“Well done, St. Olaf,” said the Captain; “I thought that all his conversions were effected by the weight of his battle-axe.”
“Why, you Englishmen acknowledge him as a saint as well as we,” said Captain Hjelmar. “Have you not, in your great City of London, a church dedicated to him? and is there not also a place called Cripplegate?”
“There certainly are such places,” said the Parson, “but what they have to do with one another, or with Norway, is more than I can see.”
“There was a man in Walland, so great a cripple that he was obliged to go on his hands and knees, and it was revealed to him that if he should go to St. Olaf’s Church, in London, he should be healed. How he got there, I cannot tell you; but he did, and he was crawling along, and the boys were laughing at him, as he asked them which was St. Olaf’s Church, when a man, dressed in blue and carrying an axe on his shoulder, said, ‘Come with me, for I have become a countryman of yours.’ So he took up the cripple and carried him through the streets, and placed him on the steps of the church. Much difficulty had the poor man to crawl up the steps; but when he arrived at the top he rose up straight and whole, and walked to the altar to give thanks; but the man with the battle-axe had vanished, and was never seen more; and the people thought it was the blessed St. Olaf himself, and they called the place where the cripple was found ‘Cripplegate,’ and so they tell me it is called to this day.”[40]
“Faith! I can answer for that part of the story myself,” said the Captain; “the place is called Cripplegate, sure enough, but I am afraid St. Olaf has long since ceased to frequent it, for we have not heard of any miracles done lately in those parts. But what is your story about the ‘bale-fires,’ Birger, for I see another in process of erection on that cape?—that looks like a remarkably good boat they are going to burn in it.”
“That legend, like most of those from the Eddas, is purely allegorical, and, unlike most of them, is very intelligible. Baldur, among the Æsir, is the Principle of Good, and everything that is bright, or beautiful, or innocent, is dedicated to him, and among other things, that part of the year which begins at Walpurgis Night, when the reign of the frost ceases, and ends at this day, the summer’s solstice—that is to say, the whole of that time in which light and warmth are getting the mastery over cold and darkness. These commemorate the happy days of Asgard, before the Principle of Evil had crept in; and had they only continued, the whole world would have been by this time glowing in perpetual light, and spring, and happiness.
“But Loki himself, one of the twelve of the principal Æsir, became envious of this, and was jealous that all the good in the world should be ascribed to Baldur; so he resolved to kill him. This the Nornir revealed to Baldur in a vision, and the goddess Freya took an oath of everything that walked on the earth, or swam the waters, or flew in the air, or grew from the ground, or was under it, that they would not hurt Baldur; and then the gods would laugh at the revelation of the Nornir, and would shoot at Baldur with stones, and masses of iron, and thrust at him with their spears, and cut at him with their swords and axes; but they all passed him by for the oath’s sake, which all nature had given.
“So Loki said to the mistletoe, ‘Thou dost neither run, nor fly, nor swim, nor grow from the ground, nor lie under it; there is no oath for thee.’ So he gathered the stem of the mistletoe, and placed it in the hand of Hodur, the god of Blindness, and said, ‘shoot, like the other gods, and I will direct thy hand:’ and he shot, and Baldur fell dead in the midst of the gods, and innocence departed from the earth; and then the days which had hitherto been getting brighter and brighter, so that darkness had began to fly from the face of the earth, now began to close in again, and darkness began to increase.
“In vain did Hermod, the brother of Baldur,[41] undertake the journey to the realms of Hela. So much was accorded, that if all nature would agree to mourn for the death of Baldur, he should be restored to earth; but though everything did so, as the Edda has it, ‘Men and animals, and earth, and stones, and trees, and all metals, even as thou hast seen everything weep when it comes forth from the frost into the warm air, yet the giantess, Thaukt, who it is said was but Loki in disguise, refused to weep.’
“‘Neither in life, nor yet in death,