Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/510

482 that the Scandinavians from Kiev ratified a treaty with the Byzantines by swearing by their god "Perun," the Slavonic Thor. The Frisians attributed their laws to a supernatural being with an axe. Among the Upper Saxons a hammer was the summons to the assembly. In later times in Iceland a small object called "St Olaf's axe" served this purpose. It is likely that this "axe" was originally a "Thor's hammer," for by the irony of fate, many of the attributes of his old enemy Thor attached themselves in popular belief to the sainted king Olaf, who rooted out his worship in Norway. An Icelandic settler invokes him in sea-voyages, and Adam of Bremen states that the Swedes sacrifice to him in famine and in pestilence. As regards disease, we have the further testimony of an Old Norse charm found in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, which appears to call on Thor to drive away an ailment, and it was until recently a common Swedish practice to mix in the fodder of cattle powder ground from the edge of a "Thor's hammer" or flint axe, to avert disease. It is possible that the miniature T-shaped hammers, often of silver or gold, of which over fifty are to be seen in the Scandinavian museums, were worn to shield the wearer from disease, but the protective functions of Thor were so numerous that the symbols may have served other purposes as well. It has recently been recorded that Manx and Whitby fishermen wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep to protect them from drowning; and slaughterers at Berlin wear the same bone suspended from their necks. The appearance of the bearded Thor himself, hammer and all, on a baptismal font in Sweden, has been considered to prove that the hammer was used at the heathen ceremony of naming a child, and we have some ground for supposing that it figured at weddings and at funerals.

Sacrifices to Thor are constantly mentioned, and range from the daily offerings of the Goth Radagaisus in Italy at the beginning of the fifth century to a song in his honour composed in the year 1006 by one of an Icelandic crew starving off the coast of America. It seems probable that the sacrifice at the beginning of all Things was to Thor. At one place of assembly in Iceland we hear of a "stone of Thor" on which "men were broken," but human sacrifice is so rarely mentioned in Iceland that the statement is looked upon with suspicion. We must note that Tacitus fails to mention a Germanic Jupiter. It has been suggested that he represents Thor by Hercules.

After the enumeration of the manifold activities of Thor, there seems hardly room for the imposing figure of Odin, and indeed in Scandinavia, besides being the Lord of Valhöll, Odin only presides over war, poetry and magic. Yet in one point he stands nearer to the race of men than Thor, in that he is regarded as the ancestor of most of the royal families of Denmark and of England (where the form of the name is Wodan). It is perhaps hardly correct to speak of Thor and Odin