TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

THUNAK. 181
Mid. Ages as a happy initiatory omen to any undertaking. Thorr
with his hammer hallows dead bones, and makes them alive again,
Sn. 49 (see Suppl.). But most important of all, as vouching for
the wide extension of one and the same heathen faith, appears to
me that beautiful poem in the Edda, the Hamars heimt (hammer s
homing, mallei recuperatio), 1 whose action is motived by Thor s
hammer being stolen by a giant, and buried eight miles underground:
ek hefi HlorriSa hamar umfolginn atta rostom for iorS nedan,
Seem. 71 a . This unmistakably hangs together with the popular
belief I have quoted, that the thunderbolt dives into the earth and
takes seven or nine years to get up to the surface again, mounting
as it were a mile every year. At bottom Thrymr, J?ursa drottinn,
lord of the durses or giants, who has only got his own hammer
back again, seems identical with Thorr, being an older nature-god,
in whose keeping the thunder had been before the coming of the
ases; this is shown by his name, which must be derived from
Jmima, tonitru. The compound J?rumketill (which Biorn explains
as aes tinniens) is in the same case as the better-known ]?6rketill
(see Suppl.).
Another proof that this myth of the thundergod is a joint pos
session of Scandinavia and the rest of Teutondom, is supplied by
the word hammer itself. Hamar means in the first place a hard
stone or rock, 2 and secondly the tool fashioned out of it ; the ON.
hamarr still keeps both meanings, rupes and malleus (and saks, seax
again is a stone knife, the Lat. saxum). Such a name is particularly
well-suited for an instrument with which the mountain-god Donar,
our Tairguneis, achieves all his deeds. Now as the god s hammer
strikes dead, and the curses thunder strike you and hammer strike
you meant the same thing, there sprang up in some parts, especially
of Lower Gemany, after the fall of the god Donar, a personification
of the word Hamar in the sense of Death or Devil : dat die de
Hamer ! i vor den Hamer ! de Hamer sla ! are phrases still
1 No other lay of the Edda shows itself so intergrown with the people s
poetry of the North ; its plot survives in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian songs,
which bear the same relation to that in the Edda as our folk-song of Hildebrand
and Alebrand does to our ancient poesy. Thor no longer appears as a
god, but as Thorkar (Thorkarl) or Thord af Hafsgaard, who is robbed of his
golden hammer, conf. Iduna 8, 122. Nyerups udvalg 2, 188. Arvidsson 1, 3.
Schade s beskrivelse over oen Mors, Aalborg 1811, p. 93. Also the remarkable
legend of Thor me& tungum liamri in Faye s norske sagn. Arendal 1833, p. 0,
where also he loses and seeks his hammer.
2 Slav, kamen gen. kanmia, stone ; Lith. akmu gen. akmens ; fcam = Tiam.