The Danes in Lancashire and Yorkshire

by S. W. Partington

Loki, the crafty god, was the father of the Fenris-Wolf, and the snake. He was the god of warmth and household fire, and was held to be the corrupter of gods, and the spirit of evil. It was Loki who formed the fatal dart, which he placed in the hands of the blind Hödur, which caused the death of Baldur. After the murder of Baldur, Loki conceals himself on a distant mountain, and hides himself under a waterfall. Here the avengers catch him in a peculiar net which he had invented for the destruction of others. They bind him to a rock, where a snake drops poison upon his face, which makes him yell with pain. His faithful wife, Sigyn, catches the poison in a cup; but still it drops upon him whenever the vessel is full. From this myth it is supposed that Shakspere derived the story of his greatest drama and tragedy, "Hamlet," of the Prince of Denmark. Our forefathers notion of the last battle, the single combats of the strong, the burning of the world, are all to be read in ancient traditions, and we find them described in the poems of the Skalds. The Norse mythology makes amends for the tragic end of the divine drama by concluding with a description of the renewal of the world. The earth rises fresh and green out of its ruin, as soon as it has been cleansed from sin, refined and restored by fire. The gods assemble on the plains of Ida, and the sons of Thor bring with them their father's storm-hammer, a weapon no longer used for fighting, but only for consecrating what is right and holy. They are joined by Baldur and Hödur, reconciled and united in brotherly love.

Uller is recorded in the Edda as the cheery and sturdy god of winter, who cared nothing for wind and snowstorm, who used to go about on long journeys on his skates or snow-shoes. These shoes were compared to a shield, and thus the shield is called Uller's Ship in many places. When the god Uller skated over the ice he carried with him his shield, and deadly arrows and bow made from the yew-tree. He lived in the Palace Ydalir, the yew vale. As he protected plants and seeds from the severe frosts of the north, by covering the ground with a coating of snow, he was regarded as the benefactor of mortal men, and was called the friend of Baldur, the giver of every blessing and joy. Uller meant divine glory, as Vulder, the Anglo-Saxon god, was also characterised. This was probably because the glory of the northern winter night, which is often brilliantly lighted by the snow, the dazzling ice, and the Aurora-borealis, the great northern light. The myths exist in the present like the stately ruins of a past time, which are no longer suitable for the use of man. Generations come and go, their views, actions, and modes of thought change:

"All things change; they come and go;
The pure unsullied soul alone remains in peace."

Thousands of years ago our ancestors prayed to Waruna, the father in heaven; thousands of years later the Romans entered their temple and worshipped Jupiter, the father in heaven, while the Teutonic races worshipped the All-father. After the lapse of centuries now we turn in all our sorrow and adversities to our Father which is in heaven. In the thousands of years which may pass we shall not have grown beyond this central point of religion.

"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of Thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith; we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from Thee,
A beam in darkness, let it grow!"

In his masterly work on "Hero-Worship," Carlyle traces the growth of the "Hero as Divinity" from the Norse Mythology in the following words: "How the man Odin came to be considered a god, the chief god? His people knew no limits to their admiration of him; they had as yet no scale to measure admiration by. Fancy your own generous heart's love of some greatest man expanding till it transcended all bounds, till it filled and overflowed the whole field of your thought.

Then consider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.

What an enormous 'camera-obscura' magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory, in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel marble: only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why! in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow 'mythic,' the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead: enough for us to discern far in the uttermost distance some gleam as of a small real light shining in the centre of that enormous camera-obscura image: to discern that the centre of it all was not a madness and nothing, but a sanity and something.

This light kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse mind, dark but living, waiting only for the light, this is to me the centre of the whole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion spread itself in forms and colours, depends not on it, so much as in the National Mind recipient of it. Who knows to what unnameable subtleties of spiritual law all these Pagan fables owe their shape! The number twelve, divisiblest of all, which could be halved, quartered, parted into three, into six, the most remarkable number, this was enough to determine the Signs of the Zodiac, the number of Odin's sons, and innumerable other twelves.