e Enchanted Princess, a heathen goddess.

The visits to Fairyland recorded in Chapter VII differ only in one
respect from those mentioned in earlier chapters of this book. Like
them, they are visits of business or of pleasure. Mortals are summoned
to perform some service for the mysterious beings whose dwelling is
beneath the earth, such as to stand sponsor to their children, or to
shoe their horses; or they go to take a message from this world, or to
bring a message back. Or else they are drawn into the regions over which
the power of the supernatural extends, by curiosity, by the desire of
pleasure, or else by the invitation, or unconsciously by the spell, of
their superhuman inhabitants. The point at which the visits differ from
those we have previously considered, and from a hundred others precisely
parallel in all other respects, is in their length. To the entrammelled
mortal the visit seems to last but a moment; for while under the fairy
sway he is unconscious of the flight of time. In other stories deception
is practised on the sight. The midwife, without the ointment, is
deceived like Thor by Utgard-Loki: nothing is as it appears to her.
Parents and husbands are deceived by changelings: they are made to
believe that images of dead wood are living creatures, or human corpses.
In these stories, on the other hand, the magic is directed against the
sense of time. A subtler, a weirder, a more awful horror is thus added
to the dread of communion with the supernatural.

This horror is one arising comparatively late in the history of culture.
The idea of time must first grow up and be elaborated. Time is dependent
on number. A savage who can barely count beyond five cannot know
anything of stories which deal with the lapse of centuries. Even the
vaguer, but shorter, period of a generation will be an idea he cannot
grasp. We have therefore found no such tales in the lower savagery; and
even among the Lapplanders and the Siberian tribes the stories we have
been able to collect speak only of short periods, such as the transition
from autumn to spring, where a man had slept through the winter, and the
expansion of a day into a month, or a year. In these two cases not only
the phases of the moon and the measurement of time by them, which must
have been early in development, but also the cycle of the seasons had
been observed. But the idea lying at the root of this group of tales is
as yet only in germ. The full terror of t