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Under the Christian dispensation, our blessed Lord, his awful sacrifice once performed, 'ascended up on high', having 'led captivity captive', and expects the hour that shall make his foes 'his footstool'; but false gods, Jupiter, Vishnu, Odin, Thor, must constantly keep themselves, as it were, before the eyes of men, lest they should lose respect.

Three times Odin shook him off, and still Garm, as fierce as ever, went on with the fight. At last Sleipnir leaped, and Odin thrust just at the same moment; then horse and rider cleared the entrance, and turned eastward towards the dead Vala's grave, dripping blood along the road as they went; while the beaten Garm stood baying in the cavern's mouth.

"So you are a real Dane not an English-bred one like myself. That is good. You and I will have many a talk together. Odin, how good it is to meet a housecarl who speaks as man to man and does not cringe to me! Who are you?" "Radbard Grimsson of Grimsby, housecarl just now to this King of Lindsey." "And your comrade?"

Then spake the grey-beard, "From Sleipnir's kin is this horse come, and he must be nourished heedfully, for it will be the best of all horses;" and therewithal he vanished away. So Sigurd called the horse Grani, the best of all the horses of the world; nor was the man he met other than Odin himself. Now yet again spake Regin to Sigurd, and said

Traces of the self-sacrifice of a god have been sought in such myths as the stories of the self-immolation of Dido and Odin; but the form and origin of these myths are obscure all that can be said of them in this connection is that they seem not to contain expiatory conceptions.

It seemed absurd to us, that men, in their rude admiration, should take some wise great Odin for a god, and worship him as such; some wise great Mahomet for one god-inspired, and religiously follow his Law for twelve centuries: but that a wise great Johnson, a Burns, a Rousseau, should be taken for some idle nondescript, extant in the world to amuse idleness, and have a few coins and applauses thrown him, that he might live thereby; this perhaps, as before hinted, will one day seem a still absurder phasis of things!

But the three moved forward, while the fourth hesitated behind them. As though struggling against a heavy flood they came on. The gun-crew died defending their whirling weapon. The three Kalis swarmed over it like bees smothering the enemy, Odin thought. The pulsing coiling light died. There was a burst of flame.

She, with a single push, set the ship floating, and then, whilst Thor stood up holding his hammer high in the air, Odin lighted the funeral pile of Baldur and of Nanna. So Ringhorn went floating towards the deep sea and the funeral fire burnt on. Its broad red flame burst forth heavenward, but when the smoke would have gone upward too, the winds came sobbing and carried it away.

"We cannot make it now; for who would dare to send a present to Thor before he has offered one to Odin, the great All-Father?" "Make me, then, a gift for Odin," cried Loki; "and he will shelter me from the Thunderer's wrath."

They first entered the land of the Vandals, who refused them permission to settle. This was a question to be decided at sword's point, and war was declared. Both sides appealed to the gods for aid, Gambara praying to Freya, while the Vandals invoked Odin, who answered that he would grant the victory to the party he should first behold at the dawn of the coming day. The day came. The sun rose.