But with this, the versatile Greek is not content. He multiplies the sins and the punishments. Tartaros is full of despair and tears, and the wicked there suffer a variety of tortures. Enormous vultures continually gnaw the liver of Tityos, but it always grows again. Ixion is lashed with serpents to a wheel, which a strong wind drives continually round and round. Tantalos suffers from an unceasing dread of being crushed by a great rock that hangs over his head; he stands in a stream of water that flows up to his throat, and he almost perishes from thirst; whenever he bends his head to drink the water recedes; delicious fruits hang over his head, whenever he stretches out his hand they evade his grasp. Thus it is to be tantalized. The Danaïdes must fill a cistern that has holes in the bottom; all the water they pour in runs out equally fast. Sisyphos, sweating and all out of breath, rolls his huge stone up the mountain side; when he reaches the summit, the stone rolls down again.
The fundamental idea is always the same. It is always punishment for sin; but it is expressed and illustrated in many different ways. The variety enhances the beauty. The Greek mythology is rich, for profuseness of illustration is wealth. The Norse mythology is poor, because it is so strong; it consumes all its strength in the profoundness of its thought. The Norse mythology excels in the concentratedness and strength of the whole system; the Greek excels in the beauty of the separate groups of myths. The one is a religion of strength, the other of beauty.
The influence that the outward features of a country exercise upon the thoughts and feelings of men, especially during the vigorous, imaginative, poetic and prophetic childhood of a nation, can hardly be overestimated. Necessarily, therefore, do we find this influence affecting and modifying a nation’s mythology, which is a child-like people’s thoughts and feelings, contemplating nature reflected in a system of religion. Hence, it is eminently fitting, in comparing the Norse mythology with the Greek, to take a look at the home of the Norsemen. We, therefore, cordially invite the traveler from the smooth-beaten tracks of southern Europe to the mountains, lakes, valleys and fjords of Norseland. You may come in midsummer, when Balder (the summer sunlight) rules supreme, when the radiant dawn and glowing sunset kiss each other and go hand in hand on the mountain tops; but we would also invite you to tarry until Balder is slain, when the wintry gloom, with its long nights, sits brooding over the country, and Loke (Thok, fire) weeps his arid tears (sparks) over the desolation he has wrought.
Norway is dark, cloudy, severe, grand, and majestic. Greece is light, variegated, mild, and beautiful. No one can long more deeply for the light of summer, with its mild and gentle breezes from the south, than the Norseman. When he has pondered on his own thoughts during the long winter, when the sun entirely or nearly disappeared from above the horizon, and nothing but northern lights flickered and painted the colors of the rainbow over his head, he welcomes the spring sun with enthusiastic delight. It was this deep longing for Balder that drove swarms of Norsemen on viking expeditions to France, Spain, and England; through the pillars of Hercules to Italy, Greece, Constantinople and Palestine, and over the surging main to Iceland, Greenland and Vinland. It is this deep longing for Balder that every year brings thousands of Norsemen to alight upon our shores and scatter themselves to their numberless settlements in these United States. Still every Norse emigrant, if he has aught in him worthy of his race, thinks he shall once more see those weird, gigantic, snow-capped mountains, that stretched their tall heads far above the clouds and seemed to look half anxiously, half angrily after him as his bark was floating across the deep sea.
