Donner (Thunder) or Thor,--God also of beneficent Summer-heat.
The thunder was his wrath; the gathering of the black clouds is the
drawing down of Thor's angry brows; the fire-bolt bursting out of
Heaven is the all-rending Hammer flung from the hand of Thor: he urges
his loud chariot over the mountain-tops,--that is the peal: wrathful
he 'blows in his red beard,'--that is the rustling storm-blast before
the thunder begin. Balder again, the White God, the beautiful, the
just and benignant (whom the early Christian Missionaries found to
resemble Christ), is the Sun--beautifulest of visible things; wondrous
too, and divine still, after all our Astronomies and Almanacs! But
perhaps the notablest god we hear tell-of is one of whom Grimm the
German Etymologist finds trace: the God _Wuensch_, or Wish. The God
_Wish_; who could give us all that we _wished_! Is not this the
sincerest yet rudest voice of the spirit of man? The _rudest_ ideal
that man ever formed; which still shows itself in the latest forms of
our spiritual culture. Higher considerations have to teach us that the
God _Wish_ is not the true God.

Of the other Gods or Joetuns I will mention only for etymology's sake,
that Sea-tempest is the Joetun _Aegir_, a very dangerous Joetun;--and
now to this day, on our river Trent, as I learn, the Nottingham
bargemen, when the River is in a certain flooded state (a kind of
back-water, or eddying swirl it has, very dangerous to them), call it
_Eager_; they cry out, "Have a care, there is the _Eager_ coming!"
Curious; that word surviving, like the peak of a submerged world! The
_oldest_ Nottingham bargemen had believed in the God Aegir. Indeed,
our English blood too in good part is Danish, Norse; or rather, at
bottom, Danish and Norse and Saxon have no distinction, except a
superficial one,--as of Heathen and Christian, or the like. But all
over our Island we are mingled largely with Danes proper,--from the
incessant invasions there were: and this, of course, in a greater
proportion along the east coast; and greatest of all, as I find, in
the North Country. From the Humber upwards, all over Scotland, the
Speech of the common people is still in a singular degree Icelandic;
its Germanism has still a peculiar Norse tinge. They too are
'Normans,' Northmen,--if that be any great beauty!--

Of the chief god, Odin, we shall speak by and by. Mark at present so
much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is:
a r