So Hrungnir put down his shield and stood on it and took his stone club in two hands. Then he saw lightnings and heard thunder, and Thor's hammer came flying: it caught the hone and broke it, and went into Hrungnir's stone skull and cracked it into little pieces. The hone was broken: half of it went into Thor's head. The mud giant fell to Thialfi, and made a poor end. The healing of Thor's head is another story.

cance.

Odin.

Odin has a different method and a different signifiOne of the poems in the Elder Edda, The Lay of Harbard, has for its subject the contention of Thor and Odin, of Force and Wit. The spirit of Odin, the scholar-adventurer, was contrasted with the native unsophisticated strength of Thor. So long ago, even before the old faith was discarded, Norway had begun to contribute satirical dialogue to this part of the everlasting comedy, the antithesis of old custom and new reason, in which the latest Norwegian authors still find something to say. And yet earlier and older than The Lay of Harbard is the solemn deliverance of the mind of Odin in The High One's Lesson (Hávamál): “I hung on the gallows-tree nine whole nights, wounded with the spear, offered to Woden, myself to myself; on the tree whose roots no man knoweth. They gave me no loaf, they held no horn to me. I peered down, I caught up the mysteries with a cry, then I fell back. I learned nine songs of might . . . I got the draught of the precious mead . . . then I became fruitful and wise,

and waxed great and flourished; word followed fast on word with me, work followed fast on work with me." 1

The agony of Odin is a myth of a different sort from the downright methods of Thor with the giants, and the early Northern religious poet knew this and brought it out. As Prometheus takes on an ideal character, with a tragic depth and meaning far beyond the original old conceptions of the philanthropic Titan, so Odin with the Northmen grows more and more in significance, and stands for all the perplexities and questionings of the human race.

Balder.

The myths of the death of Balder and the Doom of the Gods have been explained and admired too often to need much comment. Perhaps one reason why modern treatment of these subjects is so often found unsatisfactory is that the original documents have left nothing for modern imagination to do. The Volospá and Balder's Dream, with the prose of the Edda, have got out of the myths their whole imaginative essence.

The tragedy of the Doom of the Powers, the end of the world, seems to have been the ruling idea of the later Northern mythology, or at any rate that which impressed itself most deeply in poetic meditations on such themes. Perhaps the Teutons had always a suspicion that their gods were mortal. The story of the death of Balder is probably a very old one. Originally perhaps a nature-myth, of the death of summer, or of the day, its ideas of mortality were

1 Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i. 24.

retained after the natural origin of the story was forgotten; it became the symbolic tragedy of all death, the triumph of Time. The idea also that the whole system of the world-Heaven and Earth and the Gods-was fated to disappear, was probably a very old one. Zeus in the Prometheus Bound is conscious of danger ahead, though the sympathies of the audience are not attracted to him in the same way. Zeus is in the position of Odin, trying all shifts to get at the mystery of his fate, as Odin goes about asking questions of Vafthrudnir and others, trying to find out all he can of the way things are going "until the wreck of the gods" (unz riúfask regin). This situation, which is exceptional in Greek, becomes the ruling motive in Scandinavian legend. The realm of Chaos and old Night is to rise against the gods and overcome them; the Wolf, the old enemy, is unchained; the World-serpent of the ocean raises its head against them. Out of the chaotic fire of Muspellsheim comes a fiendish army led by a king with a flaming sword. The Æsir stand on the ramparts of Asgarth, and with them the heroes who have fallen in battle on earth, and have been chosen by Odin's Valkyries to be the fellows of the gods in the last conflict. Thor slays the Midgarth-worm, but its venom is the death of him. The Wolf attacks Odin; it is written: "Few men can see further than the day when Odin shall meet with the wolf."

The latest prophets of the old faith thought they saw something further: Balder coming again, and a new Heaven and a new Earth. But perhaps this was

not the common belief; this part of Northern tradition is full of analogies with the Christian Apocalypse; it belongs, as is clearly explained by the editors of Corpus Poeticum Boreale, to the Viking age, when the Northmen in France, Ireland, everywhere, were in close acquaintance with Christian ideas and with repeated pictures of Doomsday. They were not a dull people; besides their economic motives for roving, they had the appetite for seeing the world and learning the ways of foreigners (at kanna annarra manna siðu); they could not fail to learn much of the beliefs that provided them with their richest earnings, in churches and convents. What is distinctly Northern in the myth of the Twilight of the Gods is the strength of its theory of life. It is this intensity of courage that distinguishes the Northern mythology (and Icelandic literature generally) from all others. The last word of the Northmen before their entry into the larger world of Southern culture, their last independent guess at the secret of the Universe, is given in the Twilight of the Gods. As far as it goes, and as a working theory, it is absolutely impregnable. It is the assertion of the individual freedom against all the terrors and temptations of the world. It is absolute resistance, perfect because without hope. The Northern gods have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more

1 The term "Twilight of the Gods" (ragnarökr), used regularly by Snorri, is probably to be taken, as Gudbrand Vigfusson explains, for a confusion with "Doom of the Gods" (ragnarök) which occurs re peatedly, while the other occurs once only, in the mythological

poems.

like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason; but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat is not refutation. The latest mythology of the North is an allegory of the Teutonic self-will, carried to its noblest terms, deified by the men for whom all religion was coming to be meaningless except "trust in one's own might and main❞—the creed of Kjartan Olafsson1 and Sigmund Brestisson 2 before they accepted Christianity.

The Northmen in the Dark Ages had already discovered the imaginative, poetical, romantic value of myth. They allowed this interest more and more to absorb what remained of a practical and effective belief in the gods. The gods became a fable: and in this way, because the fable, the adventures of Thor and Odin, the death of Balder, the fall of Asgarth, was not found inconsistent with new forms of religion, the mythology of the North was preserved, when the mythology of England and Germany, being without a poetic mind to translate it into romance, was driven to its refuges and disguises in common folk-lore.

The Celtic mythology was not so fortunate as the Norse; but the same imaginative temper is found in Ireland and Irish literature, the same refusal to give up

Wales. good stories on account of religious objections to them. The difference between Ireland and Iceland is that the original heathen traditions had become much more obscure and corrupt in Ireland before the 1 Laxdæla Saga. 2 Færeyinga Saga.