The Mythology of the Edaa 95 



ceptioii of such a being as this, dwelling in the fen and 

 the fastness, a haunter of the night, fits in exactly with 

 the experiences of a northern people, in a country 

 scantily inhabited and not fully explored, in a climate 

 in which, if there were long summer days, there were 

 long winter nights too, nights of darkness and bitter 

 cold, seasons when all the ways were closed by snow 

 and ice, or made dangerous by storms and floods. How 

 naturally would such a northern people, pent in, by 

 groups, within the limits of their villages and home- 

 steads, conceive the notion of a vast and terrible out- 

 side world peopled by monsters such as the Grendel of 

 BeowvlfX It is this same imagery which forms the 

 staple of the mythology of the Eddas. 



The idea of a giant-haunted world is so engrained in 

 the mythology of the German races that, even to our 

 minds, it is one of the most familiar of mytliic notions ; 

 though with us it has sunk down to a level with the 

 nursery tales in which alone it survives. To our remote 

 forefathers it was a very real and a very terrible idea. 

 In the north tlie giant race was associated with the 

 worst, the most inimical of the influences of Nature, with 

 the frosts and snows which abounded in these countries. 

 Thus, in the Edda, the giants — they are called giants, 

 jdtuns,jdtnar, or monsters, thursar — are generally spoken 

 of collectively as frost-monsters, Hrim-Thursar. This 

 shows, it seems to me, that these beings, as they appear 

 in the Edda poems, are essentially a Norse conception, 

 and not at all Celtic. Some have, besides, horrible 

 individual names which prove them to have been as 

 terrible as the Grendel of Beowulf. One of the giants 

 in the Edda, for instance, is called Corpse-devourer. 



