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Now Eric was afraid, for he thought it a strange thing that a severed head should speak to him. "Here it seems I have to deal with trolls," he said; "but at the least, though he speak, this one shall strike no more," and he looked at the head, but it answered nothing. Now Skallagrim slept through it all and the light grew so dim that Eric thought it time to make an end this way or that.
But she hadn't long taken the shirt in hand, before it got far worse than ever, and with all her rubbing, and wringing, and scrubbing, the spots grew bigger and blacker, and the darker and uglier was the shirt. Then all the other Trolls began to wash, but the longer it lasted, the blacker and uglier the shirt grew, till at last it was as black all over as if it had been up the chimney.
Then came another company, and at their head stalked black Ospakar. "These be they who died at Middalhof," cried Eric. "Welcome, Ospakar! that marriage-feast of thine went ill!" "Now methinks we are overdone with trolls," said Skallagrim; "but see! here come more." As he spoke, Hall of Lithdale came, and with him Koll the Half-witted, and others.
Odin and the Aesir then were dispossessed and degraded by our Saviour and his Apostles, just as they had of old thrown out the Frost Giants, and the two are mingled together, in medieval Norse tradition, as Trolls and Giants, hostile alike to Christianity and man. Christianity had taken possession indeed, but it was beyond her power to kill.
The giant, for instance, always complains of a smell of Christian blood, and is always answered by the formula, that a crow flew over the chimney and must have dropped a bone down it; the hero almost always meets three old women, or three Trolls, or three enchanted beasts or birds, of whom he in that case always asks the same questions, receiving the same replies, verbatim.
"Evidently it is not the excitement of fighting which they enjoy, but the pleasure of torturing. I will not be sure but what they are trolls after all." "It was a devils' deed," Alwin said hoarsely. He looked down at the ghastly heap with a shudder of loathing. "And we are not without guilt who have permitted it.
"It is," said I, "because they get so excited about their own affairs. Rather more than a hundred years ago, for instance, a war broke out in Fairyland because the King of the Fairies, whose name is Oberon, and the Queen of the Fairies, whose name is Titania, had asked the Trolls to dinner.
Now if they be trolls it is ill, for then is the world growing worser, and the wood shall be right perilous for those who needs must fare therein. Yet if they be men it is a worse matter; for the trolls would not come out of the waste into the sunlight of the Dale.
But it is fated, she went on, 'that thou come with us to learn all that may be learned of the use of arms. For there are none in Britain to compare with us for the knowledge of warfare. Then Perceval remembered what he had heard the trolls the people of the Underworld say, though he had not understood their meaning.
And then, when the wine is gone out of them, the survivors come to their senses, and stare shamefully and sadly round. What an ugly, desolate, tottering ruin the fairy palace has become! Have they spoilt it themselves? or have the Trolls bewitched it? And all the fairy treasure what has become of it? no man knows.
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