Thor is not always so successful. In another of his journeys[124] the giants play a series of tricks upon him, quite suitable to the Teutonic conception of the cold north, as a place of magic, glamour, and illusion. One giant induces the thunderer to mistake a mountain for him, and to hurl at _it_ the death-dealing bolt--his hammer Mjölnir. Afterwards he is set to drain a horn which he supposes he can finish at a draught, but finds that after the third pull at it, scarcely more than the rim has been left bare; at the same time Loki engages in an eating match with one Logi, and is utterly worsted. But in reality Thor’s horn has reached to the sea, and he has been draining at that; while the antagonist of Loki is the devouring fire itself. Next Thor is unable to lift a cat from the ground, for it is in truth the great Midgard serpent which girds the whole earth. Finally he is overcome in a wrestling match with an old hag, whose name is Ella, that is Old Age or Death. Enough has been said in these stories to show how directly the cloak of Thor descends to the heroes of our nursery tales, Jack the Giant Killer and Jack of the Bean-Stalk.
Not unconnected with the sun-god are the mythical heroes of northern poetry, the Perseus or Theseus of Germany and Scandinavia. The famous Sigurd the Volsung, the slayer of Fafnir, or his counterpart Siegfrid of the Nibelung song, or again the hero of our own English poem Beowulf,[125] are especially at war with dragons--which represent the powers of darkness--or with beings of a Jötun-like character. They are all discoverers of treasure; and this so far corresponds with the character of Thor that the thunderbolt is often spoken of as the revealer of the treasures of the earth, and that the sign of it was employed as a charm for that purpose. And when we read the account of these adventures we see how entirely unhuman in character most of them were, and how much the incidents in the drama bear a reminiscence of the natural phenomena from which they sprang.
This is especially the case with Beowulf. The poem is weird and imaginative in the highest degree: the atmosphere into which we are thrown seems to be the misty delusive air of Jötunheim, and the unearthly beings whom Beowulf encounters must have had birth within the shadows of night and in the mystery which attached to the wild unvisited tracts of country. Grendel, a horrid ghoul who feasts on human beings, whom Beowulf wrestles with (as Thor wrestles with Ella) and puts to death, is described as an ‘inhabiter of the moors,’ the ‘fen and fastnesses;’ he comes upon the scene ‘like a cloud from the misty hills, through the wan night a shadow-walker stalking;’ and of him and his mother it is said,