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542 edition, so to say, of himself, for Balder also was an unerring judge. At first sight it looks a little capricious to make the sun a judge; but from the point of view of those whose imagination gave the myth its form, nothing perhaps could have been more natural; for if the Sun-god was to be regarded as a judge at all—and every great prince had to give judgment on all sorts of occasions—he must excel in that capacity, for the position of vantage occupied by him would make him impartial, and, for the dwellers in the far North, patient to listen all the livelong day to all comers, at the same time that he saw all that went on in the world below. This excellence as a judge, without however laying too much emphasis on the habit of sitting long to hear suits, probably a characteristic to be traced only to the slowness of the summer sun in the arctic regions, belonged also to Lug, who is described as jurisconsult and historian, and more especially to his son Cúchulainn, who boasted to Emer that he revised the verdicts of the Ultonian brehons, whereby he constituted himself a sort of court of appeal in his own person; and in this connection it is worth the while to mention how the conquest of Erinn by the Milesians brought with it the replacing of Mac Gréine, or Son of the Sun, by Amorgen of the White Knee (p. 365), who has the combined functions of a just judge, of poet and of historian or story-teller ascribed to him; but it is in the person of Moen (p. 311) that the Celtic Sun-god is before all things a judge, that he is neither king nor warrior, but a great brehon alone.

These remarks on the parallelism between the Celtic Sun-god and Balder would be incomplete without a word respecting the latter's mother Frigg. She is proved by