, like the rats whom he declared they resembled,
rather than give them some of the precious grain which he had laid
up for himself.

"'I' faith, 'tis an excellent bonfire!' quoth he,
'And the country is greatly obliged to me
For ridding it in these times forlorn
Of rats that only consume the corn.'"

Robert Southey.

Soon after this terrible crime had been accomplished the bishop's
retainers reported the approach of a vast swarm of rats. These, it
appears, were the souls of the murdered peasants, which had assumed the
forms of the rats to which the bishop had likened them. His efforts
to escape were vain, and the rats pursued him even into the middle
of the Rhine, to a stone tower in which he took refuge from their
fangs. They swam to the tower, gnawed their way through the stone
walls, and, pouring in on all sides at once, they found the bishop
and devoured him alive.

"And in at the windows, and in at the door,
And through the walls, helter-skelter they pour,
And down from the ceiling, and up through the floor,
From the right and the left, from behind and before,
From within and without, from above and below,
And all at once to the Bishop they go.
They have whetted their teeth against the stones;
And now they pick the Bishop's bones;
They gnaw'd the flesh from every limb,
For they were sent to do judgment on him!"

Robert Southey.

The red glow of the sunset above the Rat Tower near Bingen on the
Rhine is supposed to be the reflection of the hell fire in which the
wicked bishop is slowly roasting in punishment for his heinous crime.

Irmin

In some parts of Germany Odin was considered to be identical with
the Saxon god Irmin, whose statue, the Irminsul, near Paderborn, was
destroyed by Charlemagne in 772. Irmin was said to possess a ponderous
brazen chariot, in which he rode across the sky along the path which
we know as the Milky Way, but which the ancient Germans designated
as Irmin's Way. This chariot, whose rumbling sound occasionally
became perceptible to mortal ears as thunder, never left the sky,
where it can still be seen in the constellation of the Great Bear,
which is also known in the North as Odin's, or Charles's, Wain.

"The Wain, who wheels on high
His circling course, and on Orion waits;
Sole star that never bathes in the Ocean wave."

Homer's Iliad (Derby's tr.).