Uskie-bae ne'er bure the bell
Sae bald as Allan bure himsel[[543]].
Byggvir adopts the same comic-heroic pose:
Byggvir am I named, and all gods and men call me hasty; proud am I, by reason that all the children of Odin are drinking ale together[[544]].
But any claims Byggvir may make to be a hero are promptly dismissed by Loki:
Hold thou silence, Byggvir, for never canst thou share food justly among men: thou didst hide among the straw of the hall: they could not find thee, when men were fighting[[545]].
Now the taunts of Loki, though we must hope for the credit of Asgard that they are false, are never pointless. And such jibes as Loki addresses to Byggvir would be pointless, if applied to one whom we could think of as in any way like our Beowulf. Later, Beyla, wife of Byggvir, speaks, and is silenced with the words "Hold thy peace—wife thou art of Byggvir." Byggvir must have been a recognized figure of the old mythology[[546]], but one differing from the monster-slaying Beow of Müllenhoff's imagination.
Byggvir is a little creature (et lítla), and we have seen above[[547]] that Scandinavian scholars have thought that they have discovered this old god in the Pekko who "promoted the growth of barley" among the Finns in the sixteenth century, and who is still worshipped among the Esthonians on the opposite side of the gulf as a three year old child; the form Pekko being derived, it is supposed, from the primitive Norse form *Beggwuz. This is a corner of a very big subject: the discovery, among the Lapps and Finns, of traces of the heathendom of the most
ancient Teutonic world, just as Thomsen has taught us to find in the Finnish language traces of Teutonic words in their most antique form.