well-known names have become
affixed to the traditions as they happened from time to time to strike
the popular imagination. This is confirmed by the fact that in many
places where similar traditions are located, no personal name at all is
given to the hero. In the Guckenberg, near Fraenkischgemuenden, _an
emperor_ disappeared a long time ago with his army. A boy selling rolls
once met an old man, to whom he complained of bad trade. The old man
said he could show him a place where he could bring his rolls every day;
but he must tell no one thereof. So saying, he led the boy into the
mountain, where there were many people. The emperor himself sat at a
table, round which his beard had grown twice: when it has grown round
it once more he will come forth again with all his men. The boy's rolls
were bought; and he daily repeated his visit. After a while, however, he
could not pass the ancient coin wherein he was paid. The people in the
village, grown suspicious, made him confess all; and he could never find
his way to the mountain again. In the "Auersperg Chronicle," under the
year 1223, it is recorded that from a certain mountain which Grimm
identifies with the Donnersberg (Thor's mountain), near Worms, a
multitude of armed horsemen used daily to issue, and thither daily to
return. A man, who armed himself with the sign of the cross, and
questioned one of the host in the name of Our Lord, was told by him: "We
are not, as you think, phantoms, nor, as we seem, a band of soldiers,
but the souls of slain soldiers. The arms and clothing, and horses,
because they once were the instruments of sin, are now to us the
materials of our punishment; for what you behold upon us is really on
fire, although you cannot perceive it with your bodily eyes." We saw in
an earlier chapter that a story influenced by the Welsh Methodist
revival represented the midwife whose sight was cleared by fairy
ointment as beholding herself surrounded by flames, and the fairies
about her in the guise of devils. In the same way here the wonders
recorded by a pious ecclesiastic have taken, though possibly not in the
first instance from him, a strictly orthodox form, and one calculated to
point a pulpit moral.[161]

Over against the last two legends we may place two from Upper Alsace. A
body of the Emperor Karl the Great's warriors had become so puffed up by
their successes that at last they pointed their guns and cannon against
heaven itself. Scarcely had they