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Updated: June 5, 2025
"And did you happen to see anything of the AEsir," asked Frigga, "as you came?" "Just now I passed by the Peacestead and saw them at play." "What were they doing?" "Shooting at Baldur." Then Frigga bent over her work with a pleased smile on her face. "And nothing hurt him?" she said. "Nothing," answered Loki, looking keenly at her.
Round that earth, which was fenced in against the attacks of ancient and inveterate foes by a natural fortification of hills, flowed the great sea in a ring, and beyond that sea was Utgard, the outlying world, the abode of Frost Giants, and Monsters, those old-natural powers who had been dispossessed by Odin and the Aesir when the new order of the universe arose, and between whom and the new gods a feud as inveterate as that cherished by the Titans against Jupiter was necessarily kept alive.
In Lokasenna Frigg says: "If I had a son like Baldr here in Oegi's halls, thou shouldst not pass out from the sons of the Aesir, but be slain here in thy anger"; to which Loki replies, "Wilt thou that I speak more ill words, Frigg? I am the cause that thou wilt never more see Baldr ride into the hall."
AEgir the Old groaned from under the deep, and sent his daughters up to mourn around the dead. Frost-giants and mountain-giants came crowding round the rimy shores of Jotunheim to look across the sea upon the funeral of an Asa. Nanna came, Baldur's fair young wife; but when she saw the dead body of her husband, her own heart broke with grief, and the AEsir laid her beside him on the stately ship.
O. "Which of the Aesir shall rule over the realms of the Gods, when Surt's fire is quenched?" V. "Vidar and Vali shall dwell in the sanctuary of the Gods when Surt's fire is quenched. O. "What shall be Odin's end, when the Gods perish?" V. "The Wolf will swallow the father of men; Vidar will avenge it. He will cleave the Wolf's cold jaws in the battle."
Here is a people with no people at their backs, driving the great world-plough which wins the world's bread up and up over the shoulder of the world a spectacle, as it might be, out of some tremendous Norse legend. North of them lies Niflheim's enduring cold, with the flick and crackle of the Aurora for Bifrost Bridge that Odin and the Aesir visited.
But when Christianity came in, and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the Aesir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief, whether Aesir, Giants, or Trolls, were mingled together in one superstition, as 'no canny'. They were all Trolls, all malignant; and thus it is that, in these tales, the traditions about Odin and his underlings, about the Frost Giants, and about sorcerers and wizards, are confused and garbled; and all supernatural agency that plots man's ill is the work of Trolls, whether the agent be the arch enemy himself, or giant, or witch, or wizard.
Odin was too much tired by his journey from Helheim to go to the Peacestead that afternoon; so he turned away and shut himself up in his palace of Gladsheim. But when he was gone, Loki came into the city by another way, and hearing from Hermod where the Aesir were, set off to join them.
He is admitted among the Aesir, though not one of them by birth, and his whole relation to them points to his being an older elemental God. He is in alliance with them against the giants; he and Odin have sworn blood-brothership, according to Lokasenna, and he helps Thor to recover his hammer that Asgard may be defended against the giants.
It may, indeed, be dreaded lest the time for collecting such English traditions is not past and gone; whether the steam-engine and printing-press have not played their great work of enlightenment too well; and whether the popular tales, of which, no doubt, the land was once full, have not faded away before those great inventions, as the race of Giants waned before the might of Odin and the Aesir.
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