CHAPTER V
FIRST CROSSING OF THE THRESHOLD
There is one part of the Arctic and Sub-arctic regions, and one only, where a country retaining the warmth and the adaptability of the temperate zone as an abode for civilised man extends far beyond the Arctic Circle, and, as it were, connects the vast tracts of ice and snow with the habitable earth. This is the Scandinavian peninsula. It stretches northwards to 71° 10′ N., maintaining a temperature throughout its length which renders it fit for the abode of a race of men who have been leaders in progress and civilisation. This remarkable phenomenon is due to the flow of warm water from the Atlantic, which passes northward along the coast of Norway. The Atlantic current has the effect of ameliorating a climate which would otherwise be of Arctic severity, while at the same time it keeps off and checks the polar icebergs in their southerly drift, so that ice is never seen on the northern shores of Finmarken. Reclus has very truly said that this current has played a chief part in the modern history of mankind.
The Norsemen appear to have arrived in the Scandinavian peninsula, and superseded the Finnish tribes, a century or two before the Christian era. The physical geography of the region moulded the thoughts and lives of the new-comers. With a noble foundation to build upon, their character was evolved by their environment. The stormy seas and impenetrable fogs, the glories of the fjords with their mighty cliffs and glittering cascades, the valleys and lakes, the dense forests and mysterious ice fjells—all were made to form settings for the long array of fancies created by the glowing enthusiasm of the Norsemen.
But the imagination of these people had a still wider and loftier range. Influenced by the glories of nature which surrounded them, they sought for the origin and first impulses of created things and strove to make their conceptions co-extensive with the universe, while they peopled nature with supernatural agencies of all kinds. Yet there was a proud humility in the loftiest flights of their imaginations. They elaborated a mythology and cosmogony, but alone among religious beliefs that of the Norsemen recognised that there must be some greater and higher order of things to follow that which, in the youth of the world, sufficed partly to satisfy their own aspirations. Fimbultyn, “he who sent the heat,” the great Helper, the mighty God, would guide the new order and live for ever.
The most beautiful myth in the northern mythology is that of Arctic day and night, of Balder and Hoder. It has been the theme of modern poets from Œhlenschlager to Matthew Arnold. The death of the Sun-God, the Deity of light and beneficence, through the treachery of Lok, but by the unknowing hand of his blind brother Hoder, the God of Darkness, is a myth the meaning of which is obvious. But the story of his death, of the mourning of all created things, and of the efforts to save the beloved one from Hela, the Goddess of Death, is deeply pathetic. The funeral of Balder attended by the whole pantheon, including giants and dwarfs, each deity with all his legendary attendants, and the launch of the flaming ship bearing the body into the silent sea, reaches the highest flight of poetic imagination.
Then Hermod, the messenger of the Gods, is sent by the All-father, on Odin’s horse Sleipner, with an order for the death-goddess Hela in Nifelheim, her abode of ice and snow, to release Balder:—
“And he came down to ocean’s northern strand
At the drear ice, beyond the giant’s home:
Thence on he journeyed o’er the fields of ice
Still north, until he met a stretching wall