to three ogres, who come successively to fetch her; and a certain Ritter Red professes to be man enough to rescue her, but on the approach of the first ogre proves to be a coward and climbs a tree.  But Shortshanks slips off from his scullery; and having a weapon which can put a whole army to flight by a single stroke, he is very brave, and keeps a remarkably good face to the foe, giving him with his tongue as good as he sends, and, laughing the ogres’ dubs to scorn, cuts off the ogrous heads, (there are five on the first individual, ten on the second, and fifteen on the third,) and carries off much treasure from the ships in which his foes came to fetch their victim.  Ritter Red descends, and takes the lungs and the tongues of the ogres, (though, as the latter were thirty in number and of gigantic size, he must have had trouble in carrying them,) and wishes to pass them off as evidence that he is the deliverer of the princess, of which they would seem to have been very satisfactory proof:  but the gold, silver, and diamonds carry the day; Shortshanks has the princess and half the kingdom, and Ritter Red is thrown into a pit full of snakes,—­on the French general’s principle, we suppose, who hung his cowards “pour encourager les autres.”  But the king has another daughter, whom an ogre has carried off to the bottom of the sea.  Shortshanks discovers her while the ogre is out looking for a man who can brew a hundred lasts of malt at one strike.  He finds the man at home, of course, and puts him to his task.  Shortshanks gets the ogre and all his kith and kin to help the brew, and brews the wort so strong, that, on tasting it, they all fall down dead, except one, an old woman, “who lay bed-ridden in the chimney-corner,” and to her our hero carries his wort and kills her too.  He then carries off the treasure of the ogres, and gives this princess and the other half of the kingdom to his brother Sturdy.

Now we have no particular fault to find with such stories as these, when they are produced as characteristic specimens of the folk-lore of a people; as such, they have a value beside their intrinsic interest;—­but when we are asked to receive them as part of the evidence that that people is an honest and manly race, and as an acceptable addition to our stock of household tales, we demur.  The truth is, that the very worth of these tales is to be found not only in the fact that they form a part of the stock from which our own are derived, but in the other fact that they represent that stock as it existed at an earlier and ruder stage of humanitarian development.  They were told by savage mothers to savage children; and although some of them teach the few virtues common to barbarism and civilization, they are filled with the glorification of savage vice and crime;—­deceit, theft, violence, even ruthless vengeance upon a cruel parent, are constantly practised by the characters which they hold up to favor.  Such humor as they have, too, is of the coarsest kind, and is expressed chiefly in rude practical jokes, or the bloody overreaching of the poor thick-headed Trolls, who are the butts of the stories and the victims of their heroes.  There is good ethnological and mythological reason why the Trolls should be butts and victims, it is true; but that is not to the present purpose.