Thou noble lord of mine!
Now praised be God in heaven
Hath loosed us from pain and pine!”
—Choose thy words well!
XV
THORD OF HAFSGAARD
Here we have the Old Norse Lay of Thrym (þrymskviða) recast and trolled forth by a mediæval minstrel. He has been faithful to the grim jollity of the original poem; but, as his lilting verse has lost the trenchant battle-axe swing of the old alliterative metre, so the tale he tells is shorn of the epic dignity surrounding Valhalla and the gods. On the restoration of the Thunderer’s hammer hangs the fate of the Æsir in their endless warfare with the Frost Giants; its loss is a calamity such as was never known in heaven nor earth. When Freyja is asked to play the Bride, her stamp shakes the celestial floor. When Thor drives to the wedding feast, earth burns under his chariot wheels. Whereas the Thord of the Ballad might, for aught we are told, be a mere bonnet-laird; and it is only by implication that we gather any idea of his hammer’s importance.
The erudite M. Pineau (Étude sur les Chants Populaires Scandinaves) is puzzled and pained by these variations and omissions—notably that of the Æsir’s council, and of Thor’s indignation at the idea of assuming bridal attire. “Don’t tell me,” he exclaims indignantly, “that this scene of all others could be forgotten by the popular imagination!” The Eddie Lays, according to him, jealously guarded by the priests, were never known to the people at large; and he goes so far as to declare that the source alike of Lay and Ballad must be sought in some older, and now non-existent, form of the story. M. Pineau, in short, is a Necessitarian, who will not allow free-will to poets. Why should not the minstrel pick and choose his incidents? Why, on M. Pineau’s own showing, should not the Lay have reached him in fragmentary form? The student must decide for himself; suffice it meanwhile to say that the Ballad is a capital one, and the “merry jest” at the end a racy substitute for the ferocious pun which concludes the original, at the expense of the Giant’s mother:
“For pence a pound was what she won.”