Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/91

 Rh as from the Stone Age,—the number of axes discovered was two, especially as, on one of the stones forming the walls of the tomb at Kivik on the east coast of Skåne, which tomb dates from the first period of the Bronze Age, two similarly-shaped axes are figured, one on each side of a cone (Fig. 22). The Scandinavians had already by this time come in some contact with the Orientals, amongst whom the cone was one of the symbols of the sun god. Professor Sven Nilsson therefore supposed that the conic figure of the Kivik tomb had the same significance. So long as the figure in the Kivik tomb is the only one of its kind known in the north, we cannot be quite certain of its meaning, but the question is of great interest.

On a rock-carving of the Bronze Age at Backa in Bohuslän a man is represented axe in hand. He is so much larger than the other persons figured on the same rock, that some archæologists, probably quite rightly, consider him as a supernatural being, the god whose symbol the axe was.

In Denmark a bronze image, (Fig. 23, three-quarters size), has been found, belonging to the end of the Bronze Age, representing a man. From the account of the discovery we know that the image, when found, carried an axe or a hammer in his right hand, but that hand is now lost.

Towards the end of the heathen period we find instead of the axe a symbolical hammer, alike on both sides of the eye. The fact that in Scandinavia the sun god's axe became a hammer can be explained, if we consider the original Scandinavian word hamarr. This word signified originally stone, and was thus a natural term for the weapon of the sun god or the thunder god, so long as this weapon was thought of as a thunderbolt of stone. Later on, when the word had acquired its present meaning