“It is not so, it was not so, but, indeed, God forbid that
  it should be so.”

which hint at the existence of a hoard as precious and inexhaustible as that of the Nibelungs.  The chord of terror is touched in the eerie visit of the three dead sailor sons “in earthly flesh and blood” to the wife of Usher’s well, Sweet William’s Ghost, the rescue of Tarn Lin on Halloween, when Fairyland pays a tiend to Hell, the return of clerk Saunders to his mistress, True Thomas’s ride to Fairyland, when: 

  “For forty days and forty nights,
  He wade through red blood to the knee,
  And he saw neither sun nor moon,
  But heard the roaring of the sea.”

The mediaeval romances of chivalry, which embody stories handed down by oral tradition, are set in an atmosphere of supernatural wonder and enchantment.  In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Sir Lancelot goes by night into the Chapel Perilous, wherein there is only a dim light burning, and steals from the corpse a sword and a piece of silk to heal the wounds of a dying knight.  Sir Galahad sees a fiend leap out of a tomb amid a cloud of smoke; Gawaine’s ghost, with those of the knights and ladies for whom he has done battle in life, appears to warn the king not to begin the fight against Modred on a certain day.  In the romance of Sir Amadas, the ghost of a merchant, whose corpse the knight had duteously redeemed from the hands of creditors, succours him at need.  The shadow of terror lurks even amid the beauty of Spenser’s fairyland.  In the windings of its forests we come upon dark caves, mysterious castles and huts, from which there start fearsome creatures like Despair or the giant Orgoglio, hideous hags like Occasion, wicked witches and enchanters or frightful beings like the ghostly Maleger, who wore as his helmet a dead man’s skull and rode upon a tiger swift as the wind.  The Elizabethan dramatists were fascinated by the terrors of the invisible world.  Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, round whose name are clustered legends centuries old concerning bargains between man and the devil, the apparitions and witches in Macbeth, the dead hand, the corpse-like images, the masque of madmen, the tombmaker and the passing-bell in Webster’s sombre tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, prove triumphantly the dramatic possibilities of terror.  As a foil to his Masque of Queens (1609) Ben Jonson introduced twelve loathly witches with Ate as their leader, and embellished his description of their profane rites, with details culled from James I.’s treatise on Demonology and from learned ancient authorities.