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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.
Heimdall also is a light and gracious god; he is the warder of the Æsir, and stays near the bridge Bifröst. Of him it is told that he wants less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred miles off by night or day, and hears the grass grow on the ground and the wool on the sheep's back. Bragi is the god of poetry and eloquence, the best of all skalds.
Bare is the axe of the Baresark! Croak, ye nesting ravens; Flap your wings, ye eagles, For bright is Mosfell's cave with blood! Lap! lap! thou Grey Wolf, Laugh aloud, Odin! "Laugh till shake the golden doors; Heroes' feet are set on Bifrost, Open, ye hundred gates! A! hai! A! hai! red runs the fray! A! hai! A! hai! Valkyries ride the wind!"
Amidst the general devastation the sons of Muspelheim will rush forth under their leader Surtur, before and behind whom are flames and burning fire. Onward they ride over Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, which breaks under the horses' hoofs. But they, disregarding its fall, direct their course to the battlefield called Vigrid.
Like its type, Yggdrasil, the Teutonic race seems to be threading the earth with the roots of universal dominion, and, true to hereditary instincts, it is belting the globe with its colonies, planting it, as it were, with slips from the great Mundane Ash, and throwing Bifröst bridges across oceans, in the shape of telegraph-cables and steamships. Asgard is a more homelike place than Olympus.
Perhaps Asgard, translated from mythic into scientific language, means the Zodiacal Light, and the Bridge Bifröst, the Milky Way. How curious, to trace in the grotesque mythic cosmogonies of India, Greece, and Scandinavia, modern geology, botany, chemistry, etc., the vast and brutal giants of the Eddas and other old mythic scriptures being recognized as impersonations of the forces of Nature!
Frigga, the queenly Goddess, heard the sound of her weeping, and came out of Asgard to comfort her. "Ah, what comfort can you give me, Frigga?" cried Freya. "What comfort can you give me when Odur will never be found by one who searches for him?" "Behold how your daughter, the child Hnossa, has grown," said Frigga. Freya looked up and saw a beautiful maiden standing on Bifröst, the Rainbow Bridge.
I will fight the last great fight alone; for I know this: I shall not easily be overcome, and with my fallen foes I will tread on Bifrost Bridge. Therefore, farewell! When the bones of Eric Brighteyes lie in their barrow, or are picked by ravens on the mountain side, Gizur will not trouble to hunt out those who clung to him, if indeed Gizur shall live to tell the tale.
Around the earth they let the deep waters flow, and on the distant shores the escaped Yotuns took up their abode in Yotunheim and in Utgard. For protection against them the kind gods made from Ymer's eyebrows the fortification Midgard as a defense for the inner earth. But from heaven to earth they suspended the quivering bridge called Bifrost, or the rainbow.
But a strange thought came to my mind, and I spoke it. "Under the end of that pillar does indeed lie the treasure we seek. See, it is not on the wood, but on the river bank. We searched not there, comrade." "Ay, we shall find it there," Erling answered. "It is Bifrost Allfather's bridge. He takes his son home across it."
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