s Thor, the personification of
the exploding tempest. The crashing echoes of the thunder are his
chariot wheels rattling through the cloudy halls of Thrudheim.
Whenever the lightning strikes a cliff or an iceberg, then Thor
has flung his hammer, Mjolnir, at Joton's head.

1 Vans Kennedy, Ancient and Hindu Mythology, pp. 452, 463-464.

2 Thorpe, Northern Mythology, vol. ii.

Balder was the god of innocence and gentleness, fairest,
kindest, purest of beings. Light emanated from him, and
all things loved him. After Christianity was established in the
North, Jesus was called the White Christ, or the new Balder. The
appearance of Balder amidst the frenzied and bloody divinities of
the Norse creed is beautiful as the dew cool moon hanging calmly
over the lurid storm of Vesuvius. He was entitled the "Band in the
Wreath of the Gods," because with his fate that of all the rest
was bound up. His death, ominously foretold from eldest antiquity,
would be the signal for the ruin of the universe. Asa Loki was the
Momus Satan or Devil Buffoon of the Scandinavian mythology, the
half amusing, half horrible embodiment of wit, treachery, and
evil; now residing with the gods in heaven, now accompanying Thor
on his frequent adventures, now visiting and plotting with his own
kith and kin in frosty Jotunheim, beyond the earth environing sea,
or in livid Helheim deep beneath the domain of breathing
humanity.3

With a Jotun woman, Angerbode, or Messenger of Evil, Loki begets
three fell children. The first is Fenris, a savage wolf, so large
that nothing but space can hold him. The second is Jormungandur,
who, with his tail in his mouth, fills the circuit of the ocean.
He is described by Sir Walter Scott as

"That great sea snake, tremendous curl'd, Whose monstrous circle
girds the world."

The third is Hela, the grim goddess of death, whose ferocious
aspect is half of a pale blue and half of a ghastly white, and
whose empire, stretching below the earth through Niflheim, is full
of freezing vapors and discomfortable sights. Her residence is the
spacious under world; her court yard, faintness; her threshold,
precipice; her door, abyss; her hall, pain; her table, hunger; her
knife, starvation; her man servant, delay; her handmaid, slowness;
her bed, sickness; her pillow, anguish; and her canopy, curse.
Still lower than her house is an abode yet more fearful and
loathsome. In Nastrond, or strand of corpses, stands a hall, the
conception