Grim

   Several names of prehistoric landscape features such as earthworks, hill forts, and flint mines, include the element 'Grim-'. The name Grimsditch occurs in eleven counties (in some, more than once); Grimsbury twice; Grime's Graves, Grimspound, and Grim's Hill once each. Presumably this Grim was a supernatural entity - perhaps Woden, since his Scandinavian equivalent, Odin, had 'Grimr' as a secondary name, and since the massive earthwork Wansdyke (Wiltshire) was undoubtedly named for him. However, there is also an Anglo-Saxon noun grima, meaning 'goblin' or 'spectre', so the situation is not clear-cut. Jennifer Westwood suggests that 'it is a question of scale', awe-inspiring features being ascribed to the god, small ones to the goblin (Westwood, 1985: 69-72).

   The *chapbook Life of Robin Goodfellow (1628) has among its characters a 'Fairy Grim' who boasts that he frightens many people by crying like a screech-owl at sick men's windows, that some call him the *Black Dog of Newgate, and that when young people are making merry he comes in 'in some feareful shape' to scare them away and steal their food. The Yorkshire 'church grim' lurked inside the building, but would 'maraud abroad' in stormy weather; it might toll the death-knell at midnight, and peer from a window during funerals, showing by its expression whether the dead person was saved or damned (Wright, 1913: 194). It also sometimes showed itself as a death warning, in the form of a black dog.