ch. vj First Crossing of the Threshold 31 
and loftier range. Influenced by the glories of nature 
which surrounded them, they sought for the origin and 
first impulses of created things and strove to make their 
conceptions co-extensive with the universe, while they 
peopled nature with supernatural agencies of all kinds. 
Yet there was a proud humility in the loftiest flights of 
their imaginations. They elaborated a mythology and 
cosmogony, but alone among religious beliefs that of 
the Norsemen recognised that there must be some greater 
and higher order of things to follow that which, in the 
youth of the world, sufficed partly to satisfy their own 
aspirations. Fimbultyn, "he who sent the" heat," the 
great Helper, the mighty God, would guide the new order 
and live for ever. 
The most beautiful myth in the northern mythology 
is that of Arctic day and night, of Balder and Hoder. 
It has been the theme of modern poets from (Ehlenschlager 
to Matthew Arnold. The death of the Sun-God, the 
Deity of light and beneficence, through the treachery of 
Lok, but by the unknowing hand of his blind brother 
Hoder, the God of Darkness, is a myth the meaning of 
which is obvious. But the story of his death, of the 
mourning of all created things, and of the efforts to save 
the beloved one from Hela, the Goddess of Death, is 
deeply pathetic. The funeral of Balder attended by the 
whole pantheon, including giants and dwarfs, each deity 
with all his legendary attendants, and the launch of the 
flaming ship bearing the body into the silent sea, reaches 
the highest flight of poetic imagination. 
Then Hermod, the messenger of the Gods, is sent 
by the All-father, on Odin's horse Sleipner, with an 
order for the death-goddess Hela in Nifelheim, her abode 
of ice and snow, to release Balder ; — 
" And he came down to ocean's northern strand 
At the drear ice, beyond the giant's home: 
Thence on he journeyed o'er the fields of ice 
Still north, until he met a stretching wall 
Barring his way." 
The Arctic Circle ! He puts Sleipner at it, the celestial 
steed clears it at a bound, and Hermod, the first Arctic 
explorer, enters Nifelheim. But the mission fails, for 
there was one thing that Odin could not do, and that was 
