So taking Loki with him clad as a serving-maid, the god fares to Thrym’s house, as though he were the looked-for bride. It must, one would suppose, have been an anxious time for Thor and Loki, while unarmed they sate in the hall of the giant; for the hero could not avoid raising some suspicions by his unwomanly appearance and demeanour. He alone devoured, we are told, an ox, eight salmon, ‘and all the sweetmeats women should have,’ and he drank eight ‘scalds’ of mead. Thrym naturally exclaimed that he never saw brides eat so greedily or drink so much mead. But the ‘all-crafty’ Loki sitting by, explained how this was owing to the hurry Freyja was in to behold her bridegroom, which left her no time to eat for the eight nights during which she had been journeying there. And so again when Thrym says—
‘Why are so piercing Freyja’s glances?
Methinks that fire burns from her eyes,’
Loki explains that for the same reason she had not slept upon her journey; and the foolish, vain giant is gulled once more. At last the coveted prize, the hammer, was brought in to consecrate the marriage, and ‘Thor’s soul laughed in his breast, when the fierce-hearted his hammer knew. He slew Thrym, the Thursar’s (giant’s) lord, and the Jötun’s race crushed he utterly.’
At another time Thor engages Alvîs, ‘of the race of the Thursar,’[122] in conversation upon all manner of topics, concerning the names which different natural objects bear among men, among gods, among giants, and among dwarfs, until he guilefully keeps him above earth till after sunrise, which it is not possible for a dwarf or Jötun to do and live. So Alvîs bursts asunder.[123] This tale shows clearly enough how much Thor’s enemies are allied with darkness.
Thor is not always so successful. In another of his journeys[124] the giants play a series of tricks upon him, quite suitable to the Teutonic conception of the cold north, as a place of magic, glamour, and illusion. One giant induces the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him, and to hurl at it the death-dealing bolt—his hammer Mjölnir. Afterwards he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely more than the rim has been left bare; at the same time Loki engages in an eating match with one Logi, and is utterly worsted. But in reality Thor’s horn has reached to the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Next Thor is unable to lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth the great Midgard serpent which girds the whole earth. Finally he is overcome in a wrestling match with an old hag, whose name is Ella, that is Old Age or Death. Enough has been said in these stories to show how directly the cloak of Thor descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and Jack of the Bean-Stalk.
Not unconnected with the sun-god are the mythical heroes of northern poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of Germany and Scandinavia. The famous Sigurd the Volsung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of the Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem Beowulf,[125] are especially at war with dragons—which represent the powers of darkness—or with beings of a Jötun-like character. They are all discoverers of treasure; and this so far corresponds with the character of Thor that the thunderbolt is often spoken of as the revealer of the treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was employed as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the account of these adventures we see how entirely unhuman in character most of them were, and how much the incidents in the drama bear a reminiscence of the natural phenomena from which they sprang.
This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is weird and imaginative in the highest degree: the atmosphere into which we are thrown seems to be the misty delusive air of Jötunheim, and the unearthly beings whom Beowulf encounters must have had birth within the shadows of night and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on human beings, whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thor wrestles with Ella) and puts to death, is described as an ‘inhabiter of the moors,’ the ‘fen and fastnesses;’ he comes upon the scene ‘like a cloud from the misty hills, through the wan night a shadow-walker stalking;’ and of him and his mother it is said,
‘They a father know not,
Whether any of them was
Born before
Of the dark ghosts.’
They inhabit, in a secret land, the wolves’ retreat, and in ‘windy ways—
Where the mountain stream
Under the ness’s mist
Downward flows.’