issant feats and who die in battle are
snatched by the Valkyrs from the sod to Valhalla. To die in arms
is to be chosen of Odin,

"In whose hall of gold The steel clad ghosts their wonted orgies
hold. Some taunting jest begets the war of words: In clamorous
fray they grasp their gleamy swords, And, as upon the earth, with
fierce delight By turns renew the banquet and the fight."

All, on the contrary, who, after lives of ignoble labor or
despicable ease, die of sickness, sink from their beds to the
dismal house of Hela. In this gigantic vaulted cavern the air
smells like a newly stirred grave; damp fogs rise, hollow sighs
are heard, the only light comes from funeral tapers held by
skeletons; the hideous queen, whom Thor eulogizes as the Scourger
of Cowards, sits on a throne of skulls, and sways a sceptre, made
of a dead man's bone bleached in the moonlight, over a countless
multitude of shivering ghosts.7 But the Norse moralists plunge to
a yet darker doom those guilty of perjury, murder, or adultery. In
Nastrond's grisly hail, which is shaped of serpents' spines, and
through whose loop holes drops of poison drip, where no sunlight
ever reaches, they welter in a venom sea and are gnawed by the
dragon Nidhogg.8 In a word, what to the crude moral sense of the
martial Goth seemed piety, virtue, led to heaven; what seemed
blasphemy, baseness, led to hell.

The long war between good and evil, light and darkness, order and
discord, the Asir and the Jotuns, was at last to reach a fatal
crisis and end in one universal battle, called Ragnarokur, or the
"Twilight of the Gods," whose result would be the total
destruction of the present creation. Portentous inklings of this
dread encounter were abroad among all beings. A shuddering
anticipation of it sat in a lowering frown of shadow on the brows
of the deities. In preparation for Ragnarokur, both parties
anxiously secured all the allies they could. Odin therefore
joyously welcomes every valiant warrior to Valhalla, as a recruit
for his hosts on that day when Fenris shall break loose. When
Hakon Jarl fell, the Valkyrs shouted, "Now does the force of the
gods grow stronger when they have brought Hakon to their home." A
Skald makes Odin say, on the death of King Eirilc Blood Axe, as an
excuse for permitting such a hero to be slain, "Our lot is
uncertain: the gray wolf gazes on the host of the gods;" that is,
we shall need help at Ragnarokur. But as all the brave and
magnanimous