Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/104

 78 hammer in his hand. The hammer they called Thor's hammer, and the rainbow they called Thor's bow, with which he will shoot and slay all ogres that wish to hurt them. They further believed that this Thor had people's health and welfare, life and death, in his power, wherefore they became very frightened when hearing the "Thordön." That is why they sacrificed to him, and put up his image on a sort of primitive altar. The images were made of birch,—the head of the root, and the body of the other part, with a hammer in the hand. Fig. 30 shows such a Lapp image of Thor.

It has of course not been possible here to give an exhaustive account, but the examples I have given will probably suffice to show that the god of the sun and that of thunder were originally one and the same god, that from time out of mind and by widely different peoples the axe has been considered as the sun-god's weapon, and that amongst certain peoples it became a hammer. The idea of Thor's hammer is therefore not peculiar to the Scandinavians.

In order to get a correct result in this, as in every other similar enquiry, it is necessary to look far afield. By doing that we get a view of the connection between different peoples and different periods which we could never get in any other way.

It is certainly dangerous to deal with mythological questions, because we are too easily tempted to leave the terra firma of scientific investigation and to sink down into the marshy ground of hypothesis. But the danger is not so great if, as in the present enquiry, we endeavour to keep aloof from explanations on which opinions may differ, and confine ourselves chiefly to the putting down of facts.

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