The young Hermod secured as his wife a beautiful maiden whom he liberated from the hands of a giantess. She had fallen into the hands of giants through a witch, "gigare," originally _gýgr_, a troll-woman, Aurboda, who in a great crowd of people had stolen her out of a church (the divine citadel Asgard is changed into a "house of God"). Hermod hastens on skees "through woods and caverns and recesses," comes to "the wild sea-strand" (Elivagar) and to the "mountain the blue," where the giantess resides who conceals the young maiden in her abode. It is Christmas Eve. Hermod asks for lodgings for the night in the mountain dwelling of the giantess and gets it. Resorting to cunning, he persuades the giantess the following morning to visit her neighbours, liberates the fair maiden during her absence, and flies on his skees with her "over the high mountains and down the low ones." When the old giantess on her return home finds that they have gone she hastens (according to the Norwegian version accompanied by eighteen giants) after those who have taken flight through dark forests with a speed which makes every tree bend itself to the ground. When Hermod with his young maiden had come to the salt fjord (Elivagar), the giantess is quite near them, but in the decisive moment she is changed to a stone, according to the Norse version, by the influence of the sun, which just at that time rose; according to the Swedish version, by the influence of a cross which stood near the fjord and its "long bridge."
The Swedish version states, in addition to this, that Hermod had a brother; in the mythology, Ull the skilful skee-runner. In both the versions, Hermod is himself an excellent skee-man. The refrains in both read: "He could so well on the skees run." Below, I shall prove that Orvandel, Svipdag's and Ull's father, is identical with Egil, the foremost skee-runner in the mythology, and that Svipdag is a cousin of Skade, "the dis of the skees." Svipdag-Hermod belongs to the celebrated skee-race of the mythology, and in this respect, too, these ballads have preserved a genuine trait of the mythology.
In their way, these ballads, therefore, give evidence of Svipdag's identity with Hermod, and of the latter's identity with Saxo's Otherus.