“Well,” said the Parson, “I believe all northern nations have a natural turn for drunkenness, but laws and regulations may increase or diminish the amount of it; and the laws of both these countries tend most particularly to increase it. With you it is a regular case of ‘Drunkenness made easy.’ Besides, public opinion sets that way too. If I were suspected of anything approaching to the state of our friends down below, I never could face my parish again. Your parish priest might be carried home and tucked into bed by a dozen of his faithful and hard-headed parishioners on Saturday night, and if the thing did not come round too often, would get up not a pin the worse on Sunday morning, either in health or in reputation.”
“I think,” said the Captain, “public presents are a very fair test of public propensities. In the snuffy days of the last century and the beginning of this, every public character, from the Duke of Wellington down to William Cobbett, had the freedoms of all sorts of things given them in golden snuff-boxes. Now, look at your people. When your king paid a visit to the University of Upsala, the most appropriate present he could think of making to that learned body, was an ancient drinking-horn,—of course, by way of encouraging the national tastes. And when he made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Odin and Freya, the most appropriate present which that learned body could make to him in their turn, was another ancient drinking-horn, which had the additional value of having once been the property of those heroic, but, if there is any truth in Sagas, exceedingly drunken divinities.”
“Well, well,” said Birger, good-humouredly (and it must be said that his was a case of good-humour under difficulties), “every nation has its own national sins to answer for, and it is no use for me to deny that ours is drunkenness. But what else can you expect from a people whose ideal of the joys of heaven used to be fighting all day, and after a huge dinner of boiled pork, getting beastly drunk upon beer? Gangler, in the prose Edda, asks Har, ‘How do your Heroes pass their time in Valhalla when they are not drinking?’ And Har replies, ‘Every day, as soon as they have dressed themselves, they ride out into the court, and fight till they cut each other in pieces. This is their pastime; but when meal-time approaches, they return to drink in Valhalla.’ Or, if you will have the same in verse, this is what the Vafthrudnis Mal says:—
The Einherjir all,
On Odin’s plain,
Hew daily each other
While chosen the slain are;
From the fray they then ride,
And drink ale with the Œsir.”