Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 | Page 9

head to see its pinnacles and domes. Now Thor was by no
means small; indeed, in Asgard, the city of the AEsir, he was regarded
as a giant; but here in Utgard Skrymir told him he had better not give
himself any airs, for the people of that city would not tolerate any
assumption on the part of such a mannikin!
Utgard-Loki, the king of the city, received Thor with the utmost disdain,
calling him a stripling, and asked him contemptuously what he could
do. Thor professed himself ready for a drinking-match. Whereupon
Utgard-Loki bade his cup-bearer bring the large horn which his
courtiers had to drain at a single draught, when they had broken any of

the established rules and regulations of his palace. Thor was thirsty,
and thought he could manage the horn without difficulty, although it
was somewhat of the largest. After a long, deep, and breathless pull
which he designed as a finisher, he set the horn down and found that
the liquor was not perceptibly lowered. Again he tried, with no better
result; and a third time, full of wrath and chagrin, he guzzled at its
contents, but found that the liquor still foamed near to the brim. He
gave back the horn in disgust. Then Utgard-Loki proposed to him the
childish exercise of lifting his cat. Thor put his hands under Tabby's
belly, and, lifting with all his might, could only raise one foot from the
floor. He was a very Gulliver in Brobdignag. As a last resort, he
proposed to retrieve his tarnished reputation by wrestling with some
Utgardian; whereupon the king turned into the ring his old nurse, Elli, a
poor toothless crone, who brought Thor to his knees, and would have
thrown him, had not the king interfered. Poor Thor! The next morning
he took breakfast in a sad state of mind, and owned himself a
shamefully used-up individual. The fact was, he had strayed
unconsciously amongst the old brute powers of primitive Nature, as he
ought to have perceived by the size of the kids they wore. He had done
better than he was aware of, however. The three blows of his hammer
had fallen on nothing less than a huge mountain, instead of a giant, and
left three deep glens dinted into its surface; the drinking-horn, which he
had undertaken to empty, was the sea itself, or an outlet of the sea,
which he had perceptibly lowered; while the cat was in reality the
Midgard Serpent, which enringed the world in its coils, and the
toothless she-wrestler was Old Age! What wonder that Thor was
brought to his knees? On finding himself thus made game of, Thor
grew wroth, but had to go his ways, as the city of Utgard had vanished
into thin air, with its cloud-capped towers and enormous citizens. Thor
afterwards undertook to catch the Midgard Serpent, using a bull's head
for bait. The World-Snake took the delicious morsel greedily, and,
finding itself hooked, writhed and struggled so that Thor thrust his feet
through the bottom of his boat, in his endeavors to land his prey.
There is a certain grotesque humor in Thor's adventures, which is
missed in his mythologic counterpart of the South, Hercules. It is the
old rich "world-humor" of the North, genial and broad, which still lives
in the creations of the later Teutonic Muse. The dints which Thor made

on the mountain-skull of Skrymir were types and forerunners of the
later feats of the Teutonic race, performed on the rough, shaggy,
wilderness face of this Western hemisphere, channelling it with watery
highways, tunnelling and levelling its mountains, and strewing its
surface with cities. The old Eddas and Voluspas of the North are full of
significant lore for the sons of the Northmen, wherever their lot is cast.
There they will find, that, in colonizing and humanizing the face of the
world, in zoning it with railroads and telegraph-wires, in bridging its
oceans with clipper-ships, and steamboats, and in weaving, forging,
and fabricating for it amid the clang of iron mechanisms, they are only
following out the original bent of the race, and travelling in the wake of
Thor the Hammerer.
While the Grecian and Roman myths are made familiar by our
school-books, it is to be regretted that the wild and glorious mythic lore
of our ancient kindred is neglected. To that you must go, if you would
learn whence came
"the German's inward sight, And slow-sure Britain's secular might,"
and it may be added, the Anglo-American's unsurpassed practical
energy, skill, and invincible love of freedom. From the fountains of the
ash-tree Yggdrasil flowed these things. Some of the greatest of modern
Teutonic writers have gone back to these fountains, flowing in these
wild mythic wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration