and among them were several gentlemen of credit mentioned by name as despatched by the king himself from Oxford it was taken to be a ghostly repetition of the battle of Edgehill, which had been fought only two months before on the adjacent fields. The excitement of men's minds during periods of commotion has doubtless much to do with the currency of beliefs like this. Saint Augustine alludes to a story of a battle between evil spirits beheld upon a plain in Campania during the civil wars of Rome. As in the case of Edgehill, the vision was accompanied by all the noises of a conflict; and indeed the saint goes the length of declaring that after it was over the ground was covered with the footprints of men and horses. On the spot where this is said to have happened an actual battle took place not very long after.[1] These two instances are unconnected with the Sleeping Host; but many of the legends explicitly declare the exercises of the host when it emerges from its retirement to consist of a sham fight. Although the legends containing this account are not all found among Teutonic peoples, it cannot be deemed irrelevant to draw attention to the fact that similar fights are mentioned as the daily occupation of the heroes who attain to Valhalla, just as the nightly feasts of that roystering paradise correspond to the refreshments provided for the warriors around the tables of stone in their subterranean retreats. Whatever may have been the creed of other European races, it is hardly to be doubted that in these German superstitions we have an approach to the primitive belief, of which the Eddaic Valhalla was a late and idealized development.
But we may—nay, we must—go further. For in the history of traditional religions goddesses have been as popular as gods; and if we are right in seeing, with Grimm, the archaic gods in the Hidden Heroes, some
- ↑ Gerv. Tilb., Dec. ii. c. 12; "Book of Days," vol. i. p. 154; Augustine, "De Civ. Dei," l. ii. c. 25.
