We have yet to mention a place in the lower world which is of importance to the naïve but, at the same time, perspicuous and imaginative cosmology of Teutonic heathendom. The myth in regard to the place in question is lost, but it has left scattered traces and marks, with the aid of which it is possible to restore its chief outlines.
Poems, from the heathen time, speak of two wonderful mills, a larger and a smaller "Grotte"-mill.
The larger one is simply immense. The storms and showers which lash the sides of the mountains and cause their disintegration; the breakers of the sea which attack the rocks on the strands, make them hollow, and cast the substance thus scooped out along the coast in the form of sand-banks; the whirlpools and currents of the ocean, and the still more powerful forces that were fancied by antiquity, and which smouldered the more brittle layers of the earth's solid crust, and scattered them as sand and mould over "the stones of the hall," in order that the ground might "be overgrown with green herbs"—all this was symbolized by the larger Grotte-mill. And as all symbols, in the same manner as the lightning which becomes Thor's hammer, in the mythology become epic-pragmatic realities, so this symbol becomes to the imagination a real mill, which operates deep down in the sea and causes the phenomena which it symbolizes.
This greater mill was also called Grædir, since its grist is the mould in which vegetation grows. This name was gradually transferred by the poets of the Christian age from the mill, which was grinding beneath the sea, to the sea itself.
The lesser Grotte-mill is like the greater one of heathen origin—Egil Skallagrimson mentions it—but it plays a more accidental part, and really belongs to the heroic poems connected with the mythology. Meanwhile, it is akin to the greater. Its stones come from the lower world, and were cast up thence for amusement by young giant-maids to the surface of the earth. A being called Hengikjöptr (the feminine Hengikepta is the name of a giantess—Sn. Edda, i. 551; ii. 471) makes mill-stones out of these subterranean rocks, and presents the mill to King Frode Fridleifson. Fate brings about that the same young giantesses, having gone to Svithiod to help the king warring there, Guthorm (see Nos. 38, 39), are taken prisoners and sold as slaves to King Frode, who makes them turn his Grotte-mill, the stones of which they recognize from their childhood. The giantesses, whose names are Fenja and Menja, grind on the mill gold and safety for King Frode, and good-will among men for his kingdom. But when Frode, hardened by greed for gold, refuses them the necessary rest from their toils, they grind fire and death upon him, and give the mill so great speed that the mill-stone breaks into pieces, and the foundation is crushed under its weight.
After the introduction of Christianity, the details of the myth concerning the greater, the cosmological mill, were forgotten, and there remained only the memory of the existence of such a mill on the bottom of the sea. The recollection of the lesser Grotte-mill was, on the other hand, at least in part preserved as to its details in a song which continued to flourish, and which was recorded in Skaldskaparmal.
Both mills were now regarded as identical, and there sprang up a tradition which explained how they could be so.
Contrary to the statements of the song, the tradition narrates that the mill did not break into pieces, but stood whole and perfect, when the curse of the giant-maids on Frode was fulfilled. The night following the day when they had begun to grind misfortune on Frode, there came a sea-king, Mysing, and slew Frode, and took, among other booty, also the Grotte-mill and both the female slaves, and carried them on board his ship. Mysing commanded them to grind salt, and this they continued to do until the following midnight. Then they asked if he had not got enough, but he commanded them to continue grinding, and so they did until the ship shortly afterwards sank. In this manner the tradition explained how the mill came to stand on the bottom of the sea, and there the mill that had belonged to Frode acquired the qualities which originally had belonged to the vast Grotte-mill of the mythology. Skaldskaparmal, which relates this tradition as well as the song, without taking any notice of the discrepancies between them, adds that after Frode's mill had sunk, "there was produced a whirlpool in the sea, caused by the waters running through the hole in the mill-stone, and from that time the sea is salt."
80.