There is something in the natural scenery of Norway—a peculiar blending of the grand, the picturesque, the gigantic, bewildering and majestic. There is something that leaves you in bewildering amazement, when you have seen it, and makes you ask yourself, Was it real or was it only a dream? Norway is in fact one huge imposing rock, and its valleys are but great clefts in it. Through these clefts the rivers, fed by vast glaciers upon the mountains, find their way to the sea. They come from the distance, now musically and chattingly meandering their way beneath the willows, now tumbling down the slopes, reeking and distorted by the rocks that oppose them, until they reach some awful precipice and tumble down some eight hundred to a thousand feet in a single leap into the depths below, where no human being ever yet set his foot. We are not overdrawing the picture. You cannot get to the foot of such falls as the Voring Force or Rjukan Force, but you may look over the precipice from above and see the waters pouring like fine and fleecy wool into the seething caldron, where you can discern through the vapory mists shoots of foam at the bottom, like rockets of water, radiating in every direction. You hear a low rumbling sound around you, and the very rock vibrates beneath your feet; and as you hang half giddy over the cliff, clasping your arms around some young birch-tree that tremblingly leans over the brink of the steep, and turn your eyes to the huge mountain mass that breasts you,—its black, melancholy sides seemingly within a stone’s throw, and its snow-white head far in the clouds above,—your thoughts involuntarily turn to him, the God, whom the skald dare not name, to him at whose bidding Gausta Fjeld and Reeking Force sprang from Ginungagap, from the body of the giant Ymer, from chaos. You look longer upon this wonderful scene, and you begin to think of Ragnarok, of the Twilight of the gods. Once seen, and the grand picture, which defies the brush of the painter, will forever afterwards float before your mind like a dream.
Make a journey by steamer on some of those noble and magnificent fjords on the west coast of Norseland. The whole scenery looks like a moving panorama of the finest description. The dark mountains rise almost perpendicularly from the water’s edge to an enormous height; their summits, crowned with ice and snow, stand out sharp and clear against the bright blue sky; and the ravines on the mountain tops are filled with huge glaciers, that clasp their frosty arms around the valley, and send down, like streams of tears along the weather-beaten cheeks of the mountains, numerous waterfalls and cascades, falling in an endless variety of graceful shapes from various altitudes into the fjord below. Sometimes a solitary peak lifts its lordly head a thousand feet clear above the surrounding mountains, and towering like a monarch over all, it defiantly refuses to hold communion with any living thing save the eagle. Here and there a force appears, like a strip of silvery fleecy cloud, suspended from the brow of the mountain, and dashing down more than two thousand feet in one leap; and all this marvelously grand scenery, from base to peak, stands reflected, as deep as it is lofty, in the calm, clear, sea-green water of the fjord, perfect as in a mirror.
There is no storm; the deep water of the fjord is silent and at rest. Not even the flight of a single bird ruffles its glassy surface. As the steamer glides gently along between the rocky walls, you hear no sound save the monotonous throbbing of the screw and the consequent splashing of the water. All else is still as death. The forces hang in silence all around, occasionally overarched by rainbows suspended in the rising mist. The naked mountains have a sombre look, that would make you melancholy were it not for the overpowering grandeur. Sunshine reaches the water only when the sun’s rays fall nearly vertically, in consequence of the immense height of the mountains’ sides, whose enormous shadows almost perpetually overshade the narrow fjord. The noonday sun paints a streak of delicate palish green on one side, forming a striking contrast to the other dark overshadowed side of the profound fjord. It is awe-inspiring. It is stupendous. It is solemnly grand. You can but fancy yourself in a fairy land, with elves and sprites and neckens and trolls dancing in sportive glee all around you.
Words can paint no adequate picture of the stupendousness, majesty and grandeur of Norse scenery; but can the reader wonder any longer that this country has given to the world such marvelous productions in poetry, music and the fine arts? Nay, what is more to our purpose at present, would you not look for a grand and marvelous mythological system from the poetic and imaginative childhood of the nation that inhabits this land? Knock, and it shall be opened unto you! and entering the solemn halls and palaces of the gods, where all is cordiality and purity, you will find there perfectly reflected the wild and tumultuous conflict of the elements, strong rustic pictures, full of earnest and deep thought, awe-inspiring and wonderful. You will find that simple and martial religion which inspired the early Norsemen and developed them like a tree full of vigor extending long branches over all Europe. You will find that simple and martial religion which gave the Norsemen that restless unconquerable spirit, apt to take fire at the very mention of subjection and constraint; that religion which forged the instruments that broke the fetters manufactured by the Roman emperors, destroyed tyrants and slaves, and taught men that nature having made all free and equal, no other reason but their mutual happiness could be assigned for making them dependent. You will find that simple and martial religion which was cherished by those vast multitudes which, as Milton says, the populous North
——poured from her frozen loins to pass
Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons