Page:Book of Were-wolves.djvu/49

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THE BOOK OF WERE-WOLVES.

In the Faroëse song of Finnur hin friði, we have the following verse:—

Hegar íð Finnur hetta sær.
Mannspell var at meini,
Skapti hann seg í varglíki:
Hann feldi allvæl fleiri.
When this peril Finn saw,
That witchcraft did him harm,
Then he changed himself into a were-wolf:
He slew many thus.

The following is from the second Kviða of Helga Hundingsbana (stroph. 31):—

May the blade bite,
Which thou brandishest
Only on thyself,
when it Chimes on thy head.
Then avenged will be
The death of Helgi,
When thou, as a wolf,
Wanderest in the woods,
Knowing nor fortune
Nor any pleasure,
Haying no meat,
Save rivings of corpses.

In all these cases the change is of the form: we shall now come to instances in which the person who is changed has a double shape, and the soul animates one after the other.

The Ynglinga Saga (c. 7) says of Odin, that "he changed form; the bodies lay as though sleeping or dead, but he was a bird or a beast, a fish, or a woman, and went in a twinkling to far distant lands, doing his

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