THOR'S HAMMER. 225 



this hammer, I venture to suggest, is really the stone 

 axe of the aboriginal Euskarians. Men who found such 

 axes in the ground have everywhere leaped at once to 

 the conclusion that they were thunderbolts. What more 

 natural, then, than to figure the god Thunder as armed 

 with such an axe ? In fact, we get direct evidence on 

 the subject in the Anglo-Saxon literature itself ; for in 

 the " Exeter Book" the lightning is described as the 

 " weapon of the car-borne god, Thunor ;" while in 

 another contemporary poem the thunder is described as 

 threshing " with its fiery axe." When we put all these 

 facts together, I hardly see how we can avoid the infer- 

 ence that the early English and Norsemen formed their 

 conception of Thor's hammer from the stone hatchets 

 which they knew as thunderbolts. 



On the other hand, it is curious to note how the two 

 conceptions of the stone hatchet, as the thunderbolt 

 and as a fairy relic, have lingered on side by side. In 

 Scotland, for example, these old weapons are supersti- 

 tiously cherished in families as talismans for keeping 

 away misfortunes and curing disease. This shows that 

 they are still vaguely remembered as belonging to the 

 elves, who send sickness and calamities, and whose influ- 

 ence may be averted by possession of an object which 

 once belonged to them. They are believed, in particu- 

 lar, to assist the birth of children a function with 

 which fairies are always closely connected and to 

 increase the milk of cows, which fairies are often known 

 spitefully to dry up. But then they are also regarded 

 by these very people as thunderbolts, and supposed to 

 protect the houses in which they are kept against light- 

 ning. It is an interesting fact that such heathen supersti- 

 tions still exist in Presbyterian Scotland more perhaps 

 than in any other part of the British Isles. 



