2 36 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



the Roman Jupiter, whose main function it was to wield 

 the h'ghtnings and gather the clouds, became known and 

 remembered among the Teutonic races as Thunder only. 

 His Anglo-Saxon name of Thunor — from which comes 

 our thunder — is in High German Donner, and in Scandi- 

 navian Thor. But the position of his sacred day in the 

 order of the week shows his identity with Zeus ; for 

 Thursday, originally Thunres dceg, answers of course to 

 Jovis dies or Jeudi. Among the Teutons, however, 

 Thunor or Thor is always armed with a hammer ; and 

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

 axe of the aboriginal Euskarians. Men who found such 

 axes in the ground have evcr}'where 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 

 inference 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 Scot- 

 land, for example, these old weapons are superstitiously 

 cherished in families as talismans for keeping away mis- 

 fortunes and curing disease. This shows that they are 

 still vaguely remembered as belonging to the elves, who 



