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On the Eve they work hard; before sunrise house and yard are decked with bay or olive branches or some other evergreen, which they think protects from lightning. On this day the sun, which the ancient Slavs worshipped, woke from sleep, as one may say, and the days began to lengthen perceptibly. The father of the sun was Perun, the thunder-god. To this god the oak was dedicated.
"Yes, and of you too, if you don't mind it!" answers one. And so, like Apollo taken for a Neat-herd, and perhaps for none of the best on the Admetus establishment, this new Norse Thor had to put up with what was going; to gauge ale, and be thankful; pouring his celestial sunlight through Scottish Song-writing, the narrowest chink ever offered to a Thunder-god before!
Etymologically Thor, Thunor, and thunder are the self-same word; but while the southern races looked upon Zeus or Indra as wielding his forked darts in his red right hand, the northern races looked upon the Thunder-god as hurling down an angry hammer from his seat in the clouds.
The muscles of his mouth twitched; the blood rushed visibly to his forehead; he stood looming over the table like a young pink thunder-god. Mrs. Downey and Mr. Partridge retreated in some alarm. Mr. Soper, however, was one of those people who are not roused but merely disconcerted by the spectacle of passion. Mr. Soper said he supposed he could "make a 'armless remark."
In the rear, the waves lashed us as though they had a mind to arrest our progress; from the gloom to our front came a sort of scraping and rasping; long black hands seemed to wave over our heads; just at the point where the mountain crests lay swathed in their dense coverlet of cloud, there rumbled once more the deafening iron chariot of the thunder-god; more and more frequently flashed the lightning as the earth rang, and rifts cleft by the blue glare disclosed, amid the obscurity, great trees that were rustling and rocking and, to all appearances, racing headlong before the scourge of a cold, slanting rain.
Said one of them to the other, in a joking way: "I will become a flea, so as to be able to hop into her bosom." Said the other: "I will become a louse, so as to be able to stay always in her bosom." "Are those your wishes?" cried their father, the chief thunder-god.
Ah me ! For indeed Valor is the fountain of Pity too; of Truth, and all that is great and good in man. The robust homely vigor of the Norse heart attaches one much, in these delineations. Is it not a trait of right honest strength, says Uhland, who has written a fine Essay on Thor, that the old Norse heart finds its friend in the Thunder-god?
Not not for thee, the city and the throne; The earth shall first be reddened with thy blood Thy blood and his, thy foe thy brother! Curses! Not for the first time summoned to my wrongs Curses! I call ye back, and make ye now Allies with this old man! Yea, curses shall possess thy seat and throne, If antique Justice o'er the laws of earth Reign with the thunder-god. March on to ruin!
But perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to "the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed such a change of ministry.
In Shetland, stone axes are religiously preserved in every cottage as a cheap and simple substitute for lightning-rods. In Cornwall, the stone hatchets and arrowheads not only guard the house from thunder, but also act as magical barometers, changing colour with the changes of the weather, as if in sympathy with the temper of the thunder-god.
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