Hence it was once the
Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and in
Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse,
that it may have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly
ferryman.[38] In such a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on
her fatal voyage; and of similar nature was the dusky barge,
"dark as a funeral-scarf from stem to stern," in which Arthur
was received by the black-hooded queens.[39]
[33] "Saga me forwhan byth seo sunne read on aefen? Ic the
secge, forthon heo locath on helle.--Tell me, why is the sun
red at even? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell."
Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 115, apud Tylor, Primitive
Culture, Vol. II. p. 63. Barbaric thought had partly
anticipated my childish theory.
[34] "Still in North Germany does the peasant say of thunder,
that the angels are playing skittles aloft, and of the snow,
that they are shaking up the feather beds in heaven."--
Baring-Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 172.
[35] "The Polynesians imagine that the sky descends at the
horizon and encloses the earth. Hence they call foreigners
papalangi, or 'heaven-bursters,' as having broken in from
another world outside."--Max Muller, Chips, II. 268.
[36] "--And said the gods, let there be a hammered plate in the
midst of the waters, and let it be dividing between waters and
waters.
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