henneberg,
and perhaps other places, the last honours paid to the dead
are still named todtenschuh (Reinwald 1, 165), though the practice
itself is discontinued; even the funeral feast is so denominated.
Utterly pagan in character, and suited to the warlike temper of
old times, is what Burkard of Worms reports p. 195 C : Quod
quidam faciunt homini occiso, cum : sepelitur dant ei in manum
/ ^
unguentum quoddam, quasi illo unguento post
1
sanari possit,
et sic cum unguento sepeliunt.
mortem
For a
vulnus
similar
purpose, slaves, horses, dogs were burnt with a dead man, that he
might use them in the next world. King Ring had king Harald
buried in a great barrow, his horse killed that he had ridden in
Bravalla fight, and his saddle buried with him,
so that he could
ride to Walhalla. It was thought that to convey the corpse by
any road but the traditional one (the hellweg, p. 801) was bad
for the soul of the deceased, Ledebur s Archiv 5, 369 (see
Suppl.).
The poems of the Mid. Ages occasionally describe a conflict
of angels and devils round the parting soul, each trying to take
possession of it. At the head of the angels is an archangel,
usually Michael, who, as we shall see in chap. XXVIII, has also
the task of weighing souls ; sometimes he is called Cherubim :
vor dem tievel nam der sele war der erzengel Kerubin, he saw
the soul first, Wh. 49, 10.
Laza laza tengeln !
da wart von den engeln
1 The Lithuanians bury or burn with the dead the claws of a lynx or bear, in
the belief that the soul has to climb up a steep mountain, on which the divine judge
(Kriwe Kriweito) sits : the rich will find it harder to scale than the poor, who are
unburdened with property, unless their sins weigh them down. A wind wafts the
poor sinners up as lightly as a feather, the rich have their limbs mangled by a
dragon Wizunas, who dwells beneath the mountain, and are then carried up by
tempests (Woycicki s Klechdy 2, 134-5. Narbutt 1, 284). The steep hill is called
Ana fields by the Lithuanians, and szklanna gora (glass mountain) by the Poles, who
think the lost souls must climb it as a punishment, and when they have set foot on
the summit, they slide off and tumble down. This glass mountain is still known to
our German songs and fairytales, but no longer distinctly as an abode of the
deceased, though the little maid who carries a huckle-bone to insert (like the bear s
claw) into the glass mountain, and ends with cutting her little finger off that she
may scale or unlock it at last, may be looked upon as seeking her lost brothers in
the underworld (Kinderm. no. 25).