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Updated: June 16, 2025
While debating whether to use his voice or to enter and use his eyes, the note of the hoopoe fell on his ear. An instant after came an answering note, deeper, sweeter, and stronger, it thrilled to Balder's heart, bringing to his mind, by some subtile process, the goddess of the cliff. It was a scene confusedly beautiful.
Gnulemah was thus made the touchstone of Balder's morality. He stood ready to abide by her decision. Her understanding of the case should first be made full; then, if condemned by her look, he would publish his crime to the world, and suffer its penalty.
For he said that the sacred strength of Balder's body was proof even against steel; adding, however, that he knew of a sword which could deal him his death, which was fastened up in the closest bonds; this was in the keeping of Miming, the Satyr of the woods, who also had a bracelet of a secret and marvellous virtue, that used to increase the wealth of the owner.
In the previous encounter he had retaliated in kind. Would the bitter issue of that self-indulgence not make him wary now? Here was again the murderous lust of power, albeit disguised as love of justice. Had Balder's penitent suffering failed to teach him the truth of human brotherhood, and equality before God? Once again his glance met Gnulemah's, lingered a moment, and then turned away.
When Balder's good mother heard the sad news, she left her golden spindle in Fensal Hall, and with her maidens hastened to the Ida-plains, where the body of her son still lay. Nanna, the faithful wife of Balder, was already there; and wild was her grief at sight of the lifeless loved one. And all the Asa-folk save guilty Loki, who had fled for his life stood about them in dumb amazement.
Their palaces were brightly illuminated, but no lights shone from the windows of Breidablik, Balder's palace; and as long as that was dark, the gods cared little for the brilliance of their own dwellings. Hermod, in the meantime, had journeyed across the rainbow bridge, and on and on toward the north until he reached the Giall river, which runs between the regions of Hela and the upper world.
For every weapon turned aside from its course, and would neither mark nor bruise the shining target at which it was aimed; and Balder's princely beauty shone as bright and as pure as ever.
Nevertheless, so subtle is the boundary between love human and divine, Gnulemah in these first passionate moments may easily have deemed the one no less sublime than the other. But there was no danger of Balder's falling into such an error. The distinction was clear to him.
The view that the mistletoe was not merely the instrument of Balder's death, but that it contained his life, is countenanced by the analogy of a Scottish superstition. Tradition ran that the fate of the Hays of Errol, an estate in Perthshire, near the Firth of Tay, was bound up with the mistletoe that grew on a certain great oak.
In all seriousness, who could she be? Had Doctor Glyphic crowned his eccentricities by marrying, and begetting a daughter? These speculations were interrupted by the clear, joyous note of a bird, just above Balder's head. It was such a note as might have been uttered by a paradisical cuckoo with the breath of a brighter world in his throat.
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