The Girl at the Troll-Dance

THE GIRL AT THE TROLL DANCE

 

A GIRL, belonging to a village in the isle of' Funen, went out, one evening, into the fields, and as she was passing by a small hill, she saw that it was raised upon red pillars, and a Troll-banquet going on beneath it. She was invited in, and such was the gaiety and festivity that prevailed, that she never perceived the flight of time. At length, however, she took her departure, after having spent, as she thought, a few hours among the joyous hill-people. But when she came to the village she no longer found it the place she had left. All was changed; and when she entered the house in which she had lived with her family, she learned that her father and mother had long been dead, and the house had come into the hands of strangers. She now perceived. that for every hour that she had been among the Trolls, a year had elapsed in the external world. The effect on her mind. was such that she lost her reason, which she never after recovered. [a]

 

[a] Thiele, iv. 21. In Otmar's Volksagen, there is a German legend of Peter Klaus, who slept a steep of twenty years in the bowling-green of the Kyffhäuser, from which Washington Irving made his Ripp van Winkle. We shall also find it in the Highlands of Scotland. It is the Irish legend of Clough na Cuddy, so extremely well told by Mr. C. Croker (to which, by the way, we contributed a Latin song), in the notes to which further information will be found. The Seven Sleepers seems to be the original.