We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues.
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He married a girl from Finnland, but forgot about her. In revenge, the girl arranged so that Vanlandi was hag ridden to death. He was succeeded by his son Visbur.
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The contrast between light-loving Athens and benighted Minoan Crete, hag-ridden with religion, reflects another authorial preference. (The epigraph, from Bacchylides, is δίζησθαι δὲ φιλαγλάους Ἀθάνας, 'Set out for Athens, land that loves the light'.) Extracts from the poem were read on the BBC Home Service in 1934.Passages from 'Ariadne' by F. L. Lucas, read by Nesta Sawyer, 6 Sept. 1934: genome.ch.bbc.co.
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In Newfoundland, sleep paralysis is referred to as the Old Hag, and victims of a hagging are said to be hag-ridden upon awakening. Victims report being completely conscious, but unable to speak or move, and report a person or an animal which sits upon their chest. Despite the name, the attacker can be either male or female. Some suggested cures or preventions for the Old Hag include sleeping with a Bible under the pillow, calling the sleeper's name backwards or in an extreme example, sleeping with a shingle or board embedded with nails strapped to the chest.
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These fall into two broad categories: those that explain the occurrence of misfortune and are thus grounded in real events, and those that are wholly fantastic. The first category includes the powers to cause impotence, to turn milk sour, to strike people dead, to cause diseases, to raise storms, to cause infants to be stillborn, to prevent cows from giving milk, to prevent hens from laying and to blight crops. The second includes the power to fly in the air, to change form into a hare, to suckle familiar spirits from warts, to sail on a single plank and perhaps most absurd of all, to go to sea in an eggshell. Witches were often believed to fly on broomsticks or distaffs, or occasionally upon unwilling human beings, who would be called 'hag-ridden'.
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Horses found sweating in their stalls in the morning were also said to be hag-ridden. The accused witch Isobel Gowdie gave the following charm as her means of transmuting herself into a hare: Painting by William Rimmer depicting the Three Witches from William Shakespeare's Macbeth Especially in media aimed at children (such as fairy tales), witches are often depicted as wicked old women with wrinkled skin and pointy hats, clothed in black or purple, with warts on their noses and sometimes long claw-like fingernails. Like the Three Witches from Macbeth, they are often portrayed as concocting potions in large cauldrons. Witches typically ride through the air on a broomstick as in the Harry Potter universe or in more modern spoof versions, a vacuum cleaner as in the Hocus Pocus universe.
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The Ynglinga saga might also be an example of anti-royal social commentary rather than an attempt to tell history. Many of the kings in the saga are overshadowed by their contemporary vassals and wives, and they are rarely shown in a positive light. The inglorious deaths of many of the Swedish Ynglings; with examples such as murder, burning to death, drowning in mead and being "hag-ridden" to death, might be an attempt by Sturluson to say that the kings who ruled Norway in his time and claimed Yngling descent were not to be taken seriously. Though descent from figures such as Odin and Njord, gods in Norse mythology, might seem a prestigious origin, it would be problematic in early medieval Norway since the kings were Christian and their supposed ancestors were worshipped as Pagan gods.
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Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando at Paris "The Big Four" made all the major decisions at the Paris Peace Conference (from left to right, Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, Woodrow Wilson of the U.S.) Lloyd George represented Britain at the Paris Peace Conference, clashing with the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, the US President, Woodrow Wilson, and the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando. Unlike Clemenceau and Orlando, Lloyd George on the whole stood on the side of generosity and moderation. He did not want to utterly destroy the German economy and political system—as Clemenceau demanded—with massive reparations. The economist John Maynard Keynes looked askance at Lloyd George's economic credentials in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and in Essays in Biography called the Prime Minister a "goat-footed bard, half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity".
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