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The most striking feature, however, of this legend is its Norse-like breadth or grandeur and its genial humor, which are very remarkable characteristics for the fictions of savages. Its resemblance to the Scandinavian tales is, if accidental, very remarkable. The two heroes are, like Thor and Odin, giant heroes who make war on Jotuns and Trolls; that is, giant-like sorcerers.
She turned her attention to the other man. He was big enough, certainly; the fist that he was waving in the air was like nothing so much as a sledge-hammer, and there was a likeness to the Jotuns in his florid coarse-featured face. As she watched it, Randalin felt a coldness creep over her. His great jaws were like the jowl of a mastiff.
"Under the root, which stretches out towards the Jötuns, there is Mimir's Well, in which Wisdom and Wit lie hidden." Longfellow, too, has drunk of Mimir's Well, and hence the rare charm and witchery of his "Evangeline," "Hiawatha," and "Golden Legend." This well in the North is better than Castalian fount for the children of the North.
Around Glooskap, who is by far the grandest and most Aryan-like character ever evolved from a savage mind, and who is more congenial to a reader of Shakespeare and Rabelais than any deity ever imagined out of Europe, there are found strange giants: some literal Jotuns of stone and ice, sorcerers who become giants like Glooskap, at will; the terrible Chenoo, a human being with an icy-stone heart, who has sunk to a cannibal and ghoul; all the weird monsters and horrors of the Eskimo mythology, witches and demons, inherited from the terribly black sorcery which preceded Shamanism, and compared to which the latter was like an advanced religion, and all the minor mythology of dwarfs and fairies.
The Gods and Jotuns, the divine Powers and the chaotic brute ones, after long contest and partial victory by the former, meet at last in universal world-embracing wrestle and duel; World-serpent against Thor, strength against strength; mutually extinctive; and ruin, "twilight" sinking into darkness, swallows the created Universe.
A youth nursed up in wintry whirlwinds, in desolate darkness and difficulty, that he may step forth at last from his stormy Scandinavia, strong as a true man, as a god: a Christian Odin, a right Thor once more, with his thunder-hammer, to smite asunder ugly enough Jotuns and Giant-monsters!
On the shores of Staten Island the leafless trees stand out grey and gaunt against the whity-grey snow, a legacy, no doubt, from the great blizzard. Though I keep a sharp look-out, I can descry no Liberty Enlightening the World. There, however, are the "sky-scraper" buildings, looming out through the mist, like the Jotuns in Niflheim of Scandinavian mythology.
The Wolverine's race with a stone giant also recalls this race, the eagle being really one of the Jotuns, who were also all mountains and rocks. The Wolverine wizard becomes a girl, merely to make mischief. Loki took the form of a woman in Fensal, where he schemed to kill Balder.
The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite extremities of its diameter north and south. From its sloping internal form it might have been called the spittoon of the Jotuns. It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude.
What we now lecture of as Science, they wondered at, and fell down in awe before, as Religion The dark hostile Powers of Nature they figure to themselves as "Jotuns," Giants, huge shaggy beings of a demonic character. Frost, Fire, Sea-tempest; these are Jotuns. The friendly Powers again, as Summer-heat, the Sun, are Gods.
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