The "mission" of these Pandemonium giants is precisely analogous to that of the rest of the fraternity. Satan says to Beelzebub,—
Of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to His high will
Whom we resist. If then His providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.
The trolls and giants of the Norse traditions are evidently but other forms of the common myth, notwithstanding the metamorphoses which they, in some respects, seem to have undergone. Dasent points out some kinder qualities which the giants occasionally exhibit. He says:—"One sympathises, too, with them, and almost pities them as the representatives of a simple primitive race, whose day is past and gone, but who still possessed something of the innocence and virtue of ancient times, together with a stock of old experience, which, however useful it might be as an example to others, was quite useless to help themselves." Yet he regards them as the embodiment of "sheer brute force," which yields to the "slight and lissom foe" representing virtue and reason. The "upstart Æsir gods," to whom they are opposed, are described as endowed with "that diviner wrath which, though burning hot, was still under the control of reason." The trolls, on the contrary, are subject to wild paroxysms of merely brutal animal rage, which discloses their true parentage. The fact that their enemies, the Æsir gods, were afterwards dethroned, and stigmatised, along with the classical deities, as cacodæmons, and became associated with the giants as evil spirits, will perhaps explain why some of the race have been endowed with attributes which do not pertain to the rest. It appears that they knew of their common destiny; that they sometimes suspended hostilities, and even intermarried; and looked forward with joint melancholy gloom to that, to them, awful day, "the twilight of the gods," when both should fall before the light of the Christian revelation.
The Venerable Bede, in describing the martyrdom of St. Alban, expressly states that the magistrate or judge "was standing at the altar, and offering sacrifice to devils," the said devils being the gods of the Romans. He afterwards informs us that, when the bishops Germanicus and Lupus were on a voyage to Britain, "on a sudden they were obstructed by the malevolence of demons, who were jealous that such men should be sent to bring back the Britons to the faith. They raised storms and darkened the sky with clouds." Their efforts were fruitless, nevertheless, as the piety of the bishops prevailed against them. The Old Nick of the English, literally the devil, is but one form of Odin dethroned. Professor Henry Morley, in his "English Writers," says,—"Odin, under the name of Nikarr, from a root signifying stroke of violence, which appears in the Greek νίκη victory; in the Latin necare and Anglo-Saxon næcan, to kill; and in the English Knock; having been first cut up into Nickers, has become the Old Nick of more recent times."
Dasent speaks of the trolls "as more systematically malignant than the giants, and with the term were bound up notions of sorcery and unholy power." He justly adds,—
"But mythology is a woof of many colours, in which the hues are shot and blended, so that the various races of supernatural beings are shaded off and fade away almost imperceptibly into each other; and thus, even in heathen times, it must have been hard to say exactly where the giant ended and the troll began. But when Christianity came in and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the Æsir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief, whether Æsir, giants, or trolls, were mingled together in one superstition, as 'no canny.' They were all trolls, all malignant, and thus it is that, in these tales, the traditions about Odin and his underlings, about the frost giants, and about sorcerers and wizards, are confused and garbled; and all supernatural agency that plots man's ill is the work of trolls, whether the agent be the arch enemy himself, or giant, or witch, or wizard."
Mr. Hunt appears to regard some of the giant traditions of Cornwall as having direct reference to the aboriginal inhabitants of the country. There may be some truth in this, as the existence of such demi-giants as his Tom, who defeated giant Blunderbus by the skilful employment of the wheel and axle of his wagon, would seem to indicate. The wheel and axle, however, is an Aryan sun emblem, and one type of the "chark" or "fire-bringing" instrument, invented, according to the Greeks, by Prometheus. This unquestionably demonstrates its descent from the ancient solar myths. Conquered men driven to the caves and mountain fastnesses, and addicted to violence and cruelty, would soon be described figuratively by language which literally referred to older superstitions; just as we now designate sanguinary savages as monsters, fiends, and even "devils incarnate." This, no doubt, offers the most probable interpretation of the Gog-Magog story, as well as of many others of its class. Dasent says,—
"Between this outcast nomade race, which wandered from forest to forest, and from fell to fell, without a fixed place of abode, and the old natural powers and frost giants, the minds of the race which adored Odin and the Æsir soon engendered a monstrous man-eating cross-breed of supernatural beings, who fled from contact with the intruders as soon as the first great struggle was over, abhorred the light of day, and looked upon agriculture and tillage as a dangerous innovation which destroyed their hunting fields, and was destined finally to root them out from off the face of the earth."
Mackenzie informs us that the Esquimaux with whom he conversed had a tradition that the English were giants, with wings, who could kill with a glance of their eye, and swallow at a mouthful an entire beaver.
If the European emigrants who have conquered North America from the Red Indian, and nearly extirpated his race, had been as superstitious as their forefathers were some two or three thousand years ago, we should have had a similar class of mixed myths resulting from their warlike contact. Indeed, we have, notwithstanding the influence of Christianity, some faint indications that the superstitious element in this direction has not yet completely died out